THE EASY ROAD TO SUCCESS

Without further ado the next day arrives, heralded by morning bells clanging in a steeple high above the village and sending doves aflutter. This is the opening shot of a 45-second multiplane camera truck-and-pan that remains a revered landmark in animated cinema. Rivalling and arguably excelling the “Ave Maria” finale of Fantasia (more on that later!), this shot like that one had to be devised on a jerry-rigged horizontal multiplane camera instead of the standard vertical one. Backgrounds were painted on glass panes, some of them about four feet square. Descending into the streets below, through overhead structures and around corners, while animated children departing for school wave good-bye to their mothers and disperse through the byways, this leisurely legendary shot concludes with a zoom toward the green front door of Geppetto’s little home.

The door opens and out jumps Pinocchio. So hyped up about joining his classmates for a first day at school, the puppet won’t hold still long enough for his father to slip his vest on him. At last fully clothed, supplied with a single strapped book and a big red apple for the teacher, at Geppetto’s request for inspection Pinocchio models his ensemble by rotating his body a full 360 degrees while keeping his head face-forward, a stunt that reminds us he is still basically a wooden marionette. Figaro tries to skip off to school with him, but gets retrieved by Geppetto who waves good-bye with kitten still in hand then carries his pet back into the house.

Cut to two new characters, a fox and a cat, sauntering together down a village street, both shabbily dressed and obvious riff-raff.

J. Worthington Foulfellow (though never addressed thus within the film), alias “Honest John”, the fox notices a poster advertising Stromboli’s Marionette Show and recalls to his buddy Gideon a scam they perpetrated on the old gypsy by tying strings to the cat and passing him off as a puppet. Speaking for the pretentious fox is well-known talkies character actor Walter Catlett (1889-1960), another Ziegfeld Follies vaudeville veteran, actually an acquaintance of Jiminy Cricket’s voice actor “Ukulele Ike”. At first the fox’s cohort the imbecilic cat Gideon was intended to be a chatterbox as was Dopey in Snow White. Like Dopey in the finished film the cat is mute, although his original dialogue was recorded by none other than “The Man of a Thousand Voices” Mel Blanc (1908-1989), whose vocal agility later lent amusing speech to Warner Brothers’ Looney Toons and Merry Melodies menageries including such worthies as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig as well as a virtual legion of others. All that remains of Blanc’s performance for Pinocchio is a sneeze out of Figaro and a couple of Gideon’s hiccups, one when he gets clobbered by the fox and another during the Red Lobster Tavern scene later in the film. Before getting summoned back for a hiccup retake, Blanc remarked:

“Out of all that I did, they used one hiccup… I got $800 for one hiccup, which is a pretty high price.”[1]

And those 800 were Depression-Era dollars – pretty costly for one hiccup even if used twice! Gideon’s dimwitted demeanor appears to be modeled on Mack Sennett Studio’s silent-screen comedian Ben Turpin (1869-1940) who made a career out of having crossed eyes, reputedly insuring his ocular defect for $100,000! The introduction of a second cat into the film’s scenario – albeit one who is drawn in a cartoonish style entirely different from Figaro’s – seems to bother nobody. I am reminded of a scene in the Rob Reiner (1947) film Stand By Me (1986) during which a quartet of pre-adolescent boys are shooting the breeze around a campfire and discussing Disney characters somewhat as follows: “If Donald’s a duck and Mickey’s a mouse and Pluto’s his dog, what is Goofy?” So if Jiminy’s a cricket and Geppetto’s a man and Figaro’s his kitten, what is Gideon? Like those campfire boys, who cares?!

Now Pinocchio goes skipping past the scruffy duo on his way to school. “Why, look, Gideon: a little wooden boy,” observes the fox casually. A moment later his remark hits home: “A little WOODEN boy!” The sly villain muses, dumbfounded, “A live puppet without strings! Why, a thing like that ought to be worth a fortune to someone… Now let me see…Who–?”

The answer of course is that same Stromboli whose poster had just caught his eye. Co-incidentally, however, it was Walt himself who nearly a quarter century later began to cash in on “live puppets without strings” – a.k.a. animatronics, the crowning achievement in a career consistently preoccupied with technologies more thoroughly capable of immersing Walt’s audiences into whatever fantasies he was concocting.

Like that toy giraffe in Geppetto’s workshop, these streetscenes also feature a striking focal point, the village well pump, its distinctive structure visible in several background paintings serving to orient us in this new setting. Reminiscent of the “King” and the “Duke”, classic con artists in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), in no time Honest John and Gideon have waylaid Pinocchio. With a healthy dose of slapstick comedy, they convince him to forget all about school and pursue the “easy road to success”. “I refer,” says the vulpine stentorian, “to the theatre!” And off they go, singing “Hi-Diddle-dee-Dee, an actor’s life for me!” as they parade their way through the village in a wonderful left-to-right rooftop aerial-view this time filmed on the standard vertical multiplane camera.

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[1] Kaufman, J.B.: Pinocchio, The Making of the Disney Epic, Walt Disney Family Foundation Press, San Francisco, CA, 2015, p. 86.