A living marionette, a kindly old toymaker and that irrepressible Jiminy Cricket return as an animation classic fulfills its promise: When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.
Cartoon animation is, perhaps, the ultimate form of motion picture art. Unlike live-action movies which can photograph reality, virtually every image seen on the screen must be created from scratch. Animation's ability to bring both the real and the imaginary to vivid life is dependent upon the skill of artists who have studied and mastered human and animal anatomy, color, movement, timing, personality and drama to a far greater degree than any artist prior to the 20th century. In addition, the volume of labor demanded is staggering. Each second of high-quality animation requires a minimum of 24 drawings, a minute employs at least 1440 drawings and an hour has no less than 86,400 drawings. In this computer age, much of this work can be done automatically, but in the Golden Age of Animation (about 1920-1960), every bit of this material was hand drawn by huge teams of skilled craftsmen and craftswomen.
In the history of world cinema, there are only a handful of feature-length animated cartoons— several dozen at most— compared to tens of thousands live-action films, so by definition alone, animation is already in a rarefied strata of art.
There have been many fine animation studios and individual animators from Winsor McCay (Gertie the Dinosaur) to the Fleischers (Popeye, Betty Boop) to Chuck Jones (Roadrunner and Coyote), but clearly, the Rembrandt/Hans Christian Andersen of the classic style of animation was Walter Elias Disney.
The Disney Studio had spent nearly two decades exploring and experimenting with animation and storytelling: Alice in Cartoonland, Oswald the Rabbit, Mickey Mouse, the Silly Symphonies, the first sound cartoon, the first Technicolor cartoon, the multi-plane animation camera, and the first ever animated feature cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
While it is undoubtedly a key classic in cartoon literature, Snow White is arguably only a training film for what may be the finest piece of full animation ever produced: Pinocchio. Pinocchio has a rare combination of story, emotion and technical prowess. The multiplane camera, barely used in Snow White, was perfected for Pinocchio. Disney's animators were finally comfortable with character animation. The story contained a full gamut of emotion from warm and happy to downright terrifying. Disney himself had apparently mastered the remarkable story editing skills which seemed to have been unique to him, and he had completed building a staff and studio which allowed him to bring those skills to full fruition.
Based on the classic 19th century tale by C. Collodi, Pinocchio tells the story of Geppetto (voiced by Christian Rub and animated largely by Art Babbitt), an elderly toymaker who wishes on a star that a marionette he has carved in the image of a little boy will become a real child. His wish is granted— partially. The marionette, Pinocchio (voiced by 12-year-old Dickie Jones, animated by Frank Thomas, Milt Kahl and Ollie Johnston), is brought to life by the Blue Fairy (voiced by Evelyn Venable), but will remain a wooden boy until he becomes brave, unselfish and knows the difference between right and wrong. A cricket— Jiminy (voiced by Cliff Edwards, animated by Ward Kimball, Woolie Reitherman and Don Towsley)— is appointed Pinocchio's conscience.
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