![]() The 21 episodes that followed, published from February 1882 to January 1883, introduced the elements that the modern public would recognize and that eventually became fodder for Walt Disney. Pinocchio, it turns out, wasn’t really dead. Also, no happy ending: The puppet ends up dead, hanged on an oak tree.īut, likely prompted by the popularity of the story, Collodi resumed the serial the next year. The Blue Fairy isn’t a reassuring motherly figure, but a ghostly and possibly dead little girl who refuses to help Pinocchio, because she’s “waiting for my coffin to come take me away.” Pinocchio grows his nose, but just to annoy Geppetto, and kills the Cricket in a fit of rage. The Fox and the Cat aren’t tricksters, but assassins. ![]() In Italy, a Catholic country, the joke is that Pinocchio is “two in one,” just as God is “three in one.” Pinocchio was first published as a short serial of 15 episodes, from July to October 1881. What became The Adventures of Pinocchio really encompasses two novels. Collodi’s is a multilayered work of fiction that, although primarily aimed at young readers, is imbued with social criticism and pessimistic humor, and can be read, among other things, as an irreverent attack on established authority. The 19th-century Italian author, who wrote the book that inspired the Disney movie and countless other adaptations (including the live-action reboot released last week and another version from the director Guillermo del Toro coming out later this year), saw his character very differently.Ī radical political commentator who turned to children’s literature late in life, Collodi wrote a complex, unsettling novel-miles away from the morality tale that Pinocchio’s story has become. ![]() At this, Carlo Collodi would most likely shake his head. Asked to name the two most important things about Pinocchio, most Americans would answer: First, his nose grows when he lies, and second, he is a wooden puppet who dreams of becoming a real boy.
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