Pinocchio (1940 Film) - Production

Production

In September 1937, during the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, animator Norman Ferguson brought a translated version of Carlo Collodi's 1883 Italian children's novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio to the attention of Walt Disney. After reading the book "Walt was busting his guts with enthusiasm" as Ferguson said. Pinocchio was intended to be the studio's third film, after Bambi. However, Bambi proved to be a challenging film to adapt, so Pinocchio was moved ahead in production while Bambi was put on hold.

The plan for the original film was considerably different from what was released. Numerous characters and plot points from the original novel were used in early drafts. Walt Disney was displeased with the work that was being done and called a halt to the project midway into production so that the concept could be rethought and the characters redesigned.

Originally, Pinocchio was to be depicted as a Charlie McCarthy-esque wise guy, equally as rambunctious and sarcastic as the puppet in the original novel. He looked exactly like a real wooden puppet with a long pointed nose, a peaked cap and bare wooden hands. However Walt found that no one could really sympathize with such a character. Lead animator, Milt Kahl was given the task to redesign the puppet by animating a test sequence where Pinocchio is underwater looking for his father. In this scene he re-envisioned the character by giving him a more innocent personality and making him look more like a real boy, with a button nose, a child's Tyrolean hat, and standard cartoon character 4-fingered (or 3 and a thumb) hands with Mickey Mouse-type gloves on them. Milt quoted, "I don't think of him as a puppet, I think of him as a little boy". The only parts of him that still looked more or less like a puppet were his arms and legs. In this film, he is still led astray by deceiving characters, but gradually learns bit by bit and is depicted as innocent, naïve, somewhat coy and exhibits a good heart. For example when he is offered to go to Pleasure Island he inquires he needs to go home several times, before Honest John and Gideon pick him up themselves and carry him away.

Additionally, it was at this stage that the character of the cricket was expanded and Jiminy Cricket became central to the story. Originally the cricket was only a minor character that Pinocchio killed by squashing him with a mallet (the cricket appeared as a ghost later on). Once the character was expanded, he was depicted as an actual (that is, less anthropomorphized) cricket with toothed legs and waving antennae. But again Walt wanted something more likable. Ward Kimball had spent several months animating a "Soup Eating Sequence" in Snow White which was cut from the film due to pacing reasons. Ward was about to quit until Walt rewarded him for his work by promoting him to the "supervising animator" of Jiminy Cricket. Ward conjured up the design for Jiminy Cricket as "a little man with an egg head and no ears. And the only thing that makes him a cricket is because we call him one."

Due to the huge success of Snow White, Walt Disney wanted more famous voices for Pinocchio, which marked the first time an animated film had used celebrities as voice actors. The cast included Cliff Edwards as Jiminy Cricket, Dickie Jones as Pinocchio, Walter Catlett as Foulfellow the Fox, Christian Rub as Geppetto (the design of the character was even a caricature of him), Frankie Darro as Lampwick, Evelyn Venable as the The Blue Fairy and Charles Judels played both the villainous Stromboli and The Coachman.

Another voice actor was Mel Blanc most famous for voicing many of the characters in the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons from Warner Bros. He was hired to perform the voice of Gideon the Cat. However, it was eventually decided for Gideon to be mute just like Dopey, whose whimsical, Harpo Marx-style persona made him one of Snow White's most comic and popular characters. All of Blanc's recorded dialogue in this film was subsequently deleted except for a solitary hiccup, which was heard three times in the film.

During the production of the film the character model department was set-up headed by Joe Grant. The character model department was responsible for the building of three-dimensional clay models of the characters in the film, known as maquettes. These were then given to the staff to observe how a character should be drawn from any given angle desired by the artists. The model makers also built working models of Geppetto's cuckoo clocks, as well as Stromboli's gypsy wagon and The Coachman's carriage. However since it is difficult to animate a realistic moving vehicle, Disney filmed the carriage maquettes on a miniature set using stop motion animation. Then each frame of the animation was transferred on to onto animation cels using an early verson on a xerox. The cels were then panted on the back and overlayed on top of background images with the cels of the characters to create the completed shot on the rostrum camera.

Like Snow White live Action footage for Pinocchio was shot with the actors acting out the scenes. The animators used them as a guide for animating and studied how human beings move and incorporate some poses into the animation, but exaggerated them slightly. The animators referred to this as Live Action Reference rather than rotoscoping. However some rotoscoping was used in the animation of the Blue Fairy.

Pinocchio was a ground breaking achievement in effects animation. In contrast to the character animators who concentrate on the acting of the characters, effects animators create anything else that moves that is not the character. This includes vehicles, machinery, and natural effects such as rain, lightning, snow, smoke, shadows, and water, as well as the fantasy or science-fiction type effects like Fairy Dust. The influential abstract animator Oskar Fischinger who mainly worked on Fantasia contributed to the effects animation of the Blue Fairy's wand. Effects animator, Sandy Strother kept a diary about his year-long animation of the water effects in Pinocchio which included splashes, ripples, bubbles, waves, and the illusion of being underwater. To help give depth to the ocean, the animators put more detail on the waves on the water surface in the foreground, and put less detail in as the surface moved further back. After the animation was traced onto cels, they would trace it once more with blue and black script to pencil leads to give the waves a sculptured look. To save time and money, the splashes were kept impressionistic. This marked Pinocchio to be one of the first animated films to have highly realistic effects animation.