Pinocchio (1940 Film) - Reception

Reception

Pinocchio went into release accompanied by generally positive reviews. Archer Winsten, who had criticized Snow White, wrote: "The faults that were in Snow White no longer exist. In writing of Pinocchio, you are limited only by your own power of expressing enthusiasm." Jiminy Cricket's song, "When You Wish upon a Star", became a major hit and is still identified with the film, and later as a fanfare for The Walt Disney Company itself. Pinocchio also won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and Best Original Score, making it the first Disney film to win not only either Oscar, but also both at the same time. This did not occur again until Mary Poppins in 1964 and The Little Mermaid in 1989.

Financially however, Pinocchio was not initially a success. The box office returns from the film's initial release were both below Snow White's unprecedented success and below studio expectations. Of the film's $2.289 million negative cost - twice the cost of Snow White- Disney only reoccupied $1 million by late 1940, with studio reports of the film's final original box office take varying between $1.4 million and $1.9 million. This was primarily due to the fact that World War II and its aftermath had cut off the European and Asian markets overseas, and hindered the international success of Pinocchio and other Disney releases during the early and mid-1940s. Joe Grant recalled Walt Disney being "very, very depressed" about Pinocchio's initial returns at the box office. RKO recorded a loss of $94,000 for the film.

Despite its initial struggles at the box office, a series of reissues in the years after World War II proved more successful, and allowed the film to turn a profit. By 1973, the film had earned $13 million from the initial 1940 release and four reissues; further reissues in subsequent years have brought Pinocchio's lifetime gross to $84,254,167 at the box office.

In 1994, Pinocchio was added to the United States National Film Registry as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Filmmaker Terry Gilliam selected it as one of the ten best animated films of all time in a 2001 article written for The Guardian and in 2005, Time.com named it one of the 100 best films of the last 80 years. Many film historians consider this to be the film that most closely approaches technical perfection of all the Disney animated features. Film critic Leonard Maltin stated that "with Pinocchio, Disney reached not only the height of his powers, but the apex of what many critics consider to be the realm of the animated cartoon."

In June 2008, the American Film Institute revealed its "Ten top Ten"—the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. Pinocchio was acknowledged as the second best film in the animation genre, after Snow White. In June 2011, TIME named it the best animated movie of "The 25 All-TIME Best Animated Films".

On Rotten Tomatoes, a website which aggregates film reviews, the film has the website's highest rating of 100%, meaning every single one of the 37 reviews of the film, from contemporaneous reviews to modern re-appraisals, on the site are positive. The general consensus of the film on the site is "Ambitious, adventurous, and sometimes frightening, Pinocchio represents the pinnacle of Disney's collected works- it's beautifully crafted and emotionally resonant."