Art by Fritz Kredel (1900-73)

The Adventures of Pinocchio (Le Avventure di Pinocchio) is a novel for children by Italian author Carlo Collodi. The first half was published in serial form between 1881 and 1883, and then completed as a book for children in February 1883. It is about the mischievous adventures of Pinocchio, an animated marionette, and his poor father, a woodcarver named Geppetto. It is considered a classic of children's literature and has spawned many derivative works of art, such as Disney's classic 1940 animated movie of the same name, and commonplace ideas, such as a liar's long nose.

Background

Once upon a time, there was ... 'A king!' my little readers will say right away. No, children, you are wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood....

The Adventures of Pinocchio is a story about an animated puppet, talking crickets, boys that turn into mules and other assorted fairy tale-like devices that would be familiar to a reader of Alice in Wonderland or Brothers Grimm—in fact earlier in his career Collodi worked on a translation of Mother Goose. However Pinocchio is not a traditional fairy-tale world, containing as it does the hard realities of the need for food, shelter and other basic measures of daily life, even the setting of the story is the very real Tuscan area of Italy. It was a unique literary melding of genres for its time.

Pinocchio draws from classical sources, such as Homer and Dante, but more significantly is a part of the Tuscan novella or short-story tradition which found its genesis in Boccaccio's Decameron (1353) — as Glauco Cambon wrote:

• The Disney animated film Pinocchio (first released on February 7, 1940), although a free interpretation of the Collodi story, is considered a masterpiece of the art of animation and has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
• GoodTimes' Pinocchio, a Golden Films produced an animated adaptation of the tale.
• The Adventures of Pinocchio (1936), an historically-notable unfinished Italian animated feature film.
• The Adventures of Pinocchio (1996), a film by Steve Barron.
• Geppetto (2000), a television film broadcast on The Wonderful World of Disney starring Drew Carey in the title role.
• Pinocchio (2002), a live-action film directed by and starring Roberto Benigni.
• Pinocchio 3000 (2003), a Canadian CGI film.

Other adaptations include:

• In 1911, Italian author E. Cherubini wrote Pinocchio in Africa about how Pinocchio goes to Africa where he has a series of adventures.
• Japanese anime cartoons owe a particular debt to Pinocchio: Astroboy, one of the most popular figures of the genre, is based on the Italian puppet. In addition, the story of Pinocchio was made into an anime television series by Tatsunoko Productions in 1972 as Kashi no Ki Mokku (Mokku the Oak Tree), and again by Nippon Animation in 1976 as The Adventures of Piccolino (although Pinocchio was renamed "Piccolino" in this version). Tatsunoko's series was shown on HBO in the United States in 1992 as Saban's Adventures of Pinocchio. *The Japanese superhero Kikaider (1972), created by Shotaro Ishinomori, was partly inspired by Pinocchio (and on Frankenstein's monster).
• Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi wrote a famous Russian adaptation of the book, entitled The Little Gold Key or the Adventures of Buratino illustrated by Alexander Koshkin, translated from Russian by Kathleen Cook-Horujy, Raduga Publishers, Moscow, 1990, 171 pages, SBN 5-05-002843-4 (burattino is Italian for "puppet").
• Steven Spielberg's film, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), based on a Stanley Kubrick project that was cut short by Kubrick's death, recasts the Pinocchio theme; in it an android with emotions longs to become a real boy.
• Pinocchio briefly appears in the 2001 movie Shrek and has a larger role in the 2004 sequel Shrek 2.
• Pinocchio and Geppetto are both major characters in the ongoing comic book series Fables, written by Bill Willingham, first published in 2003.
• The animated TV show The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy (2001) has an episode titled "Nursery Crimes / My Peeps" (2004) where Pinocchio tries to eat Billy's flesh to become a real boy, but fails.
• While not an adaptation as such, the Pixar film Finding Nemo contains a number of similarities to the story of Pinocchio; namely Nemo's running away from home, and the scenes in which his father finds himself in the belly of a whale.

See also

• Jiminy Cricket
• Blue Fairy

1. ^ See Rebecca West, "The Persistent Puppet".

• "The Persistent Puppet: Pinocchio's heirs in contemporary fiction and film" — a seminar by Rebecca West from the University of Chicago

• Dual Language Version, translated by Nicolas J. Perella, 1986, and several later reprints, ISBN 0-520-07782-2, ISBN 0-520-24686-1

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

The Adventures of Pinocchio