

Presented in the Disney films as Jiminy Cricket, the embodiment of Pinocchio’s conscience, Collodi’s talking cricket meets a grisly end after advising the wooden puppet on how to behave properly. Not only does Pinocchio disobey his father, ignore the Blue Fairy’s guidance, and fall into the minacious company of the conniving Fox and Cat, but he also murders the Talking-cricket. The Tale of a Puppet, Charles Folkard At this third lie his nose grew to such an extraordinary length that poor Pinocchio could not move in any direction.” Collodi’s original fairy tale does feature the famous scene in which the puppet’s nose grows each time he lies, but lying is the least of Pinocchio’s abhorrent behaviour, and the consequences he faces are shockingly morbid. The moral we all remember from Disney’s animation, which is repeated in the 2022 live-action film, is that lying is wrong and will always result in difficulty. He narrowly escapes being fried in a frying pan and is almost murdered when hanged in a tree.ĭespite these horrific punishments, Pinocchio never seems to learn his lesson and continues to think only of himself and lie his way out of trouble. His feet are burnt off in front of the brazier, he is kidnapped, starved, and caught in an iron trap. The puppet’s insolent, ungrateful, and spoilt behaviour continues throughout the length of Collodi’s novel, and as a result, the little puppet is punished in increasingly severe and macabre fashions.

Pinocchio is not the joyful, innocent, considerate character that Walt Disney presents him to be in his 1940 animation, Pinocchio. Often described as a metaphor for the human condition, Carlo Collodi’s iconic story presents our innate selfish desires, with these capricious whims personified in his puppet protagonist. The fairy tale has seen hundreds of adaptations in literature and for the stage and screen, but the original tale is much darker than most of these family-friendly retellings. Origins of Fairy Tales from Around the Worldįirst published in 1883, The Adventures of Pinocchio is one of the greatest works of Italian literature and has been translated into over 260 languages.
