Pinocchio Response - A Morbid Tale of Paternalism

A secular viewpoint as well as a moral viewpoint is always important when examining the merits of children's media. Media itself demands a mediator, and this mediator must accept the duty to examine the merits of a certain story with intense skepticism. A positive message about an underdog rising to fame and glory can potential be a harmful message to ill-equipped dreamers with systemically social, physical, and financial disadvantages, as it is harmful to those who merely believe and act to others as disadvantaged as the character they connect with in a movie. I turn my attention especially to movies for children, because children are impressionable, and often don't recognize subliminal messaging when they see it. The story of Pinocchio as one told for children is replete with paternalistic ideologies regarding the creating myth, agency and accountability, censorship, and subservience.

Pinocchio tells a dreary tale about a boy, carved physically as a wooden puppet by a lonely clockmaker, and spiritually embodied by a magical fairy traveling on icy stellar bodies falling through Earth's atmosphere. The duality of his nature lead him into troubling circumstances, being lead by a perfect stranger vagabond who solemnly imposes himself as a "conscience," an employer looking to exploit and eventually yoke to bondage, a totalitarian radical who hypnotizes boys with the promises of pleasure, and a monstrous metaphor for parental guilt. More than a story for kids to warn them of stranger danger and disobedience, it plays out as a cautionary tale for parents: know their secrets, pull their strings, or you will lose them forever. In fact, the most compelling focus point of the story is not so much how Pinocchio became a real boy, but how Jiminy earned the right to control Pinocchio's thoughts and actions. 

The film very slickly passes to the audience that Jiminy the Cricket is a legitimate conscience, despite the much more intuitive notion that Pinocchio as a body of wood with intelligent human characteristics (talking, walking, judgments of character) was born with a conscience, and the ability to make decisions for himself. For the most part the legend of Pinocchio condemns the imposition of evil strangers on youth, yet fails to acknowledge the fact that Jiminy cricket is a stranger. Or perhaps it is the exuberant lifestyle of the rich or the reckless that appalls Walt Disney Animation Studios. The most apparent criticism in Pinocchio as Keith Booker asserts in his book "Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children's Films," the pleasures of the working class, of vaudeville, or of pool halls and amusement parks, led to a life as a beast of burden," and to convey the "middle-class virtues of deferred gratification, self-denial, thrift, and perseverance, naturalized as the experience of the most average American." 

For some reason, we have been conditioned to believe that Disney has the best interest of youth in mind and that animated allegory is suited for children, almost as intrusive as the insect that snuck through the crack under your door and is sleeping in your little boy's bedroom. If there is anything apparent in Pinocchio, it is the message of graduating from one set of ideals to the next continually. It is important to question your guiding system of influence, whether it be your whimsically-minded father, your greedy boss, your jackass best friend, your own selfish pleasures, or a gargantuan media enterprise.