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65 Betwee Sacred Legend and Folktal AWhale of a Story about a Tenth-Century Fisherman the swallowing in the story of pinocchio n a lifetime that coincided with well more than the first half of the twentieth century, the animator and entrepreneur Walt Disney (1901–66) produced animated films of versions of many “classic” fairy tales. His early films Little Red Riding Hood (1922), The Four Musicians of Bremen (1922), and Puss in Boots (1922), for example, draw on the heritages of both the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. He returned to the story of Little Red Riding Hood in The Big Bad Wolf (1934). But it was the enthusiastic reception of his feature-length cartoon Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), also indebted ultimately to the Brothers Grimm, that made feasible a succession of animations based on other folktales and literary fairy tales, including Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959); even since Disney’s death, the series has continued at a regular pace. One of the most famous among the cartoons produced directly under Walt Disney himself is Pinocchio (1940). Disney’s interpretation differs in its general atmosphere, in its roll of characters (especially in its characterization of Pinocchio himself), and even in its basic story line from The Adventures of Pinocchio: The Story of a Puppet (Le avventure di Pinocchio: Storia di un chapter two L I burattino), the book published in 1883 on the basis of weekly stories that had been serialized between 1881 and 1883. The author of The Adventures of Pinocchio wrote under the pseudonym Carlo Collodi; his real name was Carlo Lorenzini (1826–90). In its overall framework, The Adventures of Pinocchio does not rest on any single oral traditional story, since there is no one folktale of Pinocchio. Instead, the book calls for comparison with such masterpieces of children’s literature as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll (pseudonym for C. L. Dodgson, 1832–98) or the Peter Pan stories and plays by J. M. Barrie (1860–1937), rather than with the tale types cataloged by folklorists . Even so, it is commonly regarded as being a literary fairy tale.1 Since the connection of fairies with fairy tales is purely adventitious, the basis for considering The Adventures of Pinocchio a fairy tale is not that it features as a main character a fairy who becomes “the lovely Little Girl with the blue hair.”2 Rather, it is that Collodi employs to good effect a variety of lessons he had learned nearly ten years earlier (1875), when he ventured as his first children’s book a volume entitled Fairy Tales (I racconti della fate). This earlier book incorporated adaptations of French literary fairy tales by Charles Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy, and Madame Leprince de Beaumont. The Adventures of Pinocchio may not conform to any one tale type, but it absorbed many techniques and motifs familiar from folktales, both oral and literary. It begins traditionally—“Once upon a time”—but, typically, raises an immediate question about its own apparent traditionality: “Once upon a time there was . . . ‘A king!’ my little readers will immediately say. No, children you’re wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.”3 One key episode, included in the Walt Disney film as well, has Pinocchio, who has been transformed into a donkey, tossed into the sea. There he is freed, with the help of countless fish, from the donkey skin in which he has been unhappily enveloped. But a sea monster (a frightful shark in Collodi, a furious whale in Disney) swallows him. In the belly of the monster, Pinocchio comes upon his father figure, Geppetto, who has been living there for two years. Eventually Pinocchio escapes. In the Disney version the escape comes about when the boy lights on (so to speak) the idea of setting on fire Geppetto’s boat. The smoke and fire cause the sea beast such discomfort that, before long, it belches out Pinocchio, Geppetto, and the cricket Jiminy, who eventually are washed safely ashore. What sources of inspiration lay behind the portrayal of this scene in either Collodi or Disney may never be fully known, beyond the obvious fact that children’s stories are widespread in which the motif of “[v]ictims rescued from swallower’s belly” (MI F913) is the crucial turning point. The most venerable of these stories would be the Greek myth in which the god 66 Fairy Tales from Befor Fairy Tales [18...

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