The word "gypsy," a racial slur for the Romani people, is used a few times. Stromboli curses in Italian gibberish when he gets angry in some scenes. "Jackass" is pretty much the only swear word that is heard 4 times. It is used to refer to both a donkey (a visual metaphor) and a foolish person.
Pinocchio (1940) has some nudity and sexual activity. For example, one of Geppetto's cuckoo clocks shows a figurine of an angry mother smacking the bare bottom of a crying child.
As punishment for refusing to study, he is transformed into a donkey and thrown into the sea. The worse of all his violent adventures is when Pinocchio is lynched from a tree by his recurring enemies, the Fox and the Cat. This is the point when Collodi ended his original Pinocchio magazine series.
After the wooden boy falls into the water the coachman, voiced by Luke Evans, says: “B****cks. Wooden donkey would have been worth a bleeding fortune.”
1940's Pinocchio may initially appear a harmless tale for families, but it also contains some of Disney's most troubling ideas. Its narrative follows the wooden boy named Pinocchio, who comes to life after Geppetto wishes for a child of his own, and goes to some very dark places.
There's a scene in the movie at Pleasure Island which depicts child slavery and animal cruelty with the boys turned into donkeys and being locked in cages and abused by the Coachman selling them into child slavery and ends on a cliffhanger which may be considered controversial by today's standard for modern audiences.
Collodi often used the Italian Tuscan dialect in his book. The name Pinocchio is possibly derived from the rare Tuscan form pinocchio (“pine nut”) or constructed from pino (“pine tree, pine wood”) and occhio ("eye").
The moral behind Pleasure Island (or Il Paese dei Balocchi,"The land of Toys", as it was called in the original) is that children who scoff at education and moral codes set forth by their parents, preachers and authority figures and will engage in "jackass" behavior instead, such as fighting, vandalism and underage ...
Pinocchio, who had received holes in his wooden body earlier in the film, is spared. It was revealed earlier in the film that the cursed water transforms its drinker into an animal symbolic of his or her behavior. Therefore, the boys' "jackass" behavior causes them to actually physically transform into jackasses.
Pinocchio manifests the signs of a child with an oppositional defiant disorder. He makes, then breaks, one promise after another as he hangs out with a bunch of ruffians, seeks adventure, and pursues a life of ease believing that he can be fabulously successful without effort.
The fact that Pinocchio is a wooden boy is a metaphor for the inauthentic state the hero and ourselves are in at the beginning of the adventure or journey. Psychologically, this metaphor is incredibly valid, indicating the incomplete condition of our conscious selves at this early age of our existence.
Pinocchio and Lampwick are shown smoking cigars, and drinking beer. As Pinocchio is smoking, Lampwick tells him that he is not doing it right and says, "come on! Take a big drag!" So Pinocchio does, and he gets extremely high, and he can barely see straight.
In the new film, she's a winged woodland creature who bestows the gift of life upon Pinocchio in the hopes of healing the broken heart of grief-stricken woodcarver Geppetto (David Bradley). Death, too, is a winged creature, with a body reminiscent of a Sphinx.
A fisherman coats him in flour and tries to fry him. As punishment for refusing to study, he memorably transforms into a donkey and is thrown into the sea. Most shockingly of all, at one point Pinocchio is lynched from a tree by his recurring enemies, the Fox and the Cat.
Not only that, but we actually get a pretty frightening transformation sequence on-screen, as one of Pinocchio's Pleasure Island pals, Lampwick, turns into a donkey right before Pinocchio's eyes. Yes, there's a dark, painful, therianthropic transformation scene in a kids' movie in 1940!
Arguably the darkest film in the entire Disney animated canon is the 1996 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The movie opens with Frollo killing Quasimodo's mother and attempting to kill an infant Quasimodo before he's forced to stop. He attempts to atone for the sin of murdering Quasimodo's mother by taking the boy in.
Yes, the real story of Pinocchio is indeed very dark and is meant to serve as a lesson for kids who are naughty. Collodi originally planned to show that Pinocchio, as a result of his carelessness, loses his life to the sly and evil Cat and Fox who hang him and steal his gold.
The CGI and the uncanny valley imagery that it creates is noted as incredibly off-putting to most, and it also makes it questionable as to how much of a "live-action" remake the movie even is. Other critiques include the film's need to inject modern pop culture references into the story, none of which are appropriate.
The story revolves around the titular character, a wooden puppet transformed into a boy. His exact age is unknown, but he is thought to be between the ages of six and twelve.
These themes and some scary and violent scenes might really upset very young and/or sensitive viewers. This is why the movie is unsuitable for children under 5 years, and we recommend parental guidance for children aged 5-6 years. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs depicts outdated stereotypes.
