The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (dir. Peter Jackson, 2013)

One preliminary flashback aside, this second chunk of Hobbit-story runs in a straight line from Beorn to Bilbo stealing the cup (except that Beorn is apparently not Scandinavian, but rather, judging by his accent, either Polish or Ukrainian; and except that Bilbo steals no cup in this film). Since we all know what's going to happen in this instalment, Jackson seems to have made the brave, or bonkers, decision to jettison conventional 'narrative suspense' and replace it with the more meta 'in what ways and with what catastrophic results are the film-makers going to stray from the novel?' suspense. To that end we get no magic Mirkwood stream, no sleeping Bombur, no talking birds, no cup-stealing; but we do get (a) a whole new character, Poutie the Elf, played by Lost's Evangeline Lilly. This comely green-tight-clad maiden is loved by Legolas; but the Elf King has forbidden her to reciprocate, on some kind of flimsy 'for he is an Elf Prince and you are merely the Pig Scratcher's Daughter' pretext. So, obediently, she falls in love with one of the dwarfs instead. I'm not sure exactly which one. Perhaps this guy:

Also added are: (b) a whole lot of Bard backstory, although at no point did Jackson avail himself of the opportunity of having this character attempt to enter a Laketown hostelry only to be told, 'Nah, you're BARD'; (c) alas, more Radagast with bird-shit in his hair, and (d) a whole extra storyline about Gandalf deciding, rashly, to attack a castle full of warrior orcs, wargs and Sauron himself, single handedly. Indeed, 'rashly' hardly does justice to this insane, kamikaze narrative diversion. It is a sequence that depends upon Gandalf acting wholly out of character, without point or hope of success. On the plus side, it did result in a nice bit of magical combat, and a neat moment where the pupil of Sauron's Great Eye turned into that marching feller from the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army" video.

In sum: as pretty much everybody has been saying, this second film was quite a bit better than the first film in the trilogy, although too long and with too high a quotient of Silly. I enjoyed it, mind.

One thing struck me with great force; and it is a matter I have not seen discussed in any of the reviews or other accounts of the movie. It was the sheer quantity of gold stored under Erebor. Really, there was loads, not least in the form of gigantic slag-heaps of coins and cups, millions of cubic metres of the stuff:

(For comparison: the Giza pyramid, 140m high, constitutes a structure of 2.5 million cubic metres. This heap is surely at least as high as that, but much wider and more extensive). In addition to this quantity of gold there are also vast amounts of the metal lying ready in quick-start smelting furnaces: enough to supply large rivers of molten gold flowing for thousands of yards, and to construct an (apparently) solid gold 'dwarf king' statue larger even than Smaug. Millions more tonnes of the stuff! A couple of things occurred to me regarding all this. One is that, although the coins on the top of the heap would indeed be loose, as the film shows, the weight of the gold itself would have long since pressed the bottom of the heap into a solid mass, rendering it impossible of portage. But more to the point, it has implications for the economy of Middle Earth. Gold in our world is valuable because of its scarcity: all the gold ever mined in human history amounts to 165,000 tonnes, with perhaps another 100,000 tonnes still to be dug out of the earth. Middle Earth is (a) clearly much, much more liberally supplied with the metal, and (b) considerably less densely populated than our world. The unavoidable implication is that gold would be all but worthless in such a place. 'Unless,' I pondered, thinking again, 'unless gold is scarce in Middle Earth, but only because so much of the stuff is locked inaccessibly away in Smaug's lair. If that's the case, then Smaug is actually doing the world a favour, and "liberating" all that gold would disastrously deflate all Middle Earth currencies, causing decades of economic depression and collapse.'

One more worry. A metre of gold weighs something like 20,000 kg. Middle Earth, since it pulls the same gravity as Earth, must have a mass of 5.97219 × 10²⁴ kgs.* 5 million cubic metres of gold all in one place, would represent approximately 10¹⁰ kgs. Such a hugely disproportionate concentration of weight would surely throw off the orbit of the world! What would happen to our world if some magical force suddenly dumped 10¹⁰ kgs at one point on its surface? It's an xkcd sort of question. I'm guessing the answer is: nothing good. [Update: I am corrected on this point in the comments below].

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* It occurs to me that the ease with which e.g. Legolas is able to leap from pinnacle to pinnacle, slide down the trunks of elephants and to fire arrows whilst standing on the heads of dwarfs inside bobbing barrels etc. implies that gravity may be less on Middle Earth than our Earth. If so, that only makes the extraordinary concentration of mass represented by Erebor even more orbitally disruptive.

Disney

This week I've been thinking aloud, as it were, about Disney's first five feature-length animated films. I don't know that I've come to any especially pungent conclusions (still thinking, really); but here for the sake of neatness are the links to those five blogposts:

1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (prod. Walt Disney; dir David Hand et al, 1937)

2. Pinocchio (prod. Walt Disney; dir. Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske, 1940)

3. Fantasia (prod. Walt Disney, dir. various, 1940)

4. Dumbo (prod. Walt Disney, dir. Ben Sharpsteen, 1941)

5. Bambi (prod. Walt Disney, dir David Hand 1942)

Bambi (prod. Walt Disney, dir David Hand 1942)

This brief series of blogposts on the first five Disney feature-length animations comes, I'm afraid, to a rather anticlimactic conclusion with my thoughts on Bambi; because I haven't really got any thoughts on Bambi. Of the five, it's my least favourite. I know people who had genuinely traumatic childhood experiences watching this film (Bambi's mother! Dead!!), and maybe that intensity of emotional response bonds a viewer to the movie. Not having had that particular experience, I'm not well placed to say. (That is to say: I didn't see it as a little kid. I caught up with the movie later on, when I was already grown-up). Without that electric moment of affect, the film surely falls back upon a rather underpowered narrative, and a series of pretty but not especially striking visual representations of nature. And Thumper, who's just fucking annoying.

I'm being harsh, I know. I suppose the problem is that Thumper is cutesy without being kitsch. Do I dance with the angels on a moonlit pinhead when I make that distinction? Ah, perhaps I do. But it's my way of trying to get at something that seems to me important, about Disney in particular and about key modes of art that have mattered a lot to me in my life (particularly animation and SF). Cutesy may be part of kitsch, but Kitsch is much larger than cutesy. And Bambi isn't really kitsch enough. No parading pink elephants in this woodland glade.

Yes, it's about death clearly. Wikipedia points to the high praise it has won ('Mick Martin and Marsha Porter call the film "...the crowning achievement of Walt Disney's animation studio." In June 2008, the American Film Institute revealed its "10 Top 10" — the best ten films in ten classic American film genres – after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. Bambi was acknowledged as the third best film in the animation genre') and also a main reason for that praise: 'it is listed in the Top 25 Horror Movies of all Time by Time magazine. Bambi, Time states, "has a primal shock that still haunts oldsters who saw it 40, 50, 65 years ago".' To swerve away from animation for a moment, I remember being struck by one of the things Rosencrantz says in Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966):

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. Must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory. And yet, I can't remember it. It never occurred to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.

I read this first as a teenager and it seemed to me right and, somehow, profound. But that may have been because my own growing up lacked the 'shattering' moment of realisation. For many, Bambi provided just that moment. (Katzenberg-era Disney tried something similar with the death of Simba's Dad in The Lion King, but fluffed the moment by having Mufasa return as a kind-of ghost in the sky. Bambi is more pitiless in its message: dead is dead.) This may be why the film is so under-kitsched: kitsch is not about death, or perhaps it would be more accurate to swing that about and say -- there's nothing kitsch about death. Its universality and inevitability give it seriousness that transcends the sparky restlessness of the truly kitsch. Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls, after all. Perhaps my indifference to this movie is an index of my refusal to accept the importance and gravity of that apperception.

Not that I'm the only one to take refuge from individual extinction in humour and kitschy energies. For example, I give you, Zombi: Fawn of the Dead.

Dumbo (prod. Walt Disney, dir. Ben Sharpsteen, 1941)

The story so far: Snow White had made a truckload of cash, and established Disney's studio as a global player; but the two follow-up films, Pinocchio and Fantasia had both lost a great deal of money. The studio blamed World War 2 for this, because the conflict cut-off most of the lucrative European market; but the fact is, even in the States audiences just didn't fall in love with the later two films the way they did with the first. Dumbo was made quickly and cheaply in order to balance the books; backgrounds were drawn swiftly in watercolour, not meticulously painted in with gouache; animators for the first time were allowed to animate directly without having to work through elaborate preliminary animation processes, such as filming sequences with live-action actors to pose as motion models, or producing pencil animations of whole sequences (you can see the results of this glorious fluidity in the Pink Elephants sequence).

It's also this peerless sequence that does the (very early, chronologically speaking) postmodern thing of breaking the fourth wall by emphasising the framing of the movie, when the elephants parade along and up the edges of the screen. I have lots of clever things to say about this marvellous moment, but like Fermat with his margin, I don't have leisure to jot them all down here at this time.

Anyway, back to the budget: designs were simplified, frames de-cluttered, a smaller team of animators was assigned. The script was not fine-tuned over years, as the had been the case with the previous movies; indeed, the story could have been a little better balanced -- it pays-off and ends rather too abruptly and hurriedly. At any rate, the result was a motion picture that cost $900,000 (Fantasia had cost $2.3 million in 1930s dollars: a fortune. Pinocchio had cost an equivalent sum). It lasts a mere 64 minutes: the shortest of all Disney features. It made $1.6 million on its initial release, and much more over the re-releases through the 1940s. Job done, financially. Better yet: it was a film that actually moved audiences, to both tears and laughter.

It is, of course, Pinocchio Redux: only child, separated from parent, guided by externalised conscience (who happens to be a small talking animal) eventually overcomes adversity to reveal his true worth. But there are two things in particular that interest me about this reworking. One is that (as I've mentioned already in this sequence of blogposts) this is the first feature-length Disney animation to be set not in an idealised Old World Europe, but in the New World. There's a lot one could say about Disney's fascination with the Old World, in part because it is a significant part of the larger Hollywood fascination with the Old World, or more particularly with England and Englishness. But Disney is American, not merely in terms of the nationality of its founder but in terms of its global cultural logic. It stands, like McDonalds and WalMart, as a sort of shorthand for American-ness. It might, I suppose, be that Disney leavens its Americanness with a more 'global' set of flavours (see also: Aladdin, Lion King, Mulan etc) in order more effectively to penetrate global markets. It might, on the other hand, be that the Old World provides an ersatz historical depth to an otherwise too-too bran new cultural productive idiom at odds with the necessary historical resonances of fairy tales et al. Not sure about all this.

Related to this is the question of race. Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan's Deconstructing Disney (Pluto Press 1999) point to the paucity of African American representation in Disney's movies:

Not since James Baskett played Uncle Remus in the semi-animated film Song of the South in 1946 has a black man, that is an African-American male, been portrayed by Disney in an animated film in human form, and only in Hercules (1997) have African-American women appeared as black women. In fact the hybrid form of the semi-animated film cut with live action means that Disney has never figured an African-American man as an animated human in its entire history of feature-length films. [94]

This is an important point, and Byrne/McQuillan note the way Disney's Uncle Remus embodies a 'domestication of black representations that infantalise and emasculate the image of the black man through his elision with children, animals and entertaining cartoon capers, what James Snead calls "a rhetoric of harmlessness".' It wasn't until 2009 with The Princess and the Frog that Disney finally addressed this problem head-on; and although that was a perfectly nice movie, it was immediately followed by one of the Whitest movies in the entire Disney canon: Tangled. It may look like carping to mention the crows in Dumbo as a counter-example (not 'human', clearly; although I don't see by what codes of representation the 2D painted pot figures in Hercules count as 'human' either).

Still, race is present in the film in more complex and interesting ways than that. For one thing, the human circus workers, shown assembling the big top tent in the thunderstorm, are clearly African American, and although their appearance is marginal to the main line of the film they are neither infantalised nor domesticated. And Dumbo, despite his baby-blue eyes, is an African Elephant (check the ears!), the son of an literally enchained mother who learns to fly and astonish the world. As a fable for the African American inheritance in America it could hardly be more positive.

Well: I overstate things, I suppose. Perhaps there's a much less upbeat quality to this movie, and its representation of America. Because Dumbo is America through a double-code of representational simplification, two codes that tangle rather oddly with one another. It's animals as people: crows in little jackets, mice who can talk, mother elephants who gossip nastily like sour old middle-class matrons obsessed with respectability and so on. It's also 'the circus' as a symbolic apprehension of America itself. The tangle comes from the fact that one function of 'the circus' is precisely to present animals in non-functional, non-instrumental ways, as entertainers rather than livestock. Louis Marin (in On Representation) quotes Victor Witter Turner ‘in connection with ritual festivals’, and specifically his theory

that parades or corteges (like festivals) transform one or more real and specific social relations into communitas (both temporary and symbolic). Parades, corteges or processions represent this transformation, and by representing it they carry it out. [Marin, On Representation (1994), 52]

Think of the circus's parade when it arrives in town. Or more to the point, think of the model of society the circus in Dumbo embodies: carceral and mocking and persecutory. Dumbo's mother locked up; the clowns whole show predicated upon bullying and mocking Dumbo himself. It is a circus of cruelty. Heirarchised and stratified and sadistic, its 'ruler' the circus master a mere shadow projected upon a screen. Turner posits two modes of ‘communitas’ ‘evoked’ by the parade, procession or festival: ‘the antagonistic communitas that symbolically “acts out” a real antagonism internal to society’ and the ‘communitas of the warlike type’. Dumbo is evidently the former, although the movie’s ending is tries to cloak the movie as a whole in the latter (Dumbo bombers and so on). And what is the real antagonism internal to society that the movie symbolically performs, if not race in America?

Fantasia (prod. Walt Disney, dir. various, 1940)

Here’s today’s interesting fact: at one point in 1938 Disney contemplated animating the recently-published The Hobbit, using music from Wagner’s Ring as soundtrack. [Gabler, Walt Disney: the Biography (Random House 2006), 307]. This idea emerged from the initial groundwork for Fantasia, a movie for which Disney had the highest hopes, but which—partly because it was so expensive to make and to screen (it had to be shown with special expensive ‘Fantasound’ systems in cinemas) and partly because audiences just didn’t fall in love with it the way they did with Snow White—lost the studio a ton of money.

Its original cut, with the lengthy preludes to each sequence in which Master of Ceremonies and narrator Deems Taylor, dressed in a Conductor’s Tux, condescends so breathtakingly to the viewers that it’s a wonder the original audience didn’t throw chairs at the screen. There’s a set of assumptions at work, familiar from Bourdieu’s Distinction book (of the ‘upper-class people like classical music, middle-class people like easy listening and working-class people like pop’ kind) that are wrong now and were surely just as wrong then; and the idea that we, as audience, have to be eased gently and uncomplainingly into listening to such discordant avant-garde musical assaults-upon-our-ears as Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s fucking ‘Nutcracker Suite’ is—well, insulting, I suppose. Stravinsky was asked what he thought. ‘I do not wish to criticize an unresisiting imbecility,’ he said. Harsh! Especially since Disney had paid him tens of thousands of dollars for the use of ‘The Rite of Spring’ and to act in the role of a general consultant for the fillum. In many way a more interesting response was the review by Dorothy Thompson (a nationally syndicated columnist) who ‘seethed that she had left the theatre “in a condition bordering on a nervous breakdown” and felt as if she had been subjected to an “assault”—a brutalization of sensibility in this remarkable nightmare.” Thompson’s complaint was that Disney and Stowoski seemed to extol the savagery of nature at the expense of man.’ [Gabler, 343]. It is a designedly full-on experience, visually; and the ‘Night at Bear Mountain’ ending—or perhaps even more an assault on the senses, the quieter but infinitely more kitsch Ave Maria finale—are pitched to over-whelm.

Worse, the live-action lecturette interludes emphasise the fix-up nature of the whole, to its larger detriment. It’s not a coherent movie; it’s a string of small movies threaded together on one socially condescending premise: ‘you, yes you, I’m talking to you, will obviously never knowingly step inside a Classical concert hall, so we’re going to use your affection for Mickey Mouse to trick you into getting cultured, you horrible little prole.’ This is probably unfair. Nowadays, when Classical Music accompanies every second TV advert, when Puccini’s Turandot is an integral part of the enjoyment of World Cup football and ‘The Four Seasons’ is every company’s call-waiting music, the danger is probably the other way about: not that Classical Music needs winching down from its high pedestal but on the contrary that it could do with being elevated slightly, or at least hosed down to wash off some of the odour of commodification. But I don’t want to get all ranty.

1. Bach, ‘Toccata and Fugue in D Minor’: a long live-action sequence of the orchestra playing, artfully lit to cast multi-coloured shadows on a backdrop; then a fairly pretty sequende of more-or-less abstract shapes, lines and colours.
2. Tchaikovsky, ‘Nutcracker Suite’: fairies in nature—dewdrops, (racist Chinese caricature) dancing mushrooms, goldfish, more fairies in nature—autumn leaves and frost.
3. Dukas, ‘The Sorcerer's Apprentice’: Mickey Mouse, of course.
4. Stravinsky, ‘The Rite of Spring’: dawn of time; dinosaurs fighting; dinosaurs extincting.
5. Intermission: Meet the Soundtrack: excruciating.
6. Beethoven, ‘Pastoral Symphony’: kitsch rural idyll, flying horses, cute fauns (+ extraordinary racist black faun comic character)
7. Ponchielli, ‘Dance of the Hours’: Hippo and Alligator, dancing. Surprisingly charming
8. Mussorgsky, ‘Night on Bald Mountain’/Schubert ‘Ave Maria’: and we’re done.

Actually, I think the best way of grasping the film as a whole is to separate out its three most successful elements. The abstract sparkles and bow-string lines of the opening Bach sequence is very pretty, in an undemanding sort of way. ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ has a more complex kind of charm, dependent on Mickey himself, on the (to use a horrible word) ‘relatable’ situation he finds himself in, and on the splendidly machinic Terminator-like implacability of the Golem-brooms.

Rewatching this sequence yesterday, I note that this is before the animators learned to draw Mickey’s ears side-on (they are two face-on black circles on top of his pate, and don’t shift their position in the least when he turns his head). It’s also clear that, even though Pinocchio had a whole team assigned just to animating water, the water in this sequence isn’t quite right. It’s too gluey in texture, too silver-transparent shiny, its splashes too soapy and it clings a fraction too closely to the things it dribbles over. It wasn’t until Jungle Book, I think, that Disney managed to get the ‘animating water’ thing spot-on. I say this not to sneer, by the way. Hand-drawing water so that it looks ‘real’ is a mind-boggling challenge, a sort of Fermat’s Last Theorem of animation, and the crucial thing is that Disney, eventually, did it. Otherwise ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ has two things really going for it: the way it renders its slow, inevitable build—the increasing nightmare of Mickey’s over-reaching position; and the hard-to-deny charm of the child analogue, Mickey himself. I wasn’t so sure what to make of the Wizard, with his Semitic conk and his blue traffic-cone-shaped hat adorned with stars and crescent moons.

When he comes in at the end and disperses the water he looks like Moses. Is that deliberate?

Thirdly, there's the Hippo Dance sequence. This could have been a wreck, since the central premise (clearly) is the fat-shaming one of ‘wouldn’t it be funny to see really obese women dancing with ludicrously incongruous grace?’ But the sequence is much more than this rather cruel set-up. The gracefulness is a real thing, it what it brings home is (a) the skill of the animators, able to draw so that their two dimensional forms take on appreciable 3D heft and force, and more importantly (b) the understanding that fat people can be just as graceful as thin. Some fat people are graceless, of course; but so are many thin people. The point, rather beautifully rendered here, is that it’s possible to be both very large and a very elegant mover.

But setting these three sequences aside, the main thing that characterises the rest of the film is: kitsch. It’s kitsch raised to the power of kitsch. I don’t say this to disparage it, mind you: kitsch is a sadly neglected mode of art, I think.

You may choose to disagree with my assessment that the fairies and gnomes sprinkling dewdrops on spiders’ webs in the ‘Nutcracker’ section, or the cutesy fauns and pegasuses (‘pegasi’?) in the ‘Pastoral’ section are kitsch. Doesn’t kitsch require a degree of ironic self-awareness? Isn’t it actually an ineluctably postmodern form of art? Well I’m in two minds. On the one hand I agree with Tomas Kulka (in this, if in not much else) when he says that ‘making kitsch is not the same thing as making use of kitsch’, and draws his distinction between ‘how kitsch may work in the artworld’ and ‘how kitsch works in the kitschworld’ [Tomas Kulka, Kitsch and Art (Pennsylvania State University Press 1996; 2nd ed 2002), 9]. Nobody who has spent any time at a Disneyland resort can doubt that the kitschworld is precisely the locus of Disney. At the same time, aspects of the ironic mode are a central part of what Disney does; in the humour of it, but also in the very form of it.

‘Irony’ is a much larger category than kitsch, of course; and although kitsch generates its affect through its ironic relationship with seriousness it is a much more specific cultural category and must be considered as such. Celeste Olalquiaga suggestively traces the beginnings of ‘kitsch’ to the nineteenth century, linking it with (as she puts it) the way ‘industrialization transformed nature into an artificial kingdom of miniature scale’. For Olalquiaga this aesthetic is ‘at once exhilarated and melancholic’; and although she doesn’t not specifically discuss science fiction she might as well do. The desire to model the cosmos, to ‘reduce’ it to a working scale model—precisely, we might say (though she doesn’t make this particular point) what a cartoonist does to the material of actual life [Celeste Olalquiaga, Artificial Kingdom: a Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (University of Michigan Press 1988), 7]. And there is a weird flavour of melancholy, I think, in even the most ostensibly exhilarating Disney sequences. I don’t mean the out-and-out pathos moments, when (say) Dumbo intertwines his diminutive elephant trunk with the trunk of his incarcerated, weeping mother. I mean something more pervasive: a sense of brightness and colour and variety pushed to the point of monotony; of the machinic repetition of animation itself seeping through, as in Mickey’s nightmare tireless broomstick servants, into the fabric of the film's content itself.

‘Romanticism is outmoded,’ Jacques Sternberg once claimed; ‘symbolism disused, surrealism has always appealed to a small elite but kitsch is everywhere. Even more pervasive and indestructible now that it is fused to a civilisation based on excess consumption.’ [quoted in Thomas Kulka, 13] ‘Consumption pushed to excess’ is, of course, the business model of Disney; and it is in kitsch that Disney assimilates its inventively surreal visual imagination—Disney collaborated with Dalí, after all—its reified ‘symbols’ calcifying all the time into brands, and its out-of-kilter relationship with sentimentality, Romanticisms cousin.

If it didn’t sound so philistine, I’d be tempted to peg key moments in art as bringing ‘something new’ to the table, visual-aesthetically speaking. Picasso’s Demoiselles Davignon brings a new approach to form and visual language; Jackson Pollock brings a new attitude to the brushstroke, the core compository strategy of painting. And so on. Well, by this metric Disney was a crucial figure in the visual avant garde: he brought something quite new—motion, music—to the visual image. This, the kitsch flipside to the clean sublimity of Monet’s ‘impressions’ or Rothko’s abstractions, captures something the ‘high art’ equivalent cannot. It has the same expansiveness and mind-startling wonder about it, but married to a gonzo energy and disrespectfulness that vitalizes it more brilliantly. It has the grandeur, but also a kind of innocence pathos of silliness. ‘The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious,’ is how Sontag puts it. ‘Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious."’ One can, as Sontag notes, be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious. That Disney’s remains a silly mode of art (amongst his first commercial hits were his ‘Silly Symphonies’) is, as the phrase goes, a feature, not a bug.

Pinocchio (prod. Walt Disney; dir. Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske, 1940)

In Multiplane Technicolor, no less! An extraordinary visual text, this; immensely busy and vital and scintillant, all the more remarkable when you remember that the whole thing was hand-made by craftsman. Every frame has something visually wonderful in it, and there are many hundred thousand individual frames. It's like the monks at Lindisfarne produced not one but 100,000 gorgeously illustrated gospels. It is no wonder it cost the, in 1940s-money, heart-stopping sum of $2,289,247 to make; nor that it lost money quite heavily on its initial release. But equally it's not surprising that it made that money back handsomely on re-issue; for in the ingenuous Pinocchio, his nose and his externalised cricket-shaped conscience, Disney created a genuinely resonant cultural icon.

It is based on Carlo Collodi's once-famous (famous-no-longer, I suppose) book, The Adventures of Pinocchio (1882). But adaptation changed not only specifics but the tone of the whole piece. Disney declared that ‘the problem with Pinocchio is that people know the story, but don’t like the character’: in the book he is often cruel and capricious. A strategy for addressing this was to externalise Pinocchio’s conscience as Jiminy Cricket (check the Jesus-ish initials), and to insert the ‘blue angel’ in various scenes. In the novel the cricket is an actual cricket stamped to death on the hearth by the heartless Pinocchio, whose ghost comes back to advise the lad on morality. This was in the original script of the movie, but soon dropped as too savage, although aspects of it remain in the finished picture (the cricket is seemingly undrownable, for instance). And there's one thing in particular this film shares not only with the first five Disney features, but with a great swathe of children's literature. That is the core conceit that the best way to represent children in your story such that children reading, or watching, will most fully identify with them is not to represent them, quite, as children at all. To style them as dwarf adult, or as animals like Mickey Mouse, Dumbo or Bambi. It's not immediately obvious why this should be, unless it is that on some level of subconscious self-representation children don't 'think' of themselves as children: but rather as dogs, or monkeys (with what delight they respond to the kindly-spoken 'you cheeky monkey!'), as superheroes or robots, as gruffalos or princesses or as Mummy's Little Baby. Pinocchio is closest to being a boy of all these, but on the other hand the whole point of this story is that he is not a real boy.

This I suppose has something to do with the development of a psychologically robust self-image, objectifying one's subjectivity via actual objects. It has the additional advantage of consoling the tremulous child-mind with fantasies of invulnerability. Tender human bodies are hurt only too easily, we know from an early age; but toys are joyfully robust and deathless. Look how happy this little chappie is, despite what Saw-like horrors are being inflicted on his torso!

Pinocchio is a fable of growth, teleologically conceived as the anthropomorphism of true humanity at its end. But this growth is not inevitable; as in Kingsley, the danger of bestial devolution balances out the possibility of positive evolution, a fact recorded in this rather wonderful Soviet Russian poster for the movie (from that period when the US and the USSR were allies, fighting a common fascist enemy):

Production had begun in 1937; by the release date of 1940 Italy (the provenance and, patently, the setting of the tale) was a Fascist enemy. It's striking how little this inflects the working-out of the text, actually. And this potent nostalgia for a European past, oddly insistent in the work of a profoundly American studio, is itself a fascinating thing; I'll come back to it and say more when I blog about Dumbo, the fifth feature but first American movie of this American studio.

Instead I want to note something, briefly, about the Disney style. I don't mean the specific style of this movie, lovely though that is; I mean that je-ne-sais-quoi people mean when they say 'Disney'. It has something to do with an unashamed cuteness, a visual sentimentality and a smooth-lined, bright-coloured approachability. But it is also a very carefully crafted mode of simplification that works so effortlessly with the grain of animation itself that it approaches a kind of idea harmony with it. Any image must be simplified, codified and boiled-down to a modular version of itself in order to be animated, since pre-computers it must be endlessly and easily reproducible by hand-drawing. This interests me very much, because (I suppose) it occurs to me that if 'the novel' does this with life, the 'children's novel' or 'YA novel' must do it a fortiori. The development of Pinocchio as a main character was largely a process of smoothing away the rougher edges until a final form was arrived at that pleased Walt. What he objected to about the early sketches was that they looked too much like a puppet.

But actually the best example of what I'm talking about is not Pinocchio, but Walt's own signature. You can see it evolving, moving towards a final form that combines a visually charming 'handwritten' individuality with the maximum power of machine-made reproducibility.

This is, really, one of the most perfectly achieved simulacra of the twentieth-century. It bears only a distant, genetic relationship to any actual handwritten signature, yet it more than supersedes the handmade, precedes the original. It 'is' Disney, his very hand guiding his very pen upon the page in his personal, individuated communication to each one of us. A personal, individual message that happens to have been sent simultaneously to another four billion people. The broader cultural codes of visual simplicity as against visual complexity may wax and wane around this fact (computing has made it much easier to do the latter, and so for a while that's what we got; but the advantages of a modular simplification, visually speaking, tend to win out in the longer run) this signature remains the same.

In some important way, we don't really want Pinocchio to become 'a real boy'. He's more fun, and certainly more iconic, as a magical object. The notional trajectory of this film is from reified thing to humanised person; but the larger logic not only of the film but of the 'Disney process' itself is, as the evolution of his signature shows, exactly the other way about.