Pinocchio

(1940)

When all is said and done, Disney will have many legacies but one of the most artistically significant may be the Americanization of horror. True, the Universal monster movie cycle did a lot of the heavy lifting in the early thirties by making science-fiction, fantasy, and the gothic a part of the American filmgoing diet. However, Disney was able to weld European folklore and fairytale to cartoons, vaudeville, and popular music. PINOCCHIO is both where the fusion crystallized and also as a raw as they were ever willing to do. The allusions to modern mass-culture mask the body horror, torture porn, and psychological terror at the heart of the film. Show this to a child and you’d have a better chance getting them to sleep after a late-night screening of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Disney animated features were the first horror movies that felt indigenous and as much of a re-mythologizing of the form as PSYCHO in the sixties and HALLOWEEN in the seventies. The lingering menace of the artwork is palpable in a way that only a studied understanding of the way that horror permeated modern painting and film through the expressionist movement can provide. The invisible eyes and columnal teeth of the whale Monstro which swallows Pinocchio and his father is tattooed on the inside of my mind’s eye made visceral by its complete lack of gloss. The moral adjudication of the storyline conceals a sado-masochistic desire for punitive action against the protagonists echoing in the decades-away slasher.