For the longest time I thought of Dumbo and Pinnochio as weird, disorganized, depressing little movies, where there is a lot of running around and nothing very ‘momentous’ stands out in my head.
Without Googling, try to describe the plot of Dumbo, the original Dumbo, okay, and you’ll probably find yourself saying “There’s an elephant, I guess… he goes through stuff, he is born into this sad circus life, every one doubts him, he gets drunk accidentally and then it turns out he can fly?”
Same thing with Pinnochio, the plot is... uh, pretty off the walls.
There’s a puppet, his creator wishes for him to be real - blessed or cursed with this wish, Pinnochio goes through a lot of weird stuff - a lying cat and fox, a mean puppet show guy, an island where bad boys are turned into donkeys 🤷?
Pinnochio narrowly escapes it all and tries to go back home but his dad was swallowed by a whale - what? - he saves his dad from the whale and then almost dies. Then he becomes real.
I thought about this for a long time and realized that Dumbo and Pinnochio feel ‘weird’ and disorganized as tales, because there are no real villains, no big scary antagonist in either movie, no Cruella de Ville, no Darth Vader.
Dumbo and Pinnochio just kind of stumble through challenge after challenge, from minor evil to minor evil, barely escaping each time.
In a way these movies aren’t fantasies or even parables, they’re horror movies, each of which deal with situational fear.
The antagonist of Pinnochio is 'non-personhood' and the antagonist of Dumbo is 'captivity', both are scary vague ideas that are not an ugly/fabulous octopus-witch who has a kick-ass song about tradeoffs.
The mega-villain plotting genius is an artistic choice, an easy choice, a recent trend, as opposed to a parable of multiple, more minor antagonists who waywardly hurt others without much thought.
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