Pinocchio

Director: Wilfred Jackson, Norman T. Ferguson, T. Hee

1940 / 88min / 35mm

Inspired by Carlo Collodi’s 1883 The Adventures of Pinocchio, Disney’s second animated feature to reach cinemas proved that the groundbreaking Snow White and the Seven Dwarves three years earlier had been no one-off fluke with a bright, buoyant, and yet unmistakably morally serious film, introducing audiences of all ages to Geppetto, his hand-carved puppet “son,” the duplicitous huckster Stromboli, and dapper Jiminy Cricket, the would-be real boy’s conscience. Winner of an Original Song Academy Award for “When You Wish Upon a Song,” still today Disney’s signature tune, and the film that introduced such innovations as the multiplane camera, which lent new depth to the animated image.

35mm IB-Technicolor print courtesy of Library of Congress

Distributor: Walt Disney Studios/20th Century