10 Fascinating Facts About Disney's Pinocchio

10. The Main Character Went Through Major Changes

Like Snow White, the early production was beset with several rewrites and redesigns. It came to a point where Walt had to halt production for a few months to rework everything from the ground up. The majority of this came from the puppet himself, Pinocchio.

It’s no surprise by now that Disney alters their source material to make it more accessible to younger audiences and Carlo Collodi’s original novel needed a lot of trimming and tweaking to change the very weird and incredibly dark story into one about being “brave, truthful and unselfish”. This all began with the design of the character.

Original sketches by Ollie Pohnston and Frank Thomas saw Pinocchio look closer to a marionette, i.e. wooden all round with a nutcracker-style mouth, peaked cap and flat hands. Disney hated it and ordered an immediate redesign, with Fred Moore adding more human elements. It wasn’t until much later that the animators had to take the opposite route and take a sketch of a cute boy and give him wooden limbs and the famous nose. This was the design approved by Disney to be inserted into the final film.

Story-wise, the character needed rejigging too (and not just from the source material where he was selfish, cruel and would only learn lessons through torture). Disney noticed that Pinocchio was far too gullible and was too easily led into situations that would turn out for the worse. It was at this point he decided the little puppet boy needed a companion to show him right from wrong, and this was where Jiminy Cricket came in.