The Italian newswire ANSA reports that 82-year-old visual effects master Carlo Rambaldi, who won two Oscars (Alien, 1979; E.T., 1982), is set on outdoing Walt Disney's 1940 masterpiece Pinocchio, based upon a tale by the 19th Century Italian novelist Carlo Collodi.

“It's always been a bee in my bonnet and now I hope I can finally get something done," he declared.

Interestingly, Rambaldi adds that he admires Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio (2002), a movie praised in Italy but widely scorned in the U.S.

Many Italian critics believe that Oscar winner Benigni (1998 Best Actor for La vita è bella-Life is Beautiful) successfully brought out the darker aspects of Collodi's 1883 complex morality tale.  According to this interpretation, Americans would not appreciate Benigni’s version because the Pinocchio they grew up with was the simplified, lightened story created by Disney right before World War II.

"Roberto was unfairly panned by the American critics, who didn't understand what he was trying to do. We Italians loved it," said Rambaldi. He will try to follow Benigni’s approach, but hopes to get a more generous reception in the U.S.

This seems a good subject to surf the Net for. Is there an “American” Pinocchio and an “Italian” Pinocchio? Is the Collodi-Benigni(-Rambaldi) approach different from Disney’s? What does the internet have to say?

To be fair, when Pinocchio was released as the second full-length Disney cartoon movie (after Snow White, 1937), critics did find it “dark”. Let’s start by looking at the Time magazine archives, recently made available for free on the internet. On February 26, 1940, while praising the picture as a work of art, Time wrote:

The peeping eyes in the night scenes in Snow White were scary […] but in Pinocchio the plunging, charging whale, Monstro, is terrifying.
Nor are there any characters in Snow White to compare with J. Worthington Foulfellow, the actor-fox, who sells Pinocchio to the puppet show, or his shabby, screwloose, unscrupulous companion, Giddy, the cat. [These] are savage adult satire. They are even out of place in a children's picture.

According to some, however, in Disney’s Pinocchio the moral battle between darkness and light, good and evil, is less complex and problematic than in Collodi’s original novel. It is an American simplification of a more elaborate Old World approach.