Children who realize their fantasies immagine Ali Babà and he appears in front of them; if they wish to enter into Alice’s Wonderland, the Cheshire cat smiles at them: if they wish to walk on the moon, they are wrapped in a silver light and watch their space boots make footprints on the lunar surface. Yes indeed! Who has never wished to see their childhood dreams come true? Hasn’t everyone, if only for a moment, lived the life of their hero, until called back to real life? We are told that in this voyage between fantasy and reality we become adapted to the world in which we have been placet by chance.

If only we could realize our fantasies, would we become as good as our parents, teachers and institutions want us? Would we really be convinced to give up the infinite worlds of our imagination for the world we are obliged to live in? I don’t think so.

Perhaps we would do what the brothers did in a short story by Ray Bradbury. Rather than leaving the nursery that adapts its structure to our desires for adventures we would prefer to leave our torturing parents on the African veldt at the mercy of the lions.

Monster children, so rarely found in children’s literature like the one created by the American author, in which the word and the story are the barely perceptible buzz of the electronic instruments in the Vitabella-house that thinks of everything. No wonder that at the threat of pulling the plug, the child reacts in terror: “how scary, will I have to tie my own shoes instead of the using the shoe tying machine, or brush my own teeth or comb my own hair or take a bath on my own?”

“Writers’ fantasies, are we so sure they are?” one may ask. Or else do we fear to recognize that in that terror lies the consumerism that is depleating our children’s and grandchildren’s imagination, dragging it down into the death and gore of a perfect world with no more rites of passage, where children are denied the experience of life before it even begins?

“Adventures of Pinocchio. The Story of a Puppet” of Lapo Art Films, oppose the slow rhythms of oral narration to neurotic curiosity of the world of things. Because Pinocchio, born in 1883 belongs to a story that appears far away to inhabitants of today’s world. A place in a memory to build with imagination stirred by the adventures of this “piece of pine wood.”

The chapters unfold in the same order created by Carlo Collodi featured by the cadence of Ornella Grassi’s introduction and music by Jacopo Martini. The deep warm voice of Sergio Ciulli take us into the author’s structure to tell us of the extraordinary passage that each individual must make to be recognized and accepted as a member of the society in which he or she is born.

It is useless to try and hide it, listening to this rendition, we may see the various images of the film versions of the story, not last of which, the one by Roberto Benigni dedicated to the most famous puppet in the world. It is inevitabile: our immagination is a large depository of ever new materials and those most recent are the result of the sights and sounds of the mass media that surround us.

For this the idea of listening acquires appeal. Accepting that we trespass that which is ordained by the civilization of the image: obscure the video to leave just the voice. We cannot avoid using images received but we are free from their restrictions. Trusting ourselves to the narration the images we have memorized line up with the words and not the words to images. This way, without noticing, we emerge into the film that we began to film the moment in which we became involved in a story too well known to be recongnized.

The beauty is that each film will be different from any other. Every station of Pinocchio’s journey assumes significance that we give it based on our interests or more simply, to the moods of the moment. For some it will be the occasion to discuss Freudian theories on the father figure, for others, the conditions of childhood, for others who miss the simplicity of a world in which supervison and punishment made sense, others will be scandalized by the mixture of fear, superstition and poverty that described the “country of hunger.”

Above all, in the magical circle of story telling we feel once again, to our surprise, emotions, feeling, pain which we had buried at the bottom of our memory and which suddenly return to surface as epiphanies of our existence.

So it is then that we can comprehend but perhaps not fully explain the mixture of distressing melancholy as well as violent rebellion that pervades while listening to the flight to Toyland and the search for his lost father, the fear of becoming a donkey and the courage to face the dog fish, or the Blue Fairy’s candy or the pain of his death and the joy of his resurrection, his impatience with the talking cricket and the ingenuous greed and deceit of the Cat and the Fox or the final transformation from wooden puppet to real boy.

With the end of Pinocchio we say farewell to the world of possibility to enter into the world of necessity, giving rise to an unconscious never ending celebration of the death of childhood. Who knows?

Pinocchio would surely mock us for our wordiness and would hold his nose in vain while attempting to sell us a bit of the shade of a belltower in one of the thousands squares throughout Tuscany, in an effort to play in a world with no need of the magic of Harry Potter.

By Andrea Spini