Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered: the dark roots of children's classics
Every few years, somebody decides it is time to revisit Pinocchio. There was Roberto Benigni's live-action oddity, Guillermo del Toro's stop-motion meditation on fascism and grief, Disney's 2022 Robert Zemeckis remake, and now another stage and screen rotation drawing critical attention again from outlets like Time Out. Each time, audiences walk away with the same surprised reaction: that was a lot heavier than I remembered.
It is not just nostalgia playing tricks. The original Pinocchio is genuinely strange — and so is most of the children's canon we hand down without thinking. Read Carlo Collodi's 1883 novel The Adventures of Pinocchio straight, and you find a wooden puppet who murders a cricket with a mallet in chapter four, burns his own feet off while sleeping, gets hanged from an oak tree by assassins, and watches his classmates literally turn into donkeys to be sold for hard labour. The 'lying makes your nose grow' bit, the only image most adults retain, is barely a footnote.
Why are the stories we still read to four-year-olds quite so grim? And what do those original versions tell us about the parents and societies that produced them?
The Disney filter and what it hides
For most Australians under fifty, 'Pinocchio' means the 1940 Disney film: warm browns, a kindly Geppetto, a top-hatted cricket called Jiminy. Disney's adaptation is so culturally dominant that we have effectively forgotten the source. Collodi's puppet has no conscience-cricket guiding him; he has the Talking Cricket, whom he kills almost immediately for the crime of giving him good advice. The cricket later returns as a ghost, which somehow makes things worse rather than better.
Collodi originally ended the story at chapter fifteen, with Pinocchio swinging dead from a tree, executed by the Fox and the Cat. Children wrote in furious. The newspaper serialising the tale demanded a sequel. Collodi grudgingly resurrected his puppet and kept going for another twenty-one chapters of moral torment. The 'happy ending' we know — Pinocchio becomes a real boy — was a commercial concession, not the author's natural instinct.
Every modern adaptation is, in some sense, an argument with that original brutality. Del Toro leans into the darkness and uses it to talk about Mussolini's Italy. Disney sands it off entirely. The version reviewed by Time Out is just the latest negotiation in a 140-year argument about how scary a children's story is allowed to be.
Cautionary tales were the whole point
The strangeness of Pinocchio makes more sense once you remember what it was for. Collodi was not writing entertainment in the modern sense. He was writing what nineteenth-century Europeans called a cautionary tale — a genre with a job description: scare children into compliance.
This is why bad behaviour in the book is punished with such cartoonish severity. Skip school, you will be turned into a donkey. Trust strangers, they will hang you from a tree. Lie, your face will visibly deform. The narrative logic is closer to a hellfire sermon than to The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Collodi, a former soldier and Tuscan civil servant writing for a newly unified Italy with abysmal literacy rates, was attempting nation-building through fear. A 'real boy' in his moral universe was a literate, obedient, working-class subject of the new Italian state.
The same logic runs through the rest of the canon. Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter (1845) features a child whose thumbs are sliced off by a tailor with giant scissors for the sin of thumb-sucking. The Brothers Grimm's original 'Cinderella' ends with the stepsisters' eyes pecked out by doves. Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid does not marry the prince — she dissolves into sea foam. These were not horror stories that accidentally got marketed to kids. They were aimed squarely at children, and the horror was the pedagogy.
What the originals say about historical parenting
Strip the moralising back and the older stories tell you something uncomfortable about the worlds that produced them. Death is everywhere — particularly the death of children, parents and especially mothers, which is why the dead-mother trope is the engine of half the Western fairytale tradition. Infant mortality in nineteenth-century Italy regularly topped 200 per 1,000 live births. The fear that a child would wander off, fall ill, be exploited by a stranger or starve was not metaphorical.
The originals also assume children are economic actors. Pinocchio is constantly being sold, hired, indentured or eaten. He works. Geppetto is desperately poor; the puppet's first decision is whether to sell his school primer for a circus ticket. Hansel and Gretel are abandoned in the woods because their parents cannot feed them. These stories take it for granted that childhood is precarious and that adults — including parents — can be the threat. That is a very different worldview from the modern one, in which children are protected innocents and the home is a safe zone.
And the morality is harsher because the stakes were harsher. A nineteenth-century peasant child who skipped school, ran off with strangers or refused to work was not heading for a difficult conversation with the school counsellor. They were heading for genuine ruin. Collodi's donkey-island, where lazy boys are literally turned into pack animals and worked to death, is grotesque, but it is also a fairly direct illustration of what happened to undereducated children in industrialising Europe.
Why we keep softening — and why the dark keeps leaking back
By the mid-twentieth century, parenting culture in countries like Australia had decisively shifted. Children were to be encouraged, not terrified. Disney's mid-century rewrites — Pinocchio, Snow White, The Little Mermaid, Cinderella — are all part of the same project: take a story whose original purpose was disciplinary and convert it into a story about self-belief, friendship and dreams coming true.
That conversion is mostly successful, but the source material keeps reasserting itself. Audiences sense, even when they cannot articulate it, that something has been removed. That is why every new adaptation tends to drift back toward the original strangeness. Del Toro put death and dictatorship back in. Stage productions return to Collodi's grotesque set-pieces — the whale, the donkey transformation, the hanging tree. Reviewers, including Time Out's writer on the latest version, keep noting how unexpectedly dark and existential the material is in the room.
It is not that artists are trying to traumatise children. It is that the original stories had structural integrity. Take out the consequences and Pinocchio is just a puppet who lies sometimes. Put them back and you have a story about mortality, class, freedom and what it costs to become fully human.
What to do with the weird
None of this means we should be reading Struwwelpeter at bedtime, or that Collodi was secretly correct about how to raise a child. The cautionary-tale tradition belonged to a world of compulsory child labour, bone-deep poverty and religious certainty that most modern Australian parents would not want to revisit.
But it is worth knowing the originals exist, and worth occasionally reading them. They are a window into how earlier generations thought about morality, mortality and the responsibilities of the young. They explain why our sanitised versions feel slightly weightless. And they remind us that the canon of 'children's classics' was assembled by adults with very specific anxieties — anxieties we have inherited, even after the donkey island and the talking cricket's funeral have been quietly edited out.
Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered. He was always meant to be.