404
on a Miles Davis album), to Mickey Rooney, and much later Roberto Benigni, and
Pee Wee Herman, all playing the title role of Pinocchio, to the opera by Jonathan
Dove at the Great Theatre in Leeds in 2007, the legend lives on. Danny Kaye and
Martin Landau both played Geppetto; actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus once played the
Blue Fairy.
There have been Pinocchios in Africa and in outer space, in paintings by contemporary artists like Jim Dine, and in philosophical embraces like those of the rigorous
Italian thinker Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) who considered The Adventures of
Pinocchio a fine example of his “absolute idealism,” a notion that ecological aesthetics is core to all philosophy. Countering the grave leveling effects of eco- anxiety,
such Garzoni gardens, though all but a few acres, manifest in every visitor a credo,
possibly fleeting, or as easily a life-altering revelation. Such is the power of ecobubbles that may be divined in places, guises, and circumstances least expected. In
the face of a divided and divisive human population, with the insistent question of
whether the species can rise to the level of the individual, Pinocchio passes along for
good measure a proof-positive credo. We don’t have to be trapped between total
despair and a fully realized Utopia. There might be a regenerative farmer, or fuel
cell innovator intoxicated with the idea of practical solutions, ready to champion an
entire generation of practical-minded individuals.
Throughout most of his life, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug
(1914–2009) was one such person—even as he admitted the fact that his “Green
Revolution,” with its heavy applications of nitrogenous fertilizers and severe impact
on aquifers, was only a stop-gap measure that might give the human species a
decade or two to stabilize its population explosion, while lending to human geography a respite from immediate famine through the mechanism of higher-yielding,
disease-resistant varieties of wheat and other staples. Borlaug’s enthusiasm for
feeding humanity was undimmed, up until the end. Notwithstanding his acute premonition that our species was in trouble.
Pinocchio anticipated similar contradictions about human nature. In the 1940
Walt Disney Animated Classics version (the second of such films following upon
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), Pinocchio’s voice was performed by Dickie
Jones, Jiminy Cricket by Cliff Edwards, and Geppetto by Christian Rub. The storyboards for that production remain classics, all formulated as Hitler was wreaking
havoc across Europe. But the myriad illustrators in the last nearly 138 years—from
Attilio Mussino and Giovanni Manca to Walt Disney’s own Pinocchio illustrator,
Swedish-born Gustaf Adolf Tenggren (1896–1970)—are as diverse as that fabulous
concatenation of illustrations for Pinocchio’s cousin, “Don Quixote.” In 1937 alone,
there were an estimated 80 simultaneous editions being published of Pinocchio,
almost all of them illustrated.
2
2 See JSTOR, “Centenary of a Character: Pinocchio,” by Angela M. Jeannet, Italica, Vol. 59, No. 3,
Pedagogy (Autumn, 1982), pp. 184–186, Published by: American Association of Teachers of
Italian, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/478984 © 1982 American Association of Teachers of
Italian; See also the “Infography about Pinocchio,” http://www.infography.com/content/927376398317.html.
44 Collodi’s Garden and the Misadventures of Pinocchio
on a Miles Davis album), to Mickey Rooney, and much later Roberto Benigni, and
Pee Wee Herman, all playing the title role of Pinocchio, to the opera by Jonathan
Dove at the Great Theatre in Leeds in 2007, the legend lives on. Danny Kaye and
Martin Landau both played Geppetto; actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus once played the
Blue Fairy.
There have been Pinocchios in Africa and in outer space, in paintings by contemporary artists like Jim Dine, and in philosophical embraces like those of the rigorous
Italian thinker Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) who considered The Adventures of
Pinocchio a fine example of his “absolute idealism,” a notion that ecological aesthetics is core to all philosophy. Countering the grave leveling effects of eco- anxiety,
such Garzoni gardens, though all but a few acres, manifest in every visitor a credo,
possibly fleeting, or as easily a life-altering revelation. Such is the power of ecobubbles that may be divined in places, guises, and circumstances least expected. In
the face of a divided and divisive human population, with the insistent question of
whether the species can rise to the level of the individual, Pinocchio passes along for
good measure a proof-positive credo. We don’t have to be trapped between total
despair and a fully realized Utopia. There might be a regenerative farmer, or fuel
cell innovator intoxicated with the idea of practical solutions, ready to champion an
entire generation of practical-minded individuals.
Throughout most of his life, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug
(1914–2009) was one such person—even as he admitted the fact that his “Green
Revolution,” with its heavy applications of nitrogenous fertilizers and severe impact
on aquifers, was only a stop-gap measure that might give the human species a
decade or two to stabilize its population explosion, while lending to human geography a respite from immediate famine through the mechanism of higher-yielding,
disease-resistant varieties of wheat and other staples. Borlaug’s enthusiasm for
feeding humanity was undimmed, up until the end. Notwithstanding his acute premonition that our species was in trouble.
Pinocchio anticipated similar contradictions about human nature. In the 1940
Walt Disney Animated Classics version (the second of such films following upon
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), Pinocchio’s voice was performed by Dickie
Jones, Jiminy Cricket by Cliff Edwards, and Geppetto by Christian Rub. The storyboards for that production remain classics, all formulated as Hitler was wreaking
havoc across Europe. But the myriad illustrators in the last nearly 138 years—from
Attilio Mussino and Giovanni Manca to Walt Disney’s own Pinocchio illustrator,
Swedish-born Gustaf Adolf Tenggren (1896–1970)—are as diverse as that fabulous
concatenation of illustrations for Pinocchio’s cousin, “Don Quixote.” In 1937 alone,
there were an estimated 80 simultaneous editions being published of Pinocchio,
almost all of them illustrated.
2
2 See JSTOR, “Centenary of a Character: Pinocchio,” by Angela M. Jeannet, Italica, Vol. 59, No. 3,
Pedagogy (Autumn, 1982), pp. 184–186, Published by: American Association of Teachers of
Italian, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/478984 © 1982 American Association of Teachers of
Italian; See also the “Infography about Pinocchio,” http://www.infography.com/content/927376398317.html.
44 Collodi’s Garden and the Misadventures of Pinocchio