Does Pinocchio become “real” when he loses his strings?

My choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, is singing a great jazzy arrangement of “I[‘ve] Got No Strings” by Paul Langford. The original song was written for the 1940 Disney movie Pinocchio and was also released the same year, with slightly different lyrics, by Decca Records. Most post-1940 performances use the Decca lyrics, I suspect because they fit into a more generalized meaning than the film’s wording, which is closely tied to the scene at the marionette theater where Pinocchio performs along with other, stringed puppets. I’ll include videos and lyrics for the two different versions at the end of this post.

The original story of the wooden puppet who comes to life was written by an Italian, Carlo Collodi, in the late 1800’s. His tale is considerably darker than the Disney version. Pinocchio is downright nasty! He kills Jiminy Cricket! With a hammer! (The cricket reappears as a ghost later on in the story.) There’s a lot of violence in the original that doesn’t appear in the film: Pinocchio goes to sleep with his feet propped up on the stove and wakes up to find that they’ve burned off; Geppetto makes him some new ones. Pinocchio bites off a cat’s front paw when the cat is disguised as a bandit. At one point Pinocchio is being hanged, but apparently he’s taking too long to die and so his would-be murderers, the cat and the fox, wander off. The Turquoise/Azure/Blue Fairy rescues him. And so on.

Since I’m always so fascinated with origin stories, I’m going to quote a rather long section from Smithsonian magazine about how (perhaps) Collodi got at least the germ of his plot:

We traced the path of Carlo’s daily walk, setting out from the Villa Il Bel Riposo. Carlo would turn right and head down the hill toward the cigar shop. (According to the translators, Carlo bought his cigars at the same store as the Italian king.) Along the street, Carlo passed two different shops where artisans worked with wood, one a carpenter and the other more of a woodcarver. The two proprietors were good friends, but they were contentious fellows, and often got into fights.

On the first page of Pinocchio, the block of wood turns up in the workshop of an old carpenter known in older translations as Mr. Cherry, because of his red nose. Mr. Cherry discovers that the wood can speak when he tries to make it into a table leg, only to hear it protest against being struck or cut, and the shock turns the tip of his nose from red to blue. So in Chapter 2, he turns the wood over to his friend Geppetto, who wants to make himself a puppet, “but a wonderful puppet, one that can dance, and fence, and do flips.” With this wonderful puppet, Geppetto hopes, he will be able to earn “a crust of bread and a glass of wine.” The mischievous block of wood manages to provoke a violent fight between the two men, who are both irascible and probably based on the craftsmen whose workshops Collodi passed on the Castello street. (“The Real Story of Pinocchio Tells No Lies”)

Collodi then went on to write a very moralistic tale about how children should behave themselves, and especially how they should attend to their education. The author was very committed to the idea of education’s being the only way to lift oneself out of poverty; his parents had been uneducated and struggling, and his own education had come about only because it was paid for by his parents’ employers. He was also very committed to an idea that might seem ahead of its time: that children can’t learn if they’re hungry. In fact, one of his earliest published works is an open letter titled “Bread and Books.”

So the Collodi version of the story is quite complicated and rich; as such, it attracted the attention of Walt Disney in the late 1930’s.  After the roaring success of Disney’s first full-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Disney wanted to do something completely different in terms of theme and content, rather than try to build on Snow White’s success by choosing a similar fairy story. He insisted, though, that the character of Pinocchio be made more likeable, and the story had to be shoehorned into a one-and-a-half-hour film. So a lot of the original story was trimmed away. What was left, however, is considered to be a masterpiece by many, one of Disney’s greatest animated films if not the greatest.

It’s interesting to note that the original Pinocchio had no strings to begin with; the block of wood used to carve him was already “alive.” But he still had to be made “real,” which is a different matter altogether. The film follows that same narrative, except that Pinocchio is indeed just a stringed marionette at first. But Geppetto, the woodcarver who has made him, wants him to be a real boy, and when he sees the “wishing star” out his window he addresses it with that desire. That’s the cue for the Blue Fairy to appear and bring Pinocchio to life, but he’s still a puppet. She tells him that he can only become truly real by being “brave, truthful, and unselfish” and that he must choose to do so. After many mishaps and misadventures, Pinocchio becomes real after selflessly rescuing Geppetto from a whale. The original story has some further complications to the plot, but in the end the same result is achieved.

The ”No Strings” song takes place early in the movie, when Pinocchio has been tempted to run off and join a marionette theater run by the sinister Stromboli. The puppet performs his song to great laughter and applause, with gold coins tossed onto the stage, and so Stromboli decides to keep him locked up in a cage so he can keep on performing and making money. Pinocchio is rescued by the Blue Fairy, but only after he lies to her and his nose gives him away. The Fairy says, “Remember, a boy who won’t be good might just as well be made of wood.” When Pinocchio apologizes and admits his lie, the Fairy opens the cage and he escapes.

Here’s the scene from the film, with flirtatious female puppets surrounding Pinocchio. Note that Jiminy Cricket is quite taken with the can-can dancers!

Here’s the Decca records version with different wording and an extra bridge melody–the song begins at about 3:10:

Here are the two sets of lyrics–first the one from the film:

Pinocchio:
I’ve got no strings
To hold me down
To make me fret, or make me frown
I had strings
But now I’m free
There are no strings on me

Hi-ho the merry-o
That’s the only way to be
I want the world to know
Nothing ever worries me

I’ve got no strings
So I have fun
I’m not tied up to anyone
They’ve got strings
But you can see
There are no strings on me

Dutch marionette:
You have no strings
Your arms is free
To love me by the Zuider Zee
Ya, ya, ya
If you would woo
I’d bust my strings for you.

French marionette:
You’ve got no strings
Comme ci comme ça
Your savoir-faire is ooh la la!
I’ve got strings
But entre nous
I’d cut my strings for you

Russian marionette:
Down where the Volga flows
There’s a Russian rendezvous
Where me and Ivan go
But I’d rather go with you
Hey!

Cossack marionettes: Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!

Pinocchio: Hey!
There are no strings on me!

And here are the alternate lyrics–note that  this site says “An earlier version of the song exists and was originally intended to be sung in a different scene, possibly before Pinocchio encounters Honest John and Gideon. A vinyl recording of the song performed by Victor Young and the Ken Darby Singers is the only known version still surviving.”