I can't prove it, but even though Carlo Collodi's PINOCCHIO rates as one of the most often-translated fantasies in the world, I suspect that not that many people in the U.S. have read it. I base this only on my long hours of bookstore-hauntings. Granted, I rarely if ever checked the children's fantasy sections, but I hardly ever saw used copies, even though it's a public domain work and anyone can issue a redaction. But I just don't think Americans, usually raised on the Disney version, are as likely to check out Collodi's prose original, in contrast to the many people who do read Lewis Carroll or L. Frank Baum.
To be sure, even though Carroll and Baum's works are often episodic, Collodi's tops them in that regard. Installments of the puppet boy's adventures originally appeared in newspapers, and Wiki asserts that Collodi kept the story going due to popular demand. so I don't know how that affected the unabridged version I read. But though it would be fun to see a film adaptation that reproduced all of Collodi's inventive sequences, I can well understand why Disney and other adapters chose a more linear approach.
I had already read commentary to the effect that prose-Pinocchio was much more mischievous than the Disney version, causing much more grief to his creator Gepetto. He has a lot of vices that child-readers could certainly recognize in themselves or in peers: he's lazy, selfish, and picky about what he eats. Yet in the book the idea that Pinocchio can become a real boy if he mends his ways isn't introduced until over two-thirds of the book is done. The positive effect of removing this "carrot" is that Pinocchio's misdeeds are more like those of ordinary kids, who don't undergo any physical transformations simply for doing the right thing.
Another major difference is that no supernatural entity brings Pinocchio to life; Gepetto simply happens to construct a boy-puppet out of wood that's already sentient when he carves it. There's no explanation as to why the wood was sentient, it's just a given-- and early in the book, Pinocchio meets other sentient puppets who immediately recognize Pinocchio, though none of them have ever physically met. Back in my 2017 review of a Neil Gaiman SWAMP THING story, I joked that Pinocchio could have been one of Gaiman's "puppet elementals." Yet I didn't guess that other puppets in the Collodi work were just alive as Pinocchio is, thanks to some unspecified fairy-tale magic. By the way, the names of two puppets, Harlequin and Punchinello, are the only conspicuous story-elements that provide any historical context to Collodi's timeless-seeming Italian setting. Since Harlequin was the later-conceived of the two, PINOCCHIO must take place any time after the 16th century. It may have been intended to take place in Collodi's own time-frame, though Collodi never depicts anything that suggests the rise of 19th-century technology.
Gepetto is the only character who's pretty much the same as he is in Disney; a lovable schmuck. He does end up inside a huge sea-monster, albeit a Giant Shark rather than a whale, and Pinocchio's rescue of his father from the beast's belly isn't crucial to his salvation as in Disney. This Pinocchio kills his advice-giving cricket, but the unnamed bug seems to be able to come back to life when he pleases. The Fox and the Cat start off as con artists, but Collodi's schemers are more murderous. They don the masks of robbers seeking to rip off the puppet-boy's money, and the only reason they don't slay their victim is because they hang him by the neck, which isn't enough to kill a puppet. Candlewick, the boy who lures Pinocchio to Playland, not only remains permanently donkey-ified, he dies after Pinocchio returns to normal. The puppet-master "Fire-Eater" is nothing like the tyrannical Stromboli, and the macabre Green Fisherman has only been adapted to film three times.
But the most fascinating original is the one on whom Disney based the Blue Fairy. In Disney she's a distant, celestial character who brings Pinocchio to life and only appears in his life a couple of times thereafter. In Collodi, she's generally called something along the lines of "the Blue-Haired Fairy," which for convenience I''ll abbreviate to "BHF." BHF is not in Pinocchio's life at the onset, but once she makes his acquaintance-- almost certainly not by coincidence-- she more or less dogs his heels, watching him with maternal omniscience as the puppet continually strays from the path.
Pinocchio first encounters one incarnation of BHF when he's fleeing the masked robbers. He sees a strange house and begs sanctuary. A blue-haired child comes to the door but won't admit him, claiming she's expecting to perish soon. After the robbers leave Pinocchio strung up, BHF finally takes action and has her minions succor him, though her initial reluctance to act begs the notion that she wants him to suffer and learn from the experience. The next time Pinocchio disobeys her, and then returns to the house, he finds a grave that claims the BHF child "died of sorrow on being deserted by her little brother Pinocchio." Of course this is just a ruse to instill guilt in the bad puppet's soul. The next time the BHF appears, she's a blue-haired adult, and she volunteers to become Pinocchio's mother in the absence of his father. Whereas Gepetto never successfully disciplines the puppet, the BHF is a true "punishing mother." However, she renders punishment only in an indirect fashion, to make Pinocchio's humiliations the direct result of his transgressions. It may not be coincidence that Pinocchio finally earns his boyhood not from rescuing Gepetto or keeping the old man healthy, but from showing charity to BHF, after one of her servants falsely tells the puppet that BHF is sick and dying.
Despite the novel's loosely contemporary setting and its episodic structure, Collodi's PINOCCHIO deserves to be better known for its insights into human psychology-- not just of the "child" variety -- and for its freewheeling creativity.
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