“No Cops. No Parents. No Rules”: Disney’s Pinocchio, Education and Anti-abolitionist Pedagogy
“When Black children are allowed to watch television unsupervised, the [capitalist] white supremacist attitudes are taught them even before they reach grade school” -bell hooks
“Your conscious is the last thing you want to take to Pleasure Island…” -Lampwick
I’ve always felt the pine-made puppet’s coming-of-age story was one of Disney’s filler archival movies. Growing up, the original Pinocchio stayed in our VHS player in our New Jersey Jamaican immigrant household. I watched it over and over but I never walked away with any deep lesson beyond not lying. It was never mentioned as much as Dumbo or Snow White. I could never have dreamed of Pinocchio being thrown into the marketing mix of live-action nostalgia-magnet remakes but I was excited to watch when I saw the billboard ad by my apartment.
There are no apolitical movies. Disney movies in particular range from ambiguous-to-direct moral-political packages handmade for children. Pinocchio comes with both discrete and overt moral messaging that has political implications for children living in the early 2020’s.
The obvious takeaway is that lying is generally bad except when perhaps you can use it to your advantage (e.g. copping keys to free you from a cage).
The writers’ changes to the original Pinocchio (1940) were insignificant in terms of the plot… until they weren’t. They still kept the “No Strings” number, the whale still goes down, and Pinocchio's nose still grows with his increasing lies.
The new additions that are salient were both drenched and lightly coated in, if not overt anti-radicalism in general, anti-societal-critique regarding schools, policing, labor issues, and freedom of speech. All of which is a huge deviation from the intentional critiques of authority, power, and national systemic injustices that Carlo Collodi, the late 19th century radical Italian children’s fiction author, intended The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) to have.
As with all propaganda, the political intentions of the directors and screenplay writers are secondary to the political impact. These areas of the story are not intended for the viewers to pry beyond the surface, but their implications once internalized by young, especially young Black and Brown and working class viewers, are devious at minimum. This is true regardless of weak attempts of Black puppet representation and a vindicated puppeteer reclaiming control of her craft.
Pinocchio Pedagogy
In the 1940’s Pinocchio, Honest John, a literal sly fox, leads our wooden hero away from school before he even arrives at the schoolhouse. In the 2022 version, Pinocchio arrives at school and is kicked out because he is a puppet. This is a moment that is meant to mirror the myriad ways neoliberal education, to use Monique Morris’s term, pushes students, particularly poor Black and POC students, out of the educational system.
This moment of school-related ridicule opens up an opportunity for live-action Honest John (voiced by Keegan Michael Key) to offer a fair critique of old-fashioned teaching methods or “pedagogy” as a means of licking Pinocchios wounds.
Honest, sly fox, John: [“Who cares what he thinks. His pedagogy is completely outdated. Is his curriculum child-led? Brain-based for a growth mindset? I think not. He makes no room for different learning styles.]
Here we see elements of classic Deweyian approaches to pedagogy (referring to John Dewey, who some, and I mean only some, might call the father of progressive pedagogy in the early 20th century). Honest John’s phrases like “Child-led” and “Brain-based” move us into some child development-centered Montessori-type educational theory energy.
We know while most of the United States was practicing the aforementioned “outdated” pedagogy during the early 20th century, Black teachers practicing in segregated Jim Crow schools, like Nannie Helen Burroughs and Carter G. Woodson, were creating and practicing not only progressive but system challenging pedagogy with highly limited economic resources. People like Gloria Ladson Billings would call their teaching “culturally relevant”, or “culturally relevant pedagogy”.
While Honest John provides us with some new progressive era based educational terms, he is still located in a movie that is participating in a particular capitalist state-centered unprogressive pedagogy (much like Dewey himself ). Disney’s Pinocchio is not what Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire would call a “pedagogy of the oppressed”; a teaching philosophy that is meant to critique the oppressive society one is learning within and strives to recreate a more liberatory learning environment and world.
Immediately after his intellectual contribution Honest John proceeds to draw Pinocchio into the self-centered and ironically all too Disney-esque dream of the vapid individualistic “self-made” star or “influencer”. This is easy enough for viewers to condemn. However this is a classic tradition of Disney, Marvel and other film/TV franchises of placing a few pieces of critical thinking into the mouth of the villain. This ultimately gets viewers to demonize those potentially insightful moments of critical thinking and associate them with the overall corruptness and incompleteness of cartoon villainous thought.
The final result leaves the viewer without a sincere critique of the educational system.
Honest John’s critique being watered down by his role as villain destroys the chance to acknowledge that educational institutions under racist and capitalist political-economic systems inevitably create exclusionary, anti-learning “learning environments” whose main drive is to create docile future workers and obedient citizens.
And that should be critiqued.
Our dislike of the sly fox also prevents any solution-based follow-up of Honest John’s pedagogical thoughts. Follow-ups like acknowledging that true education can be revolutionary, democratic, and intellectually engaging.
Instead of either of those conclusions, the writers abandon the opportunity for critical consciousness building and viewers are forced into the same old tired moral/ political mantras: “school is good” “dropping out of school is a choice and a bad choice” and “bad people make bad choices”.
These age-old songs of dominant capitalist ideology are reinforced by Pinocchio’s horrible post-school experiences 1. with the evil Stromboli and 2. with a group of rambunctious children (with some interesting gender politics) being corralled by a Coachman to a place of infinite pleasure where only those feeble-minded enough to quit school would ever want to go.
Pleasure Island and anti-radicalism
Lying, we are clear, does not lead a young puppet or anyone for that matter on the pathway to official real-boy-ness. Still, there are other things that the movie suggests are bad through the morally instructive tool of Pinocchio’s time at “Pleasure island”.
Pleasure island is a place, similar to Stromboli’s stage, for young societal castaways. It is a place of pure reckless abandon. We know this from Lampwicks comments about it before we even arrive; there are “no parents” and, importantly, there are “no cops” on Pleasure island.
Depending on where you stand politically regarding the issue of racist capitalist policing, Pleasure island initially sounds like a horrific or heavenly space. Regardless, it is a politically charged environment and it is only upon settling into the island that we get a clearer understanding of what Pinocchio, and therefore we as an audience, should feel towards a police-free, here read as structure-free, space.
Once inside Pinocchio and crew are greeted by a literal sea of indulgences. Wild children running around and flying down waves of candy are what one might expect from a place solely built to produce and enhance childhood pleasure.
Tellingly though, three recreational elements of Pleasure island are meant to cause Pinocchio and young viewers particular disdain. The first being the “Contempt Corner” where we are shown various children engaging in what looks to be street protest, with signs reading “Shut Your Mouth”, “You loser”, “Idiot”, and “Hate you”. The second is the “Clock Stoppers” where kids are vehemently smashing clocks to their heart’s content. And finally “De-Grade School” where kids are joyously destroying a school building inside and out.
The Contempt Corner and Freedom of Speech
On the surface the Contempt Corner may be advising viewers against general bullying or corrosive gossiping. But placed in the political context of contemporary events in the United States, and considering the other attractions of Pleasure Island, along with the attraction clearly mimicking a public protest, the scene quickly reads as a cartoonish manifestation of center-right to far-right dismissal of informal and formal public calls for accountability for harm or violence inflicted by a capitalist, racist, and rapist-producing society. The growing impatience with oppressive elements of society combined with calls for justice and a dismantling of social/political relations to create more equitable conditions are mistakenly known and intentionally construed by liberals and the right alike as unthought-out, unfair, child-like, irrational “cancel culture”.
The movie also makes sure to display the children smashing the storefront windows of a building called the “Shop and Lift” and taking objects. Too reminiscent of the images the mainstream corporate-owned news media decided to heinously focus on during the 2020 Black Spring uprising following the murder of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
This focus on looting in 2020 distracted from calls from various community and national organizations to defund and abolish the police that are still being demanded across the United States and the world.
Clock Stoppers and Labor Power
Clock smashing seems wonderland-ish enough to evade a deeper analysis beyond destruction for destruction’s sake. Still, clocks have symbolic weight beyond the decorative past-times of Gepetto. Clocks are essential to the industrial revolution and the very nature of how we frame work today. Pinocchio may not like clock smashing because Gepetto likes clocks, but why else would another kid loathe the idea of a clock? These poor kids (economically poor that is) have decided to defy time. Live action Pinocchio comes to us during a time of mass labor strikes for better wages and benefits along with multiple calls for the creation of unions being reported in mainstream and independent news. Pinocchio’s framing of the clock smashers as immoral lumps them in with the real-life working class people going against long-held ideas like the 40 hr work week and the 8hr day. We are not supposed to harm the clocks because clocks, and Western time itself, keep us from idleness and instill “discipline” and “innovation” into society.
De-Grade School and Curriculum
“De-Grade School” continues the movie’s anti-critique critique of schools and schooling. The children are literally degrading the school building, throwing pianos down the front steps and generally destroying the edifice. Once again, this All seems like a fever dream of what conservative imagine would happen if the educational goals of working class Black and Brown students teachers and parents came to fruition. The current debates around public education have generally been framed around right-wing reactions to the demands of student organizers around the nation.
Specifically, we have seen the calls for defunding school police budgets, abolishing police in schools altogether, and demands for ethnic studies requirements. All of which have been met by right-wing calls to stop teaching “Critical Race Theory” (which is not taught in schools) which has been a catch-all term for ethnic studies, Black history, gender studies, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, or even just the presence of social studies. All of these calls for safer, police-free, and historically accurate curriculums in schools have been seen by the right as a degrading free-for-all to the traditional school system.
Conclusion
We as viewers are not, however, supposed to want to join the fray of angry shouting children. We are not supposed to want to smash clocks (or windows). We know this because, just like the original 1940 narrative, all the children who fall for the allure of Pleasure island literally turn into donkeys.
“Your conscious is the last thing you want to take to Pleasure Island…”
-Lampwick
Beyond this viewers can watch Pinocchio's own reaction range from fear to disgust as he dives deeper into Pleasure Island.
None of the elements mentioned are by themselves anti-abolitionist, but when they are gathered in this specific fashion and delivered at this specific moment in time, the lesson becomes clear.
It is up to us to remember that abolition is not about “pleasure”, it is about resources. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, abolition is about presence, not absence. The presence of healthcare, liberatory education, accessible food, child care, worker protections, curbing climate change and equitably distributed resources. Freedom is not instant pleasure, rather, as Angela Davis says “freedom is a constant struggle”.
