The New Adventures of Pinocchio (1960)

Directed by

Tadahito Mochinaga, Arthur Rankin Jr., Jules Bass

Genre

animation

Country

United States

Length

1 season, 130 episodes

Rating

6.0 of 10 from 1 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A stop-motion animated series follows the wooden puppet Pinocchio as he tries to become a real boy. Geppetto the woodcarver and a cricket guide him through short adventures that teach lessons about honesty and growing up.

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What happens

The New Adventures of Pinocchio is a 1961 American-Canadian-Japanese syndicated stop motion animated television series produced by Rankin/Bass Productions in the United States and made by Dentsu Studios in Japan. Created by Arthur Rankin, Jr. and his partner Jules Bass, it was based on the 1883 book The Adventures of Pinocchio written by Italian author, Carlo Collodi. The series was Rankin/Bass' first production to be made in "Animagic", a stop motion puppet animation technique which, in association with the company, was done by Tadahito Mochinaga's MOM Productions. A total of 130 five-minute "chapters" were produced in 1960–61. These segments made up a series of five-chapter, 25-minute episodes. The show was deliberately designed to not emulate Walt Disney's popular 1940 version of Pinocchio in character design or characterization; the puppet wore a T-shirt and shorts instead of a Tyrolean hat, the Cricket (not Jiminy Cricket) had a high-pitched, grating voice, and Geppetto was calm and deliberate, unlike Disney's excitable and absent-minded woodcarver. The series premiered the week of February 6, 1961 on select local stations. During 1963–64, the series was also aired in Japan on Fuji TV as part of another stop motion TV series, Prince Ciscorn (シスコン王子, lit. Ciscorn Ōji), based on the manga by Fujiko Fujio and also produced by Tadahito Mochinaga for Studio KAI and Dentsu. Nineteen years later, in 1980, Rankin/Bass produced another stop motion adaptation of the novel for the American Broadcasting Company, a Christmas special called Pinocchio's Christmas, which featured a different voice cast including George S. Irving as Geppetto; Todd Porter as Pinocchio; Alan King as Maestro Fire-Eater; Allen Swift as the Fox; Pat Bright as the Cat; and Diane Leslie as Lady Azura. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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