Who would have thought that everyone's favorite puppet would resort to murder?
While The Adventures of Pinocchio was a dark fairy tale, this version of Pinocchio is probably the darkest version yet. It's even worse in the uncut version.
- Children go through abuse very frequently in the Japanese version, and one of their natural reactions to this is screaming. If you love/care about children it can be extremely disturbing to hear them do so, given the plethora of circumstances this series offers.
- Pinocchio in particular is following this pattern. One video
has no problem in displaying the many times poor puppet goes through such things — and this is not even a complete compilation!
- Pinocchio in particular is following this pattern. One video
- Episode 1 alone, uncensored, sets up the mood for the rest of the anime:
- The first half of the episode is relatively peaceful, sans the Cricket's accidental death, and follows some beats from the Disney movie, with Pinocchio being brought to life by the Fairy and overjoying Geppetto when he wakes up and discovers him. The following day Geppetto invites some kids over for Pinocchio's first birthday party, and Pinocchio sets his finger on fire by touching the candle of his cake, amused by the fact it doesn't hurt him... but then the mood drops when a girl panics and shoves Pinocchio off the candle, but does it too strongly making him violently fall to the ground, breaking off his leg while his nose falls off. Then we look at Pinocchio struggling to stand up on one leg while the music becomes eerie and surreal. Franco laughs at him and throws his own leg at him to make him fall again. Geppetto comes back and fixes Pinocchio, but it doesn't make this scene any less gratuitously disturbing.
- Franco doubles down on his cruelty by selling Pinocchio to Sneeroff. The way we're introduced to the evil puppet master is him walking next to Franco with his head out of the frame... until we suddenly Jump Scare to an extreme close-up of his red-eyed, malicious face looking down at Pinocchio.
- If Stromboli was unsettling when he talked about using Pinocchio as firewood once he got too old to use, Sneeroff actually demonstrates this when he's infuriated by a broken marionette and tosses it into his stove. Pinocchio is utterly horrified by the act, which is made worse when the burning opening of the stove casts a psychedelic, kaleidoscope filter across the room, like something out of a trippy Dario Argento flick.
- The puppets in this anime are depicted as motionless but conscious, so Sneeroff technically murdered a weak person by burning that broken marionette. We see its hand waving in the stove before collapsing into ash.
- In episode 5, Pinocchio is tricked into believing that he'll become a real boy if he murders Johnny, thus at night he sneaks into his bedroom and attempts to murder him with a chisel (pictured above). The original book might've been dark, but at no point did it pioneer Child's Play.
- The one who coaxed Pinocchio into doing that was a female cat. In the original, she wants Johnny dead because earlier in the episode he accidentally killed her kitten onscreen while abusing it to vent his frustrations. Naturally, the dub cut that out and changed the cat's motive - she now claims that Johnny threw a rock at her once.
- In the uncensored version of the episode, Johnny's father teaches his son to value his own life by handing over the axe to Pinocchio and telling him he can go ahead and take his son's heart, and Pinocchio mercifully decides to spare Johnny's life. Even if it was a Secret Test of Character and the dad would've stopped Pinocchio if he actually decided to go through with it (there's no indication he would've done it, though, especially due to how teary-eyed and thankful the father is to Pinocchio for sparing his son), Johnny STILL genuinely believed his father betrayed him and wanted to seal his fate for not living up to his standards and was going to die right there and then. And even if the father would've saved him in case Pinocchio attempted to strike him down, there's no way things would've been the same between them after this act of serious betrayal (even if pretended), and if anything it very likely would've made Johnny grow up into a bigger screw-up with trust issues with his already low self-esteem, trauma and his father's abysmal old-fashioned parenting to boot. As flawed as Saban's dub and censoring is, one can't really blame them for deciding to avoid all of this.
- Episode 6 has Pinocchio and three other boys going in Devil Forest, where a witch is rumored to lurk, despite Geppetto's and Cricket's warnings to the former. Due to the girls in the class they are in telling their parents about their whereabouts, a search party (excluding Geppetto) is formed. Before they arrive, two of the four children are EATEN ALIVE by wolves. The fathers of those children, horrified, grieve them. The dub only mentions the death of the children without showing this whole scene.
- One of the boys, cowering down in fear, has a wolf somehow sliding its face through the back side of his cloth. The animal sticks his fang through the middle of his back, then turning and slamming the child to the ground unconscious. Just...try closing your eyes at this scene and hearing it would still be horrifying.
- Before being eaten, at around 8:56 time mark, the other boy is licked by a wolf on his unclothed back. The poor kid laughs with a full grin, as if being tickled, in an extremely disturbing way. While this might be just Black Comedy, this is incredibly sadistic considering the child's fate seconds thereafter. The music doesn't help either.
- The same episode has the witch (whose existence is confirmed and is revealed to be a vampire) go to a stable where a horse is being imprisoned. She transforms into a bat and starts flying around it. The horse tries to break free but to no avail. The scene then cuts to the morning. The witch walks out of the stable, wipes her lips while cackling and a shot of the horse lying dead is shown. The dub cut that out, only having the witch telling the horse to behave or he'll become her victim.
- The way the witch is killed in the next episode. Pinocchio sets his hand on fire and burns her alive. This was also removed in the dub and changed so that the witch is simply scared off by the fire.
- Episode 11 begins with one of Pinocchio's classmates drowning. Given that the plot of the episode revolves around Pinocchio dealing with the kid's grieving mother, this was a case when the English dub averted censoring death.
- Episode 42 had a really disturbing Nightmare Sequence. It pictured Pinocchio on a crucifix, much like Jesus was (Pinocchio even has a crown of thorns on his head). The crucifix is burned and at the end, Pinocchio's disembodied head falls on the ground. This particular scene only has sound effects (which do a good job at freaking one out) and was not shown in the dub.
- Said scene, in its entirety, depicts Pinocchio COMPLETELY DEVOID OF ANY COLOUR OR EXPRESSION. Yikes.
- The Saban dub of the episode somehow makes the nightmare spirit's agonized scream even more creepy than the Japanese version. This happens in an otherwise endearing conclusion of the episode, when Pinocchio realises the bad dreams he went through are not real and defeats the aforementioned villain by throwing him in sunlight.
- Episode 47 also contains Pinocchio being crucified and almost burned from the bottom part of the cross. This time the scene was not censored by the dub, probably because Oak Fairy's magic sends the fire away and Pinocchio escapes. Still not as bad as the previous example, though.
