The Myth of Pinocchio

This Chapter has a twofold purpose. The first purpose is to acknowledge the mythological dimension of Collodi’s Pinocchio; and the second one is to look at some films based on Pinocchio, seen as a sort of intersemiotic translation which confirms Lévi-Strauss’s hypothesis that ‘the mythical value of the myth is preserved even through the worst translation’ because, unlike poetry, its substance ‘does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story it tells’. ¹ In other words, the fundamental essence of a myth, its purport, will persist throughout the diversities of forms by which the myth story is perpetuated.