It's so creepy that my kids didn't want to hear it (being read to them) with all the burning and stuff. However they also didn't want to listen to the classic fairy tales by Grimm and Andersen which are super creepy as well. Just think of burning witches or some Anderson fairy tale I remember where one guy is put into a bag and thrown into the river. It's not that I deliberately wanted to read the most creepy stories to them but there's a creepy undertone to even the most famous and "harmless" ones, think of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and so on.

If you want a film version that is more faithful to the original book, I suggest you watch the 2019 Garrone movie [0]. There's Benigni in It, but this time he plays Geppetto and he's not as insufferable as he can be. And the rest of the cast is very good too (many beloved comedians including the late Gigi Proietti).

I have no idea if this stayed only in Italy or if it has been translated to other languages.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinocchio_(2019_film)

LLM written article.

AI slop

It is weird even in the current version. Totally a horror story, not a children's tale.

> Blue Fairy — first introduced as a literal child-corpse with turquoise hair

He may have run out of ideas and tried to fill in a story with a dark mood in mind (speculation). The thing is that this is not that uncommon in many fantasy novels. Anyone remembers "The Color of Her Panties" by Piers Anthony? I read it, it is very cheesy (also silly, in particular when you as target audience are, say, 10 years old or something like that) but not necessarily mega-creepy either. But then you also begin to wonder ... is it just "good fun" to pick such a title? But then it is not the only instance and you begin to find more oddities. Naturally this depends on the author; some authors never run into such issues, others run into such issues.

I only saw the Pinocchio cartoon, that anime-style animation, on TV. That version was harmless from what I remember. Never read the books, but I am not so surprised about books being darker. Anyone knows the Grimm brothers? They lived from 1785–1863 and 1786–1859 respectively. I clearly remember that some of those drawings were really dark. It's a bit like dark horror stories if you look at it today - here is a summary:

https://discover.hubpages.com/literature/Grimms-Fairy-Tales-...

It starts with "There are some fairy tales that are just not meant for kids.".

Some of the pictures by Grimm or illustrators are quite scary, such as the bleeding or weeping out of eyes ... is gross. Possibly these were more for adults, or adults who did not care, such as Pinocchio - perhaps. A puppet that has a growing body part ... that in itself is already super-weird. Are we certain the nose was meant? Is Pinocchio ... a prison item???