One of the freebies I grabbed off Project Gutenberg was a translation of Collodio's Adventures of Pinocchio; I just finished reading it. It's a passably interesting children's tale, with fairly major differences from the Disney film. Just a few comments:
1. The book is stuffed with moralizing. More chapters than not feature an authority figure (Gepetto, the Talking Cricket, the Blue Fairy, or someone else) saying, "Don't do X!", Pinocchio agreeing not to do X, AF warning "If you do X, bad thing Y will happen!", Pinocchio repeating his promise, and then going off and breaking it.
2. Occasionally, the translator makes it a little obvious what the original words were. When Pinocchio is warned about the Great Shark (not whale), he replies, "Mother mine!" Somehow the image of Disney's marionette saying "Mamma mia!" makes me laugh.
3. Pinocchio appears in the Fables series of comics; two hundred years after becoming a real boy, he's still... a real boy. He's seriously ticked off about this, and looks forward to punching the Blue Fairy in the nose the next time he sees her. In the book, though, she explicitly promises that he'll grow up. (Of course, the Fables characters are supposed to be popular images, not necessarily consistent with the originals.)
Ah, well. It was reasonably interesting, I guess. I really would like to get my hands on a copy of Bambi, though. (We had the book when I was a kid. It's not in public domain; the author's heirs actually got some of the rights back from the Mouse in the '90s after a protracted legal battle. It'll be a couple of decades before the copyright lapses.)
1. The book is stuffed with moralizing. More chapters than not feature an authority figure (Gepetto, the Talking Cricket, the Blue Fairy, or someone else) saying, "Don't do X!", Pinocchio agreeing not to do X, AF warning "If you do X, bad thing Y will happen!", Pinocchio repeating his promise, and then going off and breaking it.
2. Occasionally, the translator makes it a little obvious what the original words were. When Pinocchio is warned about the Great Shark (not whale), he replies, "Mother mine!" Somehow the image of Disney's marionette saying "Mamma mia!" makes me laugh.
3. Pinocchio appears in the Fables series of comics; two hundred years after becoming a real boy, he's still... a real boy. He's seriously ticked off about this, and looks forward to punching the Blue Fairy in the nose the next time he sees her. In the book, though, she explicitly promises that he'll grow up. (Of course, the Fables characters are supposed to be popular images, not necessarily consistent with the originals.)
Ah, well. It was reasonably interesting, I guess. I really would like to get my hands on a copy of Bambi, though. (We had the book when I was a kid. It's not in public domain; the author's heirs actually got some of the rights back from the Mouse in the '90s after a protracted legal battle. It'll be a couple of decades before the copyright lapses.)