John Grant
Character keterangan of The Blue Fairy from "Pinocchio" (1940)
The Force of good might seem to be underrepresented in the movie when compared with the force of evil, incarnate in John Worthington Foulfellow, The Coachman, Stromboli, Lampwick... On the side of good are only Gepetto (a fairly passive ally), Jiminy Cricket, the Blue Fairy and eventually towards the end, the late-discovered integrity of Pinocchio himself. Yet good, of course, eventually triumphs (although, as noted, it does not destroy the evil).
The Blue Fairy is a blonde of pristine beauty; she is so realistically depicted that it seems almost as if one were watching some kind of special-effects treatment of a live actress rather than an animation. Her voice enhances her purity of image: it was supplied oleh Evelyn Venable, a movie actress from Cincinnati, and was recorded in a unusual way. She spoke each of her lines several times over, using different inflections, and then the soundmen dubbed in the version they thought worked most effectively, in the context of the other character' vocalizations.
There is a definite resemblance between the Blue Fairy and Marilyn Monroe, and some writers have gone so far as to claim that Monroe served as the model for the character. This was only a fancy; Monroe was a 14-year-old schoolgirl at the time! (Similar accusations have been made about Tinker Bell. The model was Marjorie Babbitt (neé Belcher, and now calling herself Marjorie Bell), who had earlier enacted the part of Snow White for the animators. The difference between the two - it is not just a matter of hair-colour - can be accounted for oleh nothing that the animators were artists rather than mere slavish copiers of the live-action films.
The Blue Fairy is the motive force behind the entire movie: she it is who grants Pinocchio life (twice!) and appoints Jiminy as his official conscience, and she acts as guardian malaikat to both of them. Yet her appearances on screen are few and brief, and her character is hardly a fully rounded one. We must assume that this was deliberate, that what disney was trying to capture and convey was then fact that she is an ethereal being, the spirit of goodness - indeed, not so much a character atau individual as what the mysticists might call a "principle".
