AI review

AI & Pinocchio; Intertwined 

        When watching AI and reading the original story of Pinocchio, I mainly took into consideration the first sequence of the film, which focuses on the monologue about a robot being able to love and feel loved by a human. However, when David’s prototype was proposed (a.k.a the robot child), one of the board members asked Professor Allen Hobby if a human can truly love a robot back, in which the latter simply replied with the following statement: “Did God create Adam to love him?”, meaning that the robot is only created to serve the needs of a human, whereas the human isn’t necessarily supposed to pay its service/love back. This statement alone is a recurring factor seen in most sci-fi movies where such creations (ex: David, The Replicants, etc.) strive to get that connection from their human counterparts (fathers/masters, etc.) but due to their nature, humans won’t care to satisfy their own needs. However, this stereotype is somewhat broken in both AI and Pinocchio since in both stories, both Gepetto and Monica, despite hating their “sons” at first due to their nature, they secretly love them (correspondingly), because both David and Pinnochio are able to imitate a child and even inherit such characteristics when they first interact with both parents. Both David and Pinocchio are very similar when we first see them on the scene, since they are both curious: David is simply a genuine mecha trying to imitate humans by laughing, eating, sleeping etc, whereas Pinocchio is a marionette who leans more into disobedience to satisfy his naiveness and greed of becoming the stereotypical archetype of a child (a bad one at best), while trying to explore what’s around him. 

        In these first interactions, both Monica and Gepetto experience the uncanny valley phenomenon, due to the obvious eerie reaction coming from both parents when they encounter such creations brought to them. They can’t believe what they see, and don’t want to believe that they are real, and therefore they become neglective and hostile towards them at first. However, in time, both parents somewhat realize that the poor creations have no fault in any of their behavior, and thus they become fond of them. Monica, at first disgusted by the idea, ends up embracing David and decides to make him part of the family by following the instructions to make him a boy, in which David stops calling Monica by her name and names her “mommy” while giving her a wholesome hug. Gepetto, who is mostly angry at Pinocchio for his behavior and for getting him in trouble (making him go to prison at one point, in Chapter 3), ends up forgiving him and help him by giving him food, clothes, while making some improvements into his wooden body, because in Gepetto’s eyes, Pinocchio’s just a boy; a boy who he loves as his own son, maybe because he’s alone and needs that company at this point of his life. It’s like if both parents had some sort of pride to not admit that they love them, but they do, and this is understood and seen in their acts (which I will discuss in further paragraphs). For example, even after Pinocchio’s mischievous acts, such as wasting the A-B-C book Gepetto gave him, escape the house, not go to school, etc., Gepetto keeps searching for him in the cold nights, even to the point he had gone to the sea, where the Terrible Shark ends up swallowing him (which to Pinocchio’s fortune, he ends up meeting his dad inside the Shark’s tummy, escaping successfully thanks to Pinocchio’s bravery and Tunny’s help). 

        With Monica, even despite hating the idea of David being part of the family, and even despite Henry and Martin hating on David constantly, she always stood by his side, defending him till the very end, even when dropping him in the outskirts of the lab he was meant to be destroyed at, she still insisted David not to go at the gates so that he could remain alive (she even granted him the wish of bringing Teddy to this “trip”). Both Gepetto and Monica love their “kids” and can’t wish them no harm, and they only want them to be safe and protected, which become a task they can’t afford: one because he’s disobedient and a rascal–always finding trouble of some sort–the other one has no choice (since David gets captured against his own will by the “Flesh Fair”). In both stories, both characters have similarities plot-wise as discussed earlier. In AI, David gets captured by the Flesh Fair and is to become mere entertainment for an audience who despises mechas. As he is caged, other mechas try to calm David down, singing lullabies to him or even holding his hand, thus showing compassion and camaraderie within a hostile environment. Also, due to David’s characteristics that make him more human than mecha (by shouting: “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!”), the audience, feeling sorry for the poor kid, end up retaliating against Johnson. In Pinocchio, Chapter 10 and 11 encompass this very moment that occurs in AI (which is very much inspired by the original tale of Carlo Collodi), since Pinocchio enters a Marionette theatre and becomes somewhat a distraction to the play, which causes hostility from the audience and from Fire Eater, who decides to punish Pinocchio by using him as wood for his fire. In this scene, Pinocchio screams repeatedly: “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!”, and he is spared by the Fire Eater due to his marionette fellows crying with Pinocchio, and due to the Fire Eater feeling sorry for the poor boy (who keeps making him sneeze out of pity). Here we can see how both characters are very similar, since they both gain compassion from the people they meet while being in danger, since they are simply viewed as boys/victims who end up on the wrong side of humanity, especially at the wrong time and place (despite their physiological differences: Pinocchio being a marionette, David being a mecha through a scanner). 

        Another similarity between both characters’ fate is when they meet some challengers on their way to achieve what they want (David wants to become a boy and be loved by his mother, Pinocchio–who eventually wants to become a boy–first wants to become rich and skip school). In AI, Martin serves as one of the main antagonists of the story, since his objective is to bring trouble to David, and he achieves this by deceiving David to cut Monica’s hair, since only by accomplishing such a task, he will become a boy and be loved by Monica. This only causes trouble to David, who is seen as a threat by Henry. Following this altercation, David is being mocked by Martin’s friends, who keep showing hostility towards him because of his nature, and challenge him to feel pain, which makes David hide behind Martin, causing both to fall into the pool as a frightened David holds Martin so strongly to the point of almost drowning him, which unintentionally makes Monica and Henry decide to kick David out. In my opinion, Martin becomes the visual representation of the Fox and the Cat from Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, since they serve as obstacles that will challenge our protagonists in their corresponding universes. In AI, Martin forces David to look for the Blue Fairy, whereas in Pinocchio, the Fox and the Cat serve as a moral tale for children about not being so foolish and naive, while sticking to good morals and principles (ex: to be a good boy, go to school, treat everyone with respect, don’t trust strangers, etc.). As explained earlier, Martin fools the naive mecha–who believes in fairy tales–to cut his mom’s hair in order to gain her love, and this only brings doom to his life. In Pinocchio, both Fox and Cat trick Pinocchio that he will be richer if he leaves the coins inside a digged hole in the Field of Wonders (only to be chased and tortured by them while being “disguised” as assassins, and then robbed in the latest chapters, where a parrot mocks Pinocchio’s foolishness for trusting them). 

        Including this latest scenario, we can see that both stories are intertwined while giving the same metaphor and morals in their corresponding universes. My only interpretation of the Blue Fairy in AI, is that Monica is the Blue Fairy for David, even in the afterlife (even despite the aliens helping David achieve his dream even if it’s for a short period of time). I mention this because it is her who unintentionally makes David become a real boy (by making him her son, by giving him a sense of purpose with Pinocchio’s tale and by making him feel emotions). She loves him in a very maternal way, even protecting him from destruction, even if she could’ve just delivered him inside and end his conscious memory. Instead, she just gives him the cruel reality of his own nature and decides to abandon him due to the “naive” mistakes he’s made in the household. The same can be applied to Pinocchio’s case, where the Blue Fairy gives Pinocchio harsh lessons when he keeps being disobedient, even to the point of neglectfulness for his own good, until he finally becomes a real boy by saving his father and by having a good loving heart in the end of the story.