Walt Disney's animated film Pinocchio won two Academy Awards.

Carlo Collodi, the author of Pinocchio, was born on 24 November 1826 in Italy. His parents were servants at the house of rich Florentines. They did not want such a life for their son so they sent him to a seminary, however, he did not wish to be a priest. Having completed his studies, Collodi went on to work in a bookshop, then as a journalist, theatre critic, writer, & magazine publisher. Collodi began publishing Pinocchio in a children's magazine in 1881. At first, the tale was short with a tragic ending. The nameless Cat & Fox, disguised as bandits, robbed Pinocchio & then hanged him.

The young readers demanded a sequel with a happy ending. Collodi himself became famous, & in Italy Pinocchio was republished over 500 times!

It may seem surprising, but Collodi gravitated towards his fame as a children's writer & did not like his character. He wrote adult novels, plays, dreamed of becoming an Italian Dickens or Shakespeare.

Carlo Collodi died in 1890. His most famous work was translated into more than one hundred languages. Walt Disney himself produced a full-length animated Pinocchio movie in 1940. In 1956 in Italy, a monument to a mischievous 'son' of Carlo was erected with the inscription, "To the immortal Pinocchio, from the grateful readers, aged from four to seventy years". Carlo Collodi was buried at the Cimitero delle Porte Sante in Florence.

The original text of the tale was affected by Collodi's seminary studies. The failing priest overflowed the tale with morality in the spirit of the 19th century. An echo of this can be seen in the episodes with The Blue-haired Fairy who forced the mischievous Pinocchio to brush his teeth & then guides Pinocchio to his goal. The wooden doll with a long nose dreamt of becoming a living person, his nose grew longer as he lied. After escaping from the clutches of the Cat & Fox, Pinocchio became a donkey, then was in the belly of a giant fish. The adventures lasted many months until the mischievous wooden puppet became a well-mannered boy. A human being.

In the original story, Pinocchio killed Jiminy Cricket, got his feet burnt off, & was hanged & left for dead

Cat & Fox Hanged Pinocchio at the End of the 15th Chapter

Polly Penrose studied Graphic Design at Camberwell College of Arts in London. She went on to work in Fashion Styling & after that worked for the photographer Tim Walker. She has always taken photographs, but started to take the practice seriously when she entered & won a competition held by the London Photographic Association in 2008. She held her first solo show, ‘A Body of Work’, at the Downstairs at Mother Gallery, London, in May 2014, & was part of a group show, Dear Sylvia, at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney, March 2015, & her second solo show “10 Seconds” at The Hoxton Gallery, London, May 2016. She was short listed for the D&AD, Next photographer award in 2015. Her work has featured on Dazed Digital, The British Journal of Photography, The Huffington Post, Hunger TV, Feature Shoot, The Guardian, Stern & Another.

Penrose has been taking spontaneous self-portraits on a ten-second timer for over a decade. She explores identity & the opposed notions of vulnerability & empowerment, comedy & tragedy.

Her pictures focus less on sexuality & female allure, but retain the awkward, often beguiling force of the body as an object, pushed into a space, forced into a position whilst feigning a sense of normality & control.

Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, author, film critic & actor. Quentin Tarantino has the Cannes Palme d'Or, two Oscars, & several Oscar nominations. He is on the jury of the most prestigious film festivals of the world, Cannes & Venice. The adjective tarantinoesque is in the Oxford dictionary.

According to Tarantino, he wouldn't be offended at all if one appropriated a sizable portion of his fame. The aesthetic that Tarantino created reflects the spirit of the 90s, powerfully influenced global filmmaking in the early 2000s. Tarantino manages to sit in two chairs. His films are strange & authorial, at the same time, they are very popular & draw full houses. His style can be called art-mainstream.

Tarantino is a cinéphage — a movie eater. He's constantly citing films of his favorite directors. Quick camera pulls & swoops, slow zooming in, shooting from below, shooting from above are among the director's favorite camerawork techniques. 

Tarantino has favorite actors that he constantly shoots, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Steve Buscemi, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman. He gave a second life to John Travolta's acting career. Tarantino is an actor. In his youth, Tarantino dreamed of associating his professional career with being an actor in his movies. He appeared mainly in small roles such as Chester Rush in his 1995's Four Rooms. Tarantino chose directing as a career path when he created Reservoir Dogs in 1992 & Pulp Fiction in 1994, the latter made him famous.

Tarantino's films are characterized by a non-linear structure, a division into chapters, ambiguous monologues & dialogues. Tarantino uses a lot of prop blood. The director sees violence as a stylistic device, in life he does not accept violence.

Tarantino is a typical representative of postmodernism. In his movies, he is often quoting other directors' films, uses irony, he depicts the world as chaotic, the structure is complex. Tarantino advertises non-existent brands like Big Kahuna burgers, Red Apple cigarettes. His films are characterized by nonlinear storylines, dark humor, stylized violence, extended dialogue, ensemble casts, references to popular culture, alternate history & neo-noir.

The Tarantino phenomenon is worthy of a dissertation. He is equally adept at writing scripts & directing the camera, is not afraid of humor & taboos, is never boring. How does he do this?

As is usually the case, true events over time have been repeatedly reinterpreted & embellished. It is believed that in the 16th-17th centuries when the legend was written down, it was already perceived as a parable of Satanic inspiration. In this version of the story, a devil in the guise of the Pied Piper led children away from the town, but, according to the Grimm brothers, who recorded this version of the legend, did not manage to kill them. On their way through the mountains, the children founded a town in Transylvania, where they later lived.

Ergotism is defined as poisoning by ergot, a fungus that parasites on rye ears & contains an alkaloid similar to LSD. Indeed, ergotism was widespread in the Middle Ages, especially among the urban & rural poor, who ate rye bread and were forced, especially in famine years, to grind into flour the grain together with the parasite that grew on it. Consumption of ergot causes depression, hallucinations & fear, among other things.

This was the basis for the theory that the "revenge of the Pied Piper" was in fact the result of mass psychosis when one person draws others with him and the crowd which has lost its sanity and sense of self-preservation is quite capable of falling into a dangerous or disastrous situation.

It is assumed that the children were lured away by colorfully dressed gypsies who managed to lead them away from the city with songs and dances. However, this theory does not have many supporters.

Another rather exotic theory is that the Pied Piper was a UFO astronaut, who for some unknown reason became interested in the children of Hamelin. The theory is purely speculative and has no confirmation.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin is the titular character of a legend from the town of Hamelin, Germany. The legend dates back to the Middle Ages, describing a piper, dressed in multicolored (pied) clothing, who was a rat-catcher hired by the town to lure rats away with his magic pipe.

Not Every Creepy Theory on the Pied Piper of Hamelin

Nick DenBoer is a Canadian film and music video director from Toronto, Ontario.

DenBoer was born in Clinton, Ontario on 25 December 1979. He moved to Toronto, Ontario in 1998 and studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design for 2 years before dropping out. He then started a construction company in Toronto while working in video and animation business on the side. In 2009, production work became the focus and he started Generic Versatility Inc., a video production company.

DenBoer has directed and produced three music videos for Canadian electronic music artist deadmau5, including Monophobia in 2018, Drama Free feat. Lights and Pomegranate, a collaboration between deadmau5 & The Neptunes, both in 2020. Nick directed and produced the critically acclaimed short film The Chickening, a visual effects remix of Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining", where he and co-director Davy Force used visual effects to alter the film's characters and scenery to create a new story. The Chickening was featured in many film festivals most notably the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015 and Sundance Film Festival in 2016. Nick is also credited as a visual effects artist of the feature film Kuso by Flying Lotus and on the music video Fire is Coming By Flying Lotus featuring David Lynch.

In 2020, DenBoer directed and executive produced an ad campaign called Virtual Influencer Colonel Sanders for Kentucky Fried Chicken through the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, which won a Webby Award for best use of social media. The campaign featured a lifelike, computer-generated incarnation of Colonel Sanders and portrayed him as a virtual influencer on social media in a series of images. He has directed and produced many other advertising projects for the companies and brands such as KFC, Old Spice, DC Shoes, BBC, Adult Swim and Red Bull. among others. Prior to his advertising work and music video directing debut, Nick worked as a bit creator on Conan O'Brien, and worked for Team Coco from 2012 to 2015, producing political satire and pop culture clips for the show. Nick is responsible for creating the series Alex Trebek has Gone Insane which was a recurring bit on Conan's monologue where he took clips from the show Jeopardy! and cut up Alex Trebek's words and rearranged them through editing to make Alex say absurd sentences. Nick also created the recurring Conan monologue series If they Melded where he took celebrities' faces and swapped them onto other celebrities.

DenBoer's done work for Conan O'Brien including a series of supercuts, but he's probably best known for a parody of The Shining that he and a buddy produced called The Chickening.

Nick Denboer: Just Another Day at the Office

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