Based on the story Pinocchio: Tale of a Puppet by Carlo Collodi, it was made in response to the huge success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
96-97 (possibly with Susan Royal in 1982, interviewer is "Premiere"). Pinocchio is the second animated Disney movie, made by Walt Disney Productions and first released to movie theaters by RKO Radio Pictures on February 7, 1940. Source: Steven Spielberg's Steven Spielberg: Interviews, University of Mississippi Press / Jackson, 2000, pp.
And I didn't want Close Encounters to end just in a dream. They didn't want to be told the film was a fantasy, and this song seemed to belie some of the authenticity and to bespeak fantasy and fairy tale. I then analyzed the preview cards very carefully, interviewed the people who left the theater, and made a determination that the audience wanted to be transported into another world along with Richard Dreyfuss as he walked aboard the mothership. And the only way I could tell was to have two different previews, on two different nights: one night with the song, one night without it. On Close Encounters, I had a very important decision to make: whether or not to use the Walt Disney song, "When You Wish Upon a Star" at the end of the movie, with Jiminy Cricket's actual voice performing it. So, in a situation that is alien - completely remote from our experience - seeing these creatures and their machines but hearing something very familiar, When You Wish Upon A Star, you feel safe and at home." He wanted to attach that childhood innocence to a feeling of nostalgia that would effect an audience. I think for him, it had something to do with the innocence of childhood and Walt Disney's music, especially Pinocchio, that we all loved as children. "In this spirit, the idea to incorporate When You Wish Upon A Star was Spielberg's. In an 1998 interview with Ian Lace, John Williams explained Apparently Spielberg, with this seemingly trivial and chaotic scene, is already preparing the audience's subconsciousness in preparation for the theme. Richard Dreyfuss's character Roy Neary has a relatively lengthy conversation with his oldest son, Brad, about going to see Pinocchio. My current guess is that it's (early) Spielberg's love for infusing his films with a certain amount of 'fairy-taleness', and naivete (in the purely positive sense), and the obvious reference to space as a benevolent force, but I'm sure Williams could have achieved those things with his own creative force alone. Something that has always struck me when watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind, was this apparent reference in John Williams' main theme (starting at 4:28) to Leigh Harline and Ned Washington's When You Wish upon a Star as used in Walt Disney's Pinocchio.ĭoes anyone know if this is indeed a homage, and, if so, why this particular motif was used?