Blue Fairy
|
|
Artificial_intelligence_bluefairy.jpg
The Blue Fairy is a fictional character in Carlo Collodi's classic novel Pinocchio. She repeatedly appears at critical moments in Pinocchio's wanderings to admonish the little wooden puppet to avoid bad or risky behavior. Although the naively willful and impulse-driven humanoid marionette initially resists her good advice, he somehow finds it within himself at last to follow her rightful instruction, albeit a bit reluctantly at first go. She in turn eventually rewards him for his well-acquired and genuine goodness by enabling his transformation into a real, flesh-and-blood human boy.
The wryly comical "First the Medicine and Then the Sugar/oh no no first the sugar and then I promise..." dispute that takes place between her and Pinocchio at one encounter on the little not-yet-human one's career path is familiar to every young child's mother to this day.
In the Disney cartoon, she appoints Jiminy Cricket as his official conscience. This twist on Collodi's classic plot, inserted by the Disney team, positions Jiminy Cricket to "steal the show" through numerous lyric and comic interludes.
It may be worthwhile to bear in mind that, although Carlo Collodi wrote Pinocchio at a time and within a culture wherein the routine beating of children was often carried out in the widespread Eurocultural belief that early and frequent exposure to such brutality would improve their prospects for eventual moral goodness, Collodi's Blue Fairy affords her wayward beneficiary every opportunity to do the "Right Thing" on his own with no particular coercion or threat applied on her part. She allows him to wander by his own free will back into his own world of error again and again, relying on his own memory of her goodness toward him even while suffering in the throes of his own self-induced difficulties. This "meta-parental" treatment on her part gives Pinocchio's final transformation and entrance into full humanity to be the genuine result of his /own/ correct decisions - and therefore his own to keep forever.
"A.I.:Artificial Intelligence" (2001)
In Steven Spielberg's 2001 movie A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, the mecha David (Haley Joel Osment), a robotic android with very high levels of artificial intelligence, is manufactured and sent to a family whose son is very ill. He quickly replaces the son and although he is a mecha and therefore not capable of feeling emotions, he develops a love for his "mother". But the son heals and retakes his place in the family, warning David that he'll never feel true love. When David almost kills the son, he is abandoned in the woods. He teams up with Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) and together they start a quest for the Blue Fairy (voiced by Meryl Streep), who David remembers from the fairy tale "Pinocchio" as a being who has the power to turn him into a real boy. He meets her in several hallucinations, but ends up trapped in a helicopter under water, gazing at the Coney Island statue of the Blue Fairy.