Blue Fairy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 and becomes a mother figure to him.
She is not actually referred to as the "Blue Fairy" in the original story, but either as the "Fairy" (or "my Fairy" as Pinocchio comes to speak of her) or the "Lovely Maiden with Azure Hair." Also, in the story, she does not bring him to life. Rather, Pinocchio comes to life on his own; indeed the piece of wood he is carved from is already alive and can even speak. The Fairy comes into the story later (Chapter 15, to be precise), first politely turning him away from her house, then intervening to save Pinocchio from death by hanging (Chapter 16).
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 film, she appoints Jiminy Cricket as his official conscience. Disney's twist on Collodi's classic plot positions Jiminy Cricket to "steal the show" through numerous lyric and comic interludes. In the film, the Fairy appears as a more divine, less vulnerable figure than in the book.
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,[citation needed] 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.[citation needed] The Blue Fairy was not a part of the first publication of the story, which did not end happily, but was added later as the story was expanded.
[edit] "A.I.:Artificial Intelligence" (2001)
In Steven Spielberg's 2001 movie A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, David (Haley Joel Osment), a robotic android with very high levels of artificial intelligence, is manufactured and sent to a family whose son is cryogenically preserved. He is a prototype who is capable of feeling unconditional love for his mother after being activated through a word code. He quickly replaces the son. But the son heals and retakes his place in the family, warning David that as a mecha he will never be truly loved. Later, when David accidentally almost drowns 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 is eventually trapped for thousands of years in an amphibicopter staring at the Coney Island statue of the Blue Fairy. Some robots later recover him and, wishing to know what the world was like in his time, create an artificial world from his memories and wishes, complete with a Blue Fairy who fabricates the original female owner (who David perceived as his mother), who in turn treats him as a real boy.
