Wooden Fictional Characters
Numerous artists, poets and writers through time have not only laid their ideas on paper (made from wood) but taken a tree or a forest or a simple log as their muse. With these creations have come characters. Characters made from wood, characters that have found their way into the home of everyday people; characters that hold so much life we forget that they are made of wood. Most famous for this is Pinocchio.
First appearing in Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio in 1883, Pinocchio is a wooden puppet made by a woodcarver named Geppetto. In 1940 Walt Disney produced an animated film based on the Collodi tale, Pinocchio; Tale of a Puppet. In the Disney tale Pinocchio’s creator Geppetto wishes upon a star that his creation will someday become a real boy. Answering Geppetto’s wish is a blue fairy that brings Pinocchio to life. Pinocchio is however still made of wood and must prove himself “brave, truthful and unselfish” before he can become a real boy.
Pinocchio has made appearances in a vast array of television shows, comics and movies including Shrek, Shrek 2, Shrek The Third, Cartoon Network’s The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, Robot Chicken and Family Guy. Pinocchio is also used as a character in the Vertigo comic series, Fables by Bill Willingham. Fables sees Pinocchio star as a real boy, with his wish having been granted by The Blue Fairy, Pinocchio now resents The Blue Fairy and the fact she turned him into a permanent real-boy, although he is over three hundred years old he has not aged a day since the wish was granted. The tale of Pinocchio is a popular one and one that comes in many different forms. It may come as surprise but even one of Japan’s most loved anime characters, Astroboy, a young robot who is capable of feeling human emotions, is loosely based around the Pinocchio story.
Another chip off the old block in the realm of puppets is Sid the wooden ventriloquist dummy who became part of the cult-phenomenon known as Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the season one episode ‘The Puppet Show’. When a girl named Emily shows up at Sunnydale High-School, Buffy is all too quick to leap on the first likely suspect. That suspect happens to be Sid, the wooden accessory of. Sid is indeed alive, but he is not the killer.
Similar to Pinocchio and Sid in the sense that he too is an intimate object endowed with human like abilities is Mokujin. Literally translated Mokujin’s name means ‘Person of Wood’, he is a martial-arts training dummy made from a 2,000 year old oak tree that is brought to life by the presence of evil in order to assist martial artists fighting against evil. Mokujin cannot speak but communicates through a series of wooden knocks. Mokujin’s first appearance was in the 1998 Playstation, fighting game Tekken 3. With no fighting style of his own, Mokujin mimics the styles of the other fighters in the game. Mokujin also appeared in Tekken 5, Tekken 6 and Tekken Tag Tournament. Through ending movies from the Tekken series, it becomes known to the player that Mokujin is not one of a kind and has a family consisting of a wife and children, all of whom look much the same as Mokujin himself with the addition of breasts on his wife.
In 1987 there was a revolution in the video-game style known as platformers . Capcom, introduced the world to their new character and game, Mega Man. Mega-Man 2 saw the introduction of a new Robot Master called Wood Man. Wood Man was created with the wood of Hinoki Cypress and is able to produce a razor-sharp leaf shield that can deflect Mega Man’s blaster-rays, this shield can also be thrown as a projectile weapon. However due to the fact he is made of wood, Wood Man is vulnerable to high temperatures.
At the other end of the wooden-character scale there are the Ents. The Ents are made of wood in its most natural form - they are giant trees with the attributes of man; created by Eru Ilúvatar at the request of Yavanna (giver of plants and animals, spouse of Aule). Yavanna was aware that the arrival of her husband’s offspring, the Dwarves, in middle Earth would mean great damage to the ancient forests thus she had Eru create the Ents to watch over and shepherd the trees. The Ents are guardians of the Middle Earth forests in J.R.R Tolkein’s Lord of the Ring saga first published in 1954 and 1955.
These are just a few of the pieces of wood that have had their roots planted, not in soil, but in the pages of books or in celluloid on film or other forms of video entertainment. It is really no wonder trees are seen as a symbol of life; merely just by being, characters such as the ones aforementioned and more will live on in our memories for a long time yet.