In the English-speaking world at least, no filmmaker so far approaches the achievement of Walt Disney, who in 1940 released the animated version of Pinocchio that has continued for more than 60 years to condition our collective knowledge of and response to the puppet. Critics are in agreement about the technical splendors of the film, but it did not enjoy a strongly positive reception when it was first released, and there are still today very differing readings of it. The cover of the sixtieth anniversary edition of the video tells us that it is Disney's "immortal masterpiece" and quotes TV Guide's assessment of it as "arguably the greatest animated feature of all time!" Disney's 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had already achieved a huge advancement in animation; Russian director Sergei Eisenstein called it the greatest film ever made, for it showed that cartoons could represent any visuals a director might conceive of, thus creating a vast new realm of cinematic creativity and freedom.ng with Fantasia, built on the achievements of Snow White and the collaboration of hundreds of artists and technicians brought together in a kind of "collective creative epiphany," to use Chicago film critic Roger Ebert's words. Ebert provides good information about the specific technical innovations of Disney's film: for one, the breaking of the frame, by means of which it is implied that there is space outside the screen, a technique of "regular" live-action films not used in animation until Disney's people made it possible. Thus in the exciting sequence in which Pinocchio and Geppetto are expelled by the whale Monstro's sneeze, then drawn back in, and then again expelled, there is a palpable sense of the presence of the whale offscreen to the right.