Ok, this one sounds a little too crazy, I admit, but I think it’s feasible for Pinocchio to grow up to be Judge Claude Frollo. Just bear with me. It’s severely unlikely that Disney intended this even within the cartoon universe, but I have some parallels so hear me out.
First of all, we all know the scene when Pinocchio’s nose grew when he told a lie. Pretty clear cause and effect relationship going on. This theme continues throughout the movie, where immoral actions have almost immediate and obvious consequences. Pinocchio is taught from a young age that he must always do the right thing or else. And where does he get his ideas of right and wrong? His conscience? Nope! Jiminy Cricket has a horrifically short lifespan. No, he learns it from religion, and that sort of guilt mongering is exactly the kind of thing 19th century Catholicism is famous for, which happened to also be the prevailing religion in Italy.
Continuing on that line of thinking, what do you think will happen when Pinocchio hits puberty? The very first time he gets an erection, he is going to remember the time his nose grew. He is going to think he did or thought something immoral. Any thought that causes an erection is going to immediately set off alarm bells in his brain that he is “bad” and he is being punished. And nobody is going to tell him otherwise, because Jiminy is dead and Gepetto has severe dementia (and shouldn’t be raising a kid in the first place). And on top of that, once again, Catholic. All he knows is “resist temptation”. So, he has all this sexual tension pushed to the back of his mind and he carries the guilt from that his whole life.
But wait, there’s more! Pinocchio has it drilled into his head (not literally) from the day he was brought to life that being a “real boy” is good and desirable, and having some semblance to being a human just isn’t going to cut it. He is immediately given the task to reject his imperfect body to achieve human form. Then afterwards, he has traumatic experiences with people of different species and races. Honest John and his cat sidekick (also known as Foulfellow and Gideon) deceive him twice, both with potentially disastrous outcomes, and Stromboli is a gypsy, a real stereotype of a greedy, child kidnapping, roaming gypsy. It’s really no surprise that Pinocchio/Frollo would have a bias. The only exceptions to this rule would be the Blue Fairy and Jiminy. Like I said before, Jiminy would be dead fairly quickly so his influence would be easy to shrug off, and he probably perceived the Blue Fairy as an angel, thus strengthening his religious conviction.
The timeline is just about perfect for Pinocchio to have grown up with a strong Catholic background and hopped over to France to be a priest at the Notre Dame Cathedral. Name changes were pretty easy and common in that time period, especially if one wanted to make a drastic career move to something prestigious instead of following in their parents’ footsteps.
Here’s just one more similarity I noticed: Pinocchio is a little bit of a pyro. When he sees a candle, the first thing he does is stick his finger in it and exclaim, “Pretty!” When he’s in Monstro’s stomach, his idea is to create a lot of smoke to make him sneeze. It was lucky that Monstro did actually sneeze, because most things don’t work out too well if you’re in an unfamiliar situation and your first response is to light all your available resources on fire. Compare that to Frollo’s propensity to burn things. Whale ate us? Light it on fire! Gypsies aren’t talking? More fire! Getting shit done!
Overanalysis of Disney Movies 