Are the Chinese characters really pictorial?
No. Chinese writing certainly has an early origin in logograms, but so does the Latin alphabet we use – the "A" is actually an ox head, tilted 90 degrees, and borrowed from the first Sumerian cuneiform script.

Since classical times, only a few percent of the Chinese language retains such logograms, while the vast majority (+90%) of characters are phonetic compounds, essentially a rather large and fuzzy alphabet with functional elements as hinting.

几 might be a table, but 叽, 饥 and 肌 haven't got much to do with a table, but are used phonetically.