Hansel and Gretel, All Grown Up

A Review of Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters

"Brothers Grimm who--?  I don't understand what I'm looking at here."

I watched Hansel and Gretel with very little expectations--perhaps that's why it managed to surprise me.

At one point during the film, I glanced down at the play bar to see that it was more than halfway done.  During many a movie, this habit of mine happens much earlier and more frequently, often followed by an anxiety for the amount of time still left to lumber by.  But Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters was actually quite entertaining, if not the stuff of legends.

The film narrative carries on after the trauma of Hansel and Gretel in the candy house in the woods.  Rather than return to a remorseful father and a deceased wicked (step)mother, the two children come away with the lesson that the only ones they can trust in the world are each other.  They go on to make a career out of protecting other children by hunting and slaying witches in pre-industrial Germany.  And they're pretty darn successful at it, until they come up upon a particularly difficult quarry--a grand witch, who seems to be methodically kidnapping children for a sinister plot that goes beyond mere snacking.

In the anachronistic style made popular by movies like Van Helsing and Brothers Grimm, the siblings carry modernized weapons, wear suspiciously hip-looking clothes, speak in generic American English, and basically hold with all the values and norms of twenty-first century westerners.  The film's makers, rather than try take it seriously, threw themselves into the irony of it all and made it over-the-top bloody, fast-paced, and humorously ridiculous.  

"Try to look moody."

It worked well.  Like I said, I don't think I was bored for a moment.  And while I guessed at the plot mysteries pretty easily, I commend them for keeping it neat and tidy, without trying to philosophize or leaving loose ends.

In the end, despite all the showy explosions and corny one-liners, the emotional core of the German fairy tale is intact: the reality of evil, the dangers of the wood, the resourcefulness of children, and the lesson that things are not always what they seem.

A grand fairy tale adaptation this is not.  So don't watch Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters if you're a purist and tend to outrage.  But it is in good fun.  And that was, after all, a big part of what fairy tales were meant for.

(For a more traditional dip into the Grimm tales, Cate at Something to Read for the Train is going systematically through the complete tales of the Brothers Grimm and reviewing them here.  I'm excited.  So go check it out!)

Not the Book by Phillip Pullman

Just sayin'.

Is this the world's shortest fairy tale?  The Grimms' The Golden Key is reproduced here in full for your enjoyment, translated by D.L. Ashliman.

Once in the wintertime when the snow was very deep, a poor boy had to go out and fetch wood on a sled.  After he had gathered it together and loaded it, he did not want to go straight home, because he was so frozen, but instead to make a fire and warm himself a little first.  So he scraped the snow away, and while he was thus clearing the ground he found a small golden key.  Now he believed that where there was a key, there must also be a lock, so he dug in the ground and found a little iron chest.  "If only the key fits!" he thought.  "Certainly there are valuable things in the chest."  He looked, but there was no keyhole.  Finally he found one, but so small that it could scarcely be seen.  He tried the key, and fortunately it fitted.  Then he turned it once, and now we must wait until he has finished unlocking it and has opened the lid.  Then we shall find out what kind of wonderful things there were in the little chest.

This needs no other commentary than this: it was historically always placed as the last tale in the collection.

Mercy Killing

I have a two-year-old.  We were watching the Baby First television channel together this morning at my parents and, not for the first time, we saw Baby First Tales, a series in which "9 classic fairy tales are retold and reinterpreted just for little ones."

This morning, it was Hansel and Gretel.  Here's Rumpelstiltskin.

I don't have any feeling either way with the series's sanitizing fairy tales to make them "appropriate" for the youngest of "readers."  We've been doing that for centuries now, ever since fairy tales started to appear in print.  It's the decision of a discerning parent if he or she wants to expose little ones to the sometimes scary realities of fairy tales--because in truth, that's what fairy tales do.  Expose us to realities (good and bad, the depraved and the beautiful) that we aren't mature enough to understand, or may never really understand.

But these stories have so very little in common with the eerie and sublime fairy tales from which they take their names.  Why bother calling them retellings at all?  Why not make the final jump and change the name of the characters?  It's not like a candy-made house or a difficult to pronounce name, in and of themselves, are an intrinsic part of fairy tales.

And that's just it.  I'm not offended that my beloved fairy tales have been altered beyond recognition.  I just don't consider them fairy tales.

As for my son, I continue to read fairy tales to him, in children's books that loyally translate the Grimm's versions into easy-to-digest prose, with pictures.  Straight from my collection of Hans Christian Anderson.  And from my own memory.

Obata Takeshi
(Do click on the picture to enlarge it; it's extraordinary.--C)

It is important to me that he is told fairy tales.  Not a neat lesson wrapped up in a fairy tale package, but the real, true, uneasy experience.  I'm not going to shelter him in this sense, and I don't think I need to.

The uneasiness seems to come to older children or adults who have not been read Grimms, Perrault, or Anderson, when they first hear about them.  Or to adults who sit down to analyze their favorite childhood fairy tales for the first time.

Young children who are exposed to fairy tales for the sake of hearing fairy tales, on the other hand, handle them pretty well.  Witch cannibal in an oven?  Natural.  Queen forced to dance in hot iron shoes?  What else would you do with a sociopath stepmother?  Let her plead insanity and sentence outpatient services?

Chesteron, as usual, sums up my entire feeling on this in one phrase:  "Children are innocent and love justice.  Adults are wicked and prefer mercy."

Looking at a Fresh Old Fairy Tale

I've previously mentioned the five hundred fairy tales "discovered" in a fault that were collected in Germany around the same time the Grimm brothers were collecting and publishing theirs.  You can read the Guardian article here.

copyright Wataru Yanagida/Gety

The Guardian also published one of the tales, called "The Turnip Princess."  

This fairy tale is simple, functional, minimalist.  Distilled down to its primary ingredients, even to the point of leaving out elements of plot and character, it could be valuable for those wishing to examine the cogs and wheels of what makes a fairy tale.  Especially as we have never encountered them before and so are not bringing to them previously read scholarship or childhood expectations.

Here it is as presented in the Guardian (I don't know anything about the translation):

A YOUNG prince lost his way in the forest and came to a cave. He passed the night there, and when he awoke there stood next to him an old woman with a bear and a dog. The old witch seemed very beautiful and wished that the prince would stay with her and marry her. He could not endure her, yet could not leave that place.

One day, the bear was alone with him and spoke to the prince: "Pull the rusty nail from the wall, so that I shall be delivered, and place it beneath a turnip in the field, and in this way you shall have a beautiful wife." The prince seized the nail so strongly that the cave shook and the nail cracked loudly like a clap of thunder. Behind him a bear stood up from the ground like a man, bearded and with a crown on his head.

"Now I shall find a beautiful maiden," cried the prince and went forth nimbly. He came to a field of turnips and was about to place the nail beneath one of them when there appeared above him a monster, so that he dropped the nail, pricked his finger on a hedge and bled until he fell down senseless. When he awoke he saw that he was elsewhere and that he had long slumbered, for his smooth chin was now frizzy with a blond beard.

He arose and set off across field and forest and searched through every turnip field but nowhere found what he was looking for. Day passed and night, too, and one evening, he sat down on a ridge beneath a bush, a flowering blackthorn with red blossoms on one branch. He broke off the branch, and because there was before him, amongst the other things on the ground, a large, white turnip, he stuck the blackthorn branch into the turnip and fell asleep.

Click here to finish reading.

There are so many things in this story that are understood on the instinctual level.  This just-barely-grasped magic is something inherent to most fairy tales; just in the better developed ones, it is not so easy to notice.

What are your thoughts on "The Turnip Princess"?

New Old Tales

Briefly, I wanted to share this news (is it still new if it's from March?) about the discovery of 500 fairy tales collected by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth.  Apparently, they were locked away in a vault and only now removed for publication. 

Sounds like a fairy tale in itself.

I'm a tad bemused they are calling them "new," since they were collected in the 19th century, the same time the Grimm brothers were recording their fairy tales from a circle of friends who heard them from their servants and nurses.

I am pleased that these stories have been preserved and are now being made available to the public.  To my understanding, "traditional" fairy tales like these don't arise spontaneously anymore; except, perhaps, in rural or non-industrialized communities.  Any new fairy tales are penned by single authors.

King Golden Hair, one of the vaulted fairy tales (artist?)

Are traditional-type fairy tales no longer a naturally occurring phenomenon?  If so, this collection of Bavarian tales is treasure indeed.

What do you think?  Is there such thing as a new fairy tale?