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!)

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."

Grace and Whimsy

Artist Sheilah Beckett

I first encountered this artist in a Little Golden Book, The Twelve Days of Christmas, which I saw in the checkout line at the grocery store and insisted that my mother buy me.  I was enchanted by the details and elegance of the clothing, the ebbing hair, and the delicate hands and features.

When I googled her, I was delighted (to say the least) to see her fairy tale illustrations.

Each story has a slightly different style, which, I think, shows her flexibility as an artist.

Twelve Dancing Princesses

from Sleeping Beauty

Snow White and Rose Red

Titania and Oberon

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Hansel and Gretel

Oh, wondrous internet, opening new worlds to me!  (And yet more and more ways for me to spend money I don't have.)

For more of my favorite childhood fairy tale artists, click the link.

And don't forget to tell your friends about our fairy tale writing contest.  I hope that even if you aren't a contest-type person that you will come back for the writing prompt exercises.