Faerie Tale Theatre Reviews: Hansel and Gretel

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“Nibble, nibble, little mouse, who’s that nibbling at my house?”
– The Witch, before showing her claws

Hey, the chimney smoke is in the shape of the Witch, I never noticed that until now…

Oh yes, the review.

It’s easy to forget that fairytales weren’t written exclusively for children all those centuries ago. They were recorded with the intention of preserving cultural heritage passed down orally that was on the brink of being lost. While the Brothers Grimm would later re-edit their findings for a younger, more conservative audience, the German folklore they published had no shortage of, ahem, grimness in their pages. This was due in large part to how awful living conditions were in the Middle Ages. It was an era of deadly plagues, drastic income inequality, wisdom and progress continuously curtailed by superstition and theocracy, human rights perpetually being violated, and the constant threat of war and death hanging over people’s heads.

Ah, sure glad we don’t have to deal with all that in these enlightened times.

When it comes to the origins of today’s tale, scholars tend to point towards a massive famine that overtook Europe in the early fourteenth century. Families would turn elder and younger members out of their homes in order to hoard whatever food was left for themselves; there’s even been reports of people resorting to cannibalism. Combine all that with folks’ fear of witches and the unknown lurking in the woods, and you’ve got the ingredients for a deliciously dark story. Even Jacob and Wilhelm, with their penchant for revisionism, couldn’t curb Hansel and Gretel’s eerie undertones. The only major edit they made later on was changing the mother who threw her children to the proverbial wolves into a wicked stepmother; trust me, I’ll have more to say about that when we get to Snow White.

Now there’s a lot one could unpack with Hansel and Gretel and the deeper significance of the motifs it shares with other fairy tales: the forest serving as both sanctuary and no man’s land, the two faces of the mother and witch belonging to the same patriarchal grotesque, the sanctity of the home and how choosing familial loyalty over independence leads to a just reward, but let’s instead focus on the children themselves. Hansel and Gretel’s journey is symbolic of a child’s rocky passage to adulthood, and how they must rely on their wits to survive a cruel world beyond their doorstep. Similar stories of children undergoing a transformative odyssey through the wilderness into maturity can be found in every culture around the world, from Southern India (Kadar and Cannibals) to South Africa (The Story of the Bird that Made Milk). Certain Russian folktales involve a girl cast out into the woods by her cruel stepmother and traveling to a chicken-legged house belonging to the cannibalistic witch Baba Yaga. She completes the impossible tasks the witch sets for her by being kind to the animals, makes a daring escape using the gifts she’s earned, and returns home, ending her stepmother’s reign of terror. Sound familiar? Even Italian author Giambatta Basile, originator of Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty, created his own take on the fable. Nennillo e Nennella starts off with the usual parental abandonment in the woodlands, but goes off the rails into royalty, piracy and some Jonah and the Whale-type shenanigans (seriously, read this one, it’s a hoot). And it doesn’t stop at the written word, either. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, the seventh entry in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, explicitly weaves the story of Hansel and Gretel into its themes as part of Craven’s efforts to return to the series back to its terrifying, more serious fantasy origins. The iconic thriller Night of the Hunter also has shades of Hansel and Gretel: two children are forced out of their home by their stepparent and find shelter in the Depression-blighted countryside with an old crone; the twist is the crone becomes their selfless protector.

The point I’m trying to make is, when done right, this fairy tale can be a rich, emotional experience, a dark but thrilling and ultimately triumphant roller coaster ride that captures a child’s view of the world in all its terror and wonder.

And Faerie Tale Theatre…it doesn’t do it right. It hardly comes close, for a number of reasons. But if you like to plod through long depressing morality plays that consistently thrash you over the head with its mean-spiritedness and bleak atmosphere, then this is the outing for you.

Faerie Tale Theatre Reviews: Sleeping Beauty

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Bernadette Peters, beverly d'angelo, brothers grimm, Carol Kane, charles perrault, Christopher Reeve, fire breathing, forest of thorns, giambattista basile, giant, kay nielsen, nutcracker ballet, prince charming, princess, rene auberjonois, russia, russian art, sleep, sleeping, sleeping beauty, sleeping beauty ballet, sleeping beauty waltz, squire, Tchaikovsky, the sleeping beauty, thorns, woodcutter, woodsman

“What is that?” “What does it look like?” “An enchanted castle […] is there a princess inside?” “Of course! You can hardly have an enchanted castle without a princess inside, now can you?”
– The “Squire” and the Woodsman on the topic of today’s story

I feel the need to post a Content Warning before we begin: The opening paragraphs include mentions of rape, traumatic childbirth, and sexual harassment. If these things are a trigger or are otherwise upsetting, please skip to “Read More” (or the paragraph after the Jack Sparrow gif) where I look at today’s episode proper.

There’s a a folklorist I follow named Austin Hackney; he’s a talented and disciplined author whose passion for fabulism is evident in his Folklore Thursday videos. His introduction on the story of The Robber Bridegroom, however, gave me pause:

It’s a fine example of just how dark and scary fairy tales can be before…Disney and the like dissolved them in the saccharine solutions of their retellings.

It’s not easy to convey in text but the distaste for Disney is evident in his voice. On the one hand, I get it, gigantic corporate overlord devouring IPs while demanding worship and all that. On the other hand, it’s unfair to cover all of Disney’s fairytales under such a massive blanket statement. Most fairy stories you can recount in five minutes tops; if you’re not going to alter them when adapting to a visual medium, you’re doing the audience and the creative team involved an extreme disservice. The artists would have very little room to stretch their creativity, and audiences, well, to say their tastes and suspensions of disbelief have changed since the fifteenth century would be a gross understatement – and that’s where Sleeping Beauty comes in.

I’ve already gone on record saying how Disney’s retelling is one of the stronger entries in the canon, both visually and in the story department. The wise decision of putting the Fairies front and center transforms the simple plot into a tale of revenge, political intrigue, and espionage with a feminist twist.

Also there’s a dragon battle. Saccharine retelling, my Aunt Fanny.

The story it’s based on, however, isn’t nearly as riveting. Much of it feels like a series of “this happened then that happened”, not helped by the titular character being there to only snooze through it. Surprisingly, the element of a cursed beauty trapped in eternal slumber and in need of rescue has appeared in many stories before its current incarnation, from Egypt’s “The Doomed Prince”, to Siegfried and Brunhilde in the Volsunga saga, to the medieval courtly romance Perceforest. It’s from there that Italian author Giambatta Basile was inspired to write his version of Sleeping Beauty, otherwise known as “Sun, Moon, and Talia”. Unfortunately, in adapting Perceforst, he kept in one unsavory detail that snowballs into an avalanche of…

Well, a cursory search on Youtube will give you a plethora of clickbaity titles such as “THE DARK HORRIFYING ORIGINS OF DISNEY’S SLEEPING BEAUTY” and “THE REAL EFFED-UP STORY OF SLEEPING BEAUTY”. Loathe as I am to say it, they’re not wrong.

In Basile’s story, Talia is a wealthy lord’s daughter who is prophesized to be doomed by a flax splinter. Her father decrees that all flax, which is used for spinning, is banished from his castle. One day teenage Talia finds an old woman spinning under a tree. A flax splinter gets caught in her finger when she has a go at it and she collapses, seemingly dead. Her father can’t bear to put her in the ground, so he shuts her in an opulent tower bedroom and abandons the estate altogether. The place gets so overgrown that it becomes part of the forest. A king goes hunting and discovers the tower when his hawk flies in through the window. He makes his way in, finds Talia, and is so taken by her beauty that he “grew hot with lust” and…

He rapes her. In no uncertain terms.

While she’s unconscious.

And still underage.

Those were my reactions too while researching this story.

And it gets worse. King Epstein leaves Talia after he reaches his happy ending and completely forgets about her. Nine months later she goes into labor – while still unconscious – and wakes up, no doubt confused and horrified, when one of her babies sucks the flax from her finger. Her, for lack of a better word RAPIST, then suddenly remembers Talia and returns to the tower for another go only to discover he’s a father now. Talia is okay with the situation when he explains what he did to her, and he visits her frequently for more lovemaking…even though he’s married to someone else.

And it keeps. Getting. Worse.

The queen learns about Talia after the king shouts her name in his sleep one too many times. Rather than call out her philandering rapist husband, she lures Talia to the palace, accuses her of being a whore and orders her and her children to be executed. Talia buys herself some time by doing a slow striptease for the queen, crying and screaming as she’s forced to hand over her clothes. The king returns just as she’s down to nothing and has his first wife killed instead. And the moral of the story is, I kid you not, “Those whom fortune favors find good luck as they sleep”.

So, yeah, regarding adaptations of Sleeping Beauty, you can only go up from there. Most of them tend to be pretty rote retellings of the later Charles Perrault or Brothers Grimm versions – which, to their credit, completely omit the rape, wedlock, infidelity, just about everything that makes this tale traumatic. I am perfectly fine with dragon-slaying and True Love’s Kiss saving the day over…THAT. They also end the story with the prince and princess getting their standard happily ever right after the kiss with no first wives or cannibalistic stepmothers getting in the way*, which is a plus in my book.

Like a number of fairytales, Sleeping Beauty has come under fire from feminists as of late; while their arguments against Snow White and The Little Mermaid seem shallow at best, I understand where they’re coming from in this instance. The thing is, when you get right down to it, the Sleeping Beauty is more of a macguffin than a character. The people in her life want to claim or destroy her, and she often has little to no say in the matter. Whomever chooses to adapt her story has to make the characters surrounding her more interesting if we want to remain invested. Few versions exist where the Sleeping Beauty has a better-defined character or an active role in the plot because of what has to happen to her. Today’s episode of Faerie Tale Theater leans heavily on the former, but I admire their attempt at the latter mainly because of who they cast in the part.