Hansel and Gretel Movies

Film School Rejects reviews films and occasionally offers Foreign Objects (foreign films). Last week, Rob Hunter reviewed a Korean version of Hansel and Gretel which is due to be released on DVD in the United States in November.

Eun-soo has a car accident while passing through a forest late at night and awakens to find a young girl in a red cloak offering him assistance. She leads him deep into the woods to her house where he meets her parents and two siblings. The family appears happy, especially the children, even if the parents do seem a bit apprehensive and nervous. The house is garishly decorated in holiday themes and kiddie designs, dinner is a plateful of cupcakes and cookies, and no one seems all that interested in helping Eun-soo find his way out of the forest and back home. Every attempt to leave leads him right back to the house and to the children. Soon the parents have gone missing, a mysterious new couple has arrived, and Eun-soo discovers the dangerous and tragic secret behind it all.

It’s not entirely accurate to call Hansel & Gretel a straight horror film as it’s interested in far more than simple scares. There’s a general sense of creepiness and dread and a handful of jump scares throughout, but the movie’s atmosphere extends well beyond the horrific. Like any fairy tale worth it’s weight in morality and metaphor the movie explores real world cruelty in a fantastic setting for maximum effect. The original Brothers Grimm story serves as a starting point, but the film is more interested in where brutality and lost innocence can lead if left unchecked.

You can also read more about Hansel and Gretel at IMDB, of course. There's another lengthy review from a viewer there who also argues against classifying the film as horror.

I'll admit I'm a wimp when it comes to horror films, even if two different reviewers state that this isn't true horror, they don't deny its creepiness. So I probably will never see it. But I do find it interesting that Hansel and Gretel hasn't been used more often for horror film scripts, at least not directly. Yes, the idea of children in danger is not as popular, but Hansel and Gretel can very easily be teenagers or young adults. This is one of the scariest of the popular tales with just as much potential as Little Red Riding Hood which has been used in this manner much more frequently.

And if you noticed the plural in the post's title, well, there is another Hansel and Gretel film in development apparently: 'Hansel and Gretel' Getting Ready To Kick Ass, With or Without Will Ferrell.

“We have a great first draft turned in on that, and we’ve already done notes and we’re actually having artist illustrations done of the look and the monsters and everything,” McKay revealed, saying that the project is full-steam ahead for his Gary Sanchez Productions. “We’re looking at turning that into Paramount pretty soon; we want to get that going because it’s really, really cool.”

Based loosely on the Brothers Grimm tale of two poor children, a house made of candy and a really scary oven, the live-action and heavy-effects film will pick up where the Grimms left off.

“The idea is that [Hansel and Gretel] fought off the witch, chucked her in the oven, and now they’ve grown up, it’s 15 years later,” explained McKay, who most recently produced “The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard” with Jeremy Piven. “They’re witch bounty hunters now, and they’re badasses.”

“There’s really clever stuff in it, like Hansel is diabetic from all the candy the witch made him eat,” McKay said of Wirkola’s script. “He has to do insulin shots every few hours.”

Now I don't even know what to think about that one...but I admit the description made me smile. Bounty hunters, huh? I rather hope that one is produced.

New Book: Crazy Beautiful by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Here's another book that slipped through the radar until a few days ago. Fortunately, it was also just released a few days ago, so I'm not months behind this time! My dream is for when more authors (or their publicists or their publishers) send me information and possibly even advanced reading copies. And occasionally copies for a SurLaLune Giveaway--reminder that the current giveaway of Fairy Tales Reimagined ends two weeks from today. Thank you again to all who send me nice informative emails! And books! Helps me keep SurLaLune as comprehensive as possible...

But back to the post:

Crazy Beautiful by Lauren Baratz-Logsted is a YA modern retelling of Beauty and the Beast. I haven't read it. I haven't touched a copy yet. I haven't even added it to SurLaLune's Beauty and the Beast pages yet, but I know there are fans out there who hunger for this type of fiction. It sounds like a great companion book to Beastly by Alex Flinn.

Here's the publisher's description:

In an explosion of his own making, Lucius blew his arms off. Now he has hooks. He chose hooks because they were cheaper. He chose hooks because he wouldn’t outgrow them so quickly. He chose hooks so that everyone would know he was different, so he would scare even himself.

Then he meets Aurora. The hooks don’t scare her. They don’t keep her away. In fact, they don’t make any difference at all to her.

But to Lucius, they mean everything. They remind him of the beast he is inside. Perhaps Aurora is his Beauty, destined to set his soul free from its suffering.

Or maybe she’s just a girl who needs love just like he does.

Intriguing, yes? There is also a PDF of the first chapter to read, if you are interested.

BTW, I have a list on Amazon of Fairy Tale Influenced Fiction 2009. In fact, I've already started one for 2010 (Fairy Tale Influenced Fiction 2010) which is how I stumbled across Crazy Beautiful.

Sleeping Beauty on Broadway

There are several articles with this latest news but this article was the most informative however brief: Regina Spektor To Write Music For Broadway Show

The singer-songwriter will write the music for a planned Broadway musical called Beauty, based on the fairy tale classic “Sleeping Beauty.”

Spektor is set to collaborate with the lyricist Michael Korie (Broadway’s Grey Gardens) and the director Tina Landau (Superior Donuts).

Beauty is tentatively planned for the 2011-2012 Broadway season after an out-of-town tryout.

Beauty is being presented as an expansion of Landau’s 2002 one-act play produced by the La Jolla Playhouse. The updated Beauty uses the 1812 Grimm fairy tale Sleeping Beauty as a jumping-off point for a ‘contemporary and hauntingly provocative story of beauty lost and beauty found,’ according to a press release statement.

I love that the number of larger budget film and theatre productions of fairy tale interpretations is increasing again...

Fairy Tales and Theatre

More Fairy Tale theatre events around the globe:

New London Theatre Presents Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood: "New London Theatre [in Gwinnett, Georgia] will present 'Cinderella/Little Red Riding Hood' opening September 18th and continuing through September 27th, 2009.

"'Cinderella' is the story of a girl who lives unhappily with her stepmother and two silly stepsisters and dreams of meeting the prince. Cinderella makes it to the ball, meets the basketball-crazy prince, but has to rush out at the stroke of midnight, leaving behind her high-top basketball shoe. The prince searches for the girl who knows all about basketball, but can Cinderella answer the basketball question? It's magic!

"'Little Red Riding Hood' is a mixed-up fairy tale where she meets the seven singing dwarves, a bashful wolf as well as a confused stagehand on her way to Grandmother's house. And there's only minutes until they turn out the lights!"

PANTO COMPETITION: Design costumes for the Ugly Sisters: "Panto season is approaching and the Maidenhead Drama Guild (MDG) [in the UK] is busy preparing for its version of the classic fairy tale Cinderella.

"Cinderella’s ugly sisters have a major part to play in the pantomime and will need suitable costumes to fit their part.

"MDG has teamed up with the Advertiser to give two local young readers, aged 16 or under, the chance to design costumes for the wicked stepsisters."

The Snow Queen is being performed as a ballet in Brisbane, Australia. There are other performances like Sleeping Beauty listed on the same page.

The Brave Tin Soldier is being performed with shadow puppets and other multimedia in Eisenach, Germany.

Finding Lost Books

One of the most common types of emails I have received over the years are from readers desperately searching for the particular collection of fairy tales they grew up with, the exact volume that held the particular stories and illustrations that first sparked their imaginations and began their love of the fantastic and wonderful.

Alas, only a very small percentage have been identified. While I have acquired an extensive knowledge and personal library of Golden Age illustrations (dating roughly 1880 to 1920), most searchers are looking for books published later, usually within a decade or two of their births. There are literally hundreds of possibilities since fairy tale collections have been a staple of many publishers great and small for decades. There are high quality collections with well-known illustrators but there are many more obscure collections that were more generic in nature with little known illustrators, many collections published with a "pulp" attitude of churning them out at low pricing for high profit margins with little concern for quality or accuracy. I'm not insulting these collections--they have contributed to the continuing popularity and availability of fairy tales. They are just very, very hard to identify and track down because they were not intended to be timeless, but rather disposable children's books.

The collection that I grew up with was Best Loved Fairy Tales Published By Parents' Magazine, pictured at the top of this post. Mine has a very important inscription:

April 1979 Easter

Heidi dear:

There are some of the stories you requested at Christmas. I know you will enjoy them as your mother and I enjoyed them.

Love, Grandma

I had requested Beauty and the Beast (not as commonly anthologized as one would think) and we spent much of the Christmas holidays trying to track it down. Grandma didn't give up and finally found it in this collection and mailed it to me. I devoured it many times over the years. Then let it capture dust for many more until I returned to it a few years after I started SurLaLune. I then realized that my love for the Golden Age Illustrators (many represented on SurLaLune) began here since the collection reproduces their work--not in high quality, but in grainy, flat images.. The Beauty and the Beast illustrations are by Walter Crane and thus remain some of my favorites to this day and rather explain why I was compelled to build a site like SurLaLune. So I understand the yearning and searching for lost fairy tale books. I am fortunate that mine wasn't given away, lost, destroyed or otherwise reacquired by the fair folk.


I suspect another popular collection is The World's Best Fairy Tales, A Reader's Digest Anthology since Reader's Digest books have been rather ubiquitous to many households over the years.


Another series is Andrew Lang's Colored Fairy Books, twelve in all, from the Blue to the Lilac. This series has rarely been out of print, thanks to Dover Publications, but the editions including the full color illustrations and not just the pen and inks are rare and expensive. For this reason, fans should rejoice that Dover is publishing Maidens, Monsters and Heroes: The Fantasy Illustrations of H. J. Ford in February 2010.


However, hands down, the most commonly sought collection has been The Golden Book of Fairy Tales by Adrienne Segur. Other Golden Books have also been popular including The Giant Golden Book of Elves and Fairies and The Snow Queen and Other Tales. (I didn't have any of these in my childhood, but Golden has been important in some way to almost every reader I have met. My personal favorite from Golden is still The Monster at the End of this Book.)


The Giant Golden Book of Elves and Fairies was reprinted last year after selling used for crazy prices but it is not guaranteed to stay in print so if this is one of your cherished memories, get it soon. The Golden Book of Fairy Tales by Adrienne Segur has been in print again for a while now, but it isn't guaranteed to stay that way either. When it does, its prices will skyrocket, too. It's that precious to so many.


Alas, The Snow Queen and Other Tales was reprinted not long ago, but it is already out of print again and selling for astronomical prices.

This post isn't just a walk down memory lane. I wanted to recommend some methods for finding "lost" books, be they fairy tales or not. The best location on the web for finding helpful and knowledgeable book sleuths is BookSleuth boards on AbeBooks. If the book is fairy tale related, you can also post on the SurLaLune Discussion Board.

If you do post your question on the board, please give as many details as possible to help others identify your tale. The following information is usually very helpful:

1) A rough estimate of the year you remember reading the story such as the actual year or at least a generalization of a decade.

2) As many details of the story--such as characters, setting, and plot--as you can remember. If there were illustrations, were they in color or black and white? Any details about the cover are sometimes helpful, too.

3) Try to remember if the story was in a collection of stories or a picture book, in other words a single story book with many illustrations. If it was in a collection, what were some of the other stories?

BookSleuth also has its own tips for using its boards. Read them!

Finally, please, don't email me with your requests but use the above methods instead. I will see your post on the SurLaLune boards. My email load is massive and I don't have the resources to answer every email, let alone to research each question sent to me. (I'm not a walking encyclopedia and most questions require time to answer. Even if I know the answer without research, I usually find ways of verifying it in the email.) Too many times I have felt generous and spent up to an hour searching for an answer or writing a response, sent it and never received a reply to know if my efforts even helped. My approach after 11 years of running this website single-handed is that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one. I allocate my time to providing information to all with website updates and now writing this blog. If a question is easily answered or sparks my interest, you may get personal service, but the chances are slim. Try these other methods instead. And good luck!

The Little Match Girl Passion by David Lang

Did you know that David Lang won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his The Little Match Girl Passion? (Here's an iTunes link: Lang: the Little Match Girl Passion if you prefer to listen to samples there instead of Amazon.)

Co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall especially for Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices, David Lang's The Little Match Girl Passion was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Setting Hans Christian Andersen's fable in the format of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, Lang elevates the suffering of the little match girl with poignant, evocative music. Lang's piece is scored for four voices and a few percussion instruments, played by the singers. They sing the sad story of a little girl who freezes to death selling matches on the street during a cold winter's night. In notes Lang wrote to accompany the Carnegie Hall premiere last October, he says he was drawn to Andersen's story because of how opposite aspects of the plot played off each other. 'The girl's bitter present is locked together with the sweetness of her past memories, ' Lang says. 'Her poverty is always suffused with her hopefulness. There's a kind of naive equilibrium between suffering and hope.'

Here are some links to reviews and articles about the composition for your further enlightenment:

David Lang Wins Music Pulitzer

David Lang - The Little Match Girl Passion

Carnegie Hall: The Little Match Girl Passion David Lang

Sounds Heard: David Lang's the little match girl passion

With the cold weather and holidays fast approaching, this sounds like a wonderful addition to a holiday music collection since this is one fairy tale that is very much associated with the winter season.

Fairy Tales by Miwa Yanagi

Found this article last week: Breaking fairy-tale conventions of beauty by Matthew Larkin and had to learn more, of course, about the Fairy Tale series by Miwa Yanagi mentioned. The Fairy Tale collection is featured here with English titles in its entirety, but of course, I had to share some of the images here, too. Follow the link to see the images in larger scale. Clicking on the images in this post will also take you to larger versions. See if you can identify what fairy tales are represented since I am not including titles.


Here are two paragraphs from the article, explaining Yanagi's inspiration and work but you can learn more at Yanagi's website. It helps if you read Japanese!

Against the tradition of bijinga (beautiful women pictures) that runs through Japanese art, there is an antithetical stream that draws attention to a grotesque and timeworn femininity. In noh plays, the celebrated early 9th-century beauty of the Heian Era, Ono no Komachi, is sometimes portrayed after her looks have faded and she has become an elderly beggar. During the Edo Period (1603-1867), there was the popular theme of Yamauba, a wild witch living the mountains. In the 20th century, the tradition continued with the paintings of ghoulish geisha from artists Shinso Okamoto and Chusei Inagaki.

The apparent contemporary to these precedents, Miwa Yanagi (b. 1967), is showing her "Windswept Women: The Old Girls' Troupe" series of photos concurrently at the National Museum of Art, Osaka (her first solo show in west Japan in seven years), and at the Venice Biennale. Yanagi started receiving critical acclaim from the mid-'90s for her work addressing Japanese feminine stereotypes, and now, as one of Japan's artistic representatives on the international stage, she is garnering further attention with her more mythic gestures. Her "Po-po Nyangnyang" exhibition at the National Museum of Art also includes works from two other series, "Fairy Tale" (2004-06) and ongoing "My Grandmothers."

Some of the images are quite disturbing--those masks!--but I also love that she interpreted lesser known tales such as Brother and Sister, Frau Trude and others.