Hansel, Gretel, and my Distrust of Gingerbread

As a Cinema major, I’ve been interested in story telling as a career, mainly through the visual medium.  The fact that any story has roots in stories preceding it, intentionally or not, fascinates me, and I’d like to familiarize myself with some of the oldest and most familiar tales regarding the human experience.  I hope that I can use my gained familiarity and dissection of these tales to improve my own story telling, using more sophisticated and traditional motifs, patterns, or themes.

I’ve recently noticed several modern interpretations of fairy tales throughout the past year that have caught my attention and interest.  One of my favorite programs Supernatural had an episode themed around Grimm’s fairy tales, where the alternate and more bloody endings of the stories were actually happening in a small town.  I found the adaptation of the stories to television to not only be interesting, but well done from the production team as well as the writers.

I also work at the Public Library on Main Street, where I sometimes have the pleasure of being a “bouncer” (for lack of a better term) for the puppet shows.  I get to see my colleagues’ humorous rehearsals of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” and “The Frog Prince”, most recently.

My favorite fairy tale is “Hansel and Gretel”, because it makes me ask so many questions, but I can still follow the story.  For instance, why is the witch living in a candy house?  If she lives in a candy house why does she eat the children?  She should just eat her house; that’s what I would do… Why did these children choose to leave breadcrumbs?  Don’t they know they’ll get eaten?  Is their journey really important enough to make them go through a creepy forest alone?  I wouldn’t even touch an abandoned sweater in the woods, so I definitely wouldn’t start eating a random and questionable candy house in the middle of a forest.

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