And the Difference is?

The Hansel and Gretel fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm is very different from the MGM film but there are still many of the same motifs and events throughout each of them. In the film, the mother does not intentionally leave the children in the forest. Rather, she gets upset with them for letting the donkey in the house and spilling the cream and sends them out to get berries. Since no berries were to be found in close proximity to their house, they had to deep into the forest and got lost. In the original fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel overhear their stepmother talking about leaving them in the forest and therefore, they know that they will have to find their way back to their house.

Also, in the movie version, it is the mother rather than the stepmother which makes a big difference. After the mother realizes in the movie that the children have gotten lost in the forest and can't find their way home, she feels extremely guilty and begins to cry. In the Grimm version, the stepmother feels no remorse and when they return the first time, she tells her husband that they must leave the children in the forest once more.

When the children reach the witch's house, there are also some differences. In the film, the witch is nice to Hansel and Gretel for a while and even put them to bed with a bed time story whereas in the fairy tale, the witch puts Hansel in the cage as soon as they enter her house. Also, in the Grimm version, Gretel does not have to break the witches eye glass in order for their plan to work. When the children return home in the Grimm version, the stepmother has died and the father is ecstatic to have his children back. In the MGM version, the mother is just as happy as the father when the children return back home safely.

The main point of the story is the same, but there are many subtle and not so subtle differences. I feel as though the directors of the MGM version made these changes so that the movie could be long enough. The Grimm fairy tale is only a short story which would not take much more than 10 or 15 minutes to read so the director had to make many changes to illustrate the story in a different way. I enjoyed both the story and the movie but I have to say that the Grimm version is my favorite, despite the lack of illustration. I did not like how the mother treated her own children in the movie and I feel as though making it the stepmother makes it easier to understand why she is so angry with the children all the time. Overall, we have seen that fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm in comparison to movies by MGM and Disney are often very different.