The Weekend Watch: Tim Burton’s Hansel and Gretel

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By Jacob Oller  |  September 6, 2024 | 10:00am
Movies Features Tim Burton
The Weekend Watch: Tim Burton’s Hansel and Gretel
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Welcome to The Weekend Watch, a weekly column focusing on a movie—new, old or somewhere in between, but out either in theaters or on a streaming service near you—worth catching on a cozy Friday night or a lazy Sunday morning. Comments welcome!

Tim Burton’s career has involved more dark circles and spinning spirals than his loopiest designs. He’s always returning to the familiar—and hey, it’s good to have a niche. The goth auteur began his career as a Disney animator, graduating from working on The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron to his own idiosyncratic productions that were a bit too much for Disney to touch. After he left for stints with Pee-Wee, Beetlejuice and Batman, Burton would come back to the Mouse House for his stop-motion Henry Selick collaborations and his Oscar-winning Ed Wood. More years passed, as did another strange phase of Burton’s career. Then he came back for Disney’s ongoing quest to remake all their animated classics as uncomfortably realistic CG hybrids, handling Alice in Wonderland and Dumbo. In a unique turning of the tables, he also did an animated remake of his own live-action short for Disney in Frankenweenie. How often does that happen?

As Burton returns to another old stomping ground with the legacy sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, The Weekend Watch will focus on the first time Burton ventured into live-action (and the first thing of his own that he ever made for Disney): the Disney Channel’s 1983 version of Hansel and Gretel.

While this 34-minute special only aired a single time on live TV—fittingly, at 10:30 PM on Halloween—it was preserved by intrepid VHS rippers and Burton preservationists; in addition to being easily found on YouTube, Hansel and Gretel screened at the much more prestigious Museum of Modern Art retrospective of Burton’s work. And Hansel and Gretel often feels like a museum piece. The opening, full of recognizable sculptures and warped toys in Burton’s spiky style, is set to Johnny Costa’s piano—a more mature and playfully dissonant edition of Costa’s work on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Sharp beaks, extending tongues, Hot Topic stripes and wide-open eyes define the creature-machines outside Hansel (Andy Lee) and Gretel’s (Alison Hong) window. This is immediately, recognizably Burton, even if it’s a made-for-TV movie released years before he ever made a feature.

That’s because Burton not only directed the film, but did its production design. Beyond the bounty of oddball little toys from Hansel and Gretel’s toymaker father (Jim Ishida), the stagey world is established through a minimalist household setting, curling landscapes, uncanny ladders to nowhere and larger-than-life bowls of gruel. Even a Beetlejuice-like worm makes an early appearance. It’s also established through Michael Yama, giving a massive, John Waters-like performance in the dual stepmother/witch role. Yama is hilariously nasty as his character tries to rid herself of the children any way she can. What’s more disconcerting is how the kids are always shot from her perspective. We look down at them, as they crane their necks back up at us. And when the Witch herself shows up…she looks a bit like Boy George and a bit like how Tim Burton himself would dress later in life: like a beach goth a bit too comfortable with puppets and dolls.

Perhaps the most Burtony thing in this Burton production is the Witch’s house. A candy-coated, gooey mess that looks like three kinds of haunted faces (and bleeds syrup when holes are poked in it) this is like an evil version of Pee-wee’s Playhouse—which is nuts because, despite helping bring Pee-wee to the public with Pee-wee’s Big Adventure a few years after this aired, Burton initially caught Paul Reubens’ eye not with Hansel and Gretel, but with his shorts  Vincent and Frankenweenie. One has to imagine that Reubens got a chance to at least discuss this production with Burton at some point.

But Burton’s not the only name here who would go on to very, very big things. Twilight’s Catherine Hardwicke worked on the film as a model assistant in the art department, alongside prolific designer Rick Heinrichs. And plenty of animators chipped in to help out with some of the well-integrated stop-motion sequences; Henry Selick gets a special thanks, but longtime Disney guy Dan Haskett, puppeteers Stephen Chiodo and Joe Ranft, and Frozen filmmaker Chris Buck all contributed.

The results are, like so many of Burton’s best productions, delightfully silly-scary due to the serious craftsmanship on display. An explosive, paint-filled finale is as excitingly surreal as the Witch’s martial arts-infused battle with the children. But it’s not just the setpieces; every moment of Hansel and Gretel looks impressive and handmade and completely at odds with everything that had come before it. And yet, it also feels tonally of a piece with the Brothers Grimm. This fairy tale is unsettling and cautionary, just kid-friendly enough to lure them in before jostling their worldview with tangible danger. Tim Burton comes back to his old ideas often because he’s had a singular vision from the start. Hansel and Gretel is a proof of concept that, with the right story and the right suspensions of disbelief, that vision could easily escape the safe confines of animation and invade our world.

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

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