Hansel & Gretel from Fotini on Vimeo.
From the description on Vimeo, this is a student short. I'd say the student is doing really well. The names of the people involved with the project are all Greek, so I guess the narration is Greek, or at least that's the most likely thing per Occam's razor. All the zh sounds made me think it was Portuguese.
The story and the art make a quantum leap when the witch shows up. That's the thing about her. She may be presented more or less sympathetically, but she's always a compelling character.
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*Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor wood-cutter with his wife and his two children. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. He had little to bite and to break, and once when great dearth fell on the land, he could no longer procure even daily bread. Now when he thought over this by night in his bed, and tossed about in his anxiety, he groaned and said to his wife: 'What is to become of us? How are we to feed our poor children, when we no longer have anything even for ourselves?' 'I'll tell you what, husband,' answered the woman, 'early tomorrow morning we will take the children out into the forest to where it is the thickest; there we will light a fire for them, and give each of them one more piece of bread, and then we will go to our work and leave them alone. They will not find the way home again, and we shall be rid of them.' 'No, wife,' said the man, 'I will not do that; how can I bear to leave my children alone in the forest?—the wild animals would soon come and tear them to pieces.' 'O, you fool!' said she, 'then we must all four die of hunger, you may as well plane the planks for our coffins,' and she left him no peace until he consented. 'But I feel very sorry for the poor children, all the same,' said the man.*
It was a nicely done video but for the fact he left out the wicked stepmother. Do you suppose they never heard that part in Greece?
The father does come off as kind in the context of the story. In the real world our views of a father who was ready to abandon his kids in the forest after a few minutes of arm twisting would get a different reaction. But then fairy tales have their own logic, and it's a world we keep coming back to.
It's hard to believe he doesn't know about the wicked stepmother. Maybe she just doesn't appeal to him on an artistic level.
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