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Maurice Sendak: "Hansel and Gretel"

 My fascination with villains dates back to the reign of Howard Ashman. 


Orin, Gaston, Jafar, Ursula: These characters are larger than life, and they raise the stakes. If I'm going to rent a movie with my daughter, I have to ensure that there is a dynamic villain, or I will risk two hours with a film-not-worthwhile. (Thank you to Olivia Colman for her recent contributions to "Paddington in Peru.")

It makes sense to me that Maurice Sendak would be drawn to "Hansel and Gretel." Sendak liked villains. "Where the Wild Things Are" begins with a monstrous decision; the mother cannot be bothered to empathize with her energetic son, so she sends him to bed without food. Later, the boy is forced to endure the company of his many unhappy aunts and uncles; their faces have morphed, and they are now wild beasts. (Their "greeting" to little Max is ambiguous at the least: "I will eat you up.")

Sendak left sketches for "Hansel and Gretel." It's a story of three villains. First, the stepmother who evicts her own kids. Second, the passive father who allows the atrocity to happen. Third, the witch who seems like a new fantasy-world reincarnation of the stepmother. If there is a message in "Hansel," it's this: "The world is brutal, and you have to be cunning." Sendak makes an inanimate house into an additional force of evil. When you turn your back on the witch's cabin, the cabin comes to life; the windows are malevolent eyes, and the basement is a yawning, hungry mouth.

Can't wait to see Sendak's posthumous book (but I have to wait until September).







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