Everyone knows the story of
Hansel and Gretel by the Grimm brothers. What many ignore is the background behind this so called fairy tale. The story is set in the Europe of the Middle Ages in a time where the quality of life was anything but good and food for example was scarce. As a result, infanticide was one of the practices families of that time performed in order to ensure survival. Little children were abandoned to die and in the original version it is Hansel and Gretel´s mother (not stepmother) who asked her husband to leave the children so deep in the forest that they could not find their way back. The children found a house, a cottage made of candy, chocolate and icing. The owner of the house, an old lady invites them to come in and traps them. Inside the cottage the kids are trapped by the old lady and fed to have them ready to be eaten. The old woman is described as an old witch with bad eyesight (hence the reason for the cany house to work as a trap and make things easy for the witch). Now, was she a witch for real? Could she not, as a witch she was, cast a spell to improve her own eyesight or to immobilize the kids? Instead she keeps Hansel in a cage and is eventually tricked by the siblings: Gretel pushes the witch inside an oven and shuts the door. Again the witch could not resort to her own magic to save herself. The most likely thing is that this a story where the villain is a cannibal not a witch (one may argue it is clear it´s a witch AND a cannibal). Of course not practicing witchcraft doesn´t mean she's not a witch either, however, if we consider the context we could end up with the conclusion that the Grimm brothers wanted to "soften" this story a little. Probably there were at that time people that practiced cannibalism and this story was a reflection of that fact.We will never know for sure, but again this would explain why Disney has not used these characters to make another one of its movies.
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