Book read Neil Gaiman & Lorenzo Mattotti - Hansel & Gretel First line This all happened a long time ago, in your grandmother’s time, or in her grandfather’s.

Two years later the woodcutter’s wife gave birth to a boy, and they called him Hans, which, because they could make it no shorter, they made longer and changed to Hansel.), but it’s the story you know about two kids lost in the woods and an evil old woman in a gingerbread house. It’s done very well, with some humorous passages like how the kids got their names ( The child was named Margaret, which they shortened to Greta, and then to Gretel. Unlike Gaiman’s adaptations of Snow White (“Snow, Glass, Apples”) and Sleeping Beauty (“The Sleeper and the Spindle”), this is a straight-forward retelling of the Grimm version. Later, Gaiman was shown Mattotti’s stark, black ink art, and asked to retell the story.Īnd that is it, I guess. The setting here is no fairy tale Gaiman sets his retelling of the story in a war zone. They were created in 2007 for an exhibition to celebrate the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s staging of the opera of the same name. A collaboration between author Neil Gaiman and illustrator Lorenzo Mattotti for Toon Books, Hansel & Gretel is a swirl of inky lines with our hero and heroine always at a distance, as lost in the chaos of the images as they are in the forest. Even the windows were clear panes of barley sugar” And then give me this picture.Ĭall it intuition, I knew this was going to be a bust.In the case of Neil Gaiman and Lorenzo Mattotti’s Hansel & Gretel, the pictures came first. How can you describe a gingerbread house like this “It was made of fresh gingerbread, decorated with hard sugar candies of green and red. The sketches are sinister, but even there I found the black and white lacking. It’s also missing the lyrical prose I crave when I read Neil Gaiman’s writing. There is nothing new or ground breaking in this rendition. But when one of the most noted and gifted writers of all time says they have been “waiting their whole life” and this is what I get, I’m going to walk away disappointed. I don’t consider this to be a weak or poor rendition of Hansel and Gretel, please do not misunderstand.

Based on what you turned out, You could have fooled me. “I have been waiting all my life for somebody to say, ‘Will you write Hansel & Gretel'”Īll your life, Neil Gaiman? Really?…. Who better to retell the Brothers Grimm’s greatest, and perhaps darkest, fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel? Coupled with breathtakingly haunting illustrations from Lorenzo Mattotti, you will be enticed into the world and into the woods.

The enduring story of the children, the breadcrumb trail and the gingerbread house is brought to life by master storyteller, Neil Gaiman.

Hansel and gretel by neil gaiman