A book series I have loved for like a decade, A Tale Dark and Grimm by Adam Gidwitz, has been turned into an animated series by a Canadian company and is now available on Netflix. It's great! It did a great job adapting the original book to a different medium. Most of the reviews are great, but the negative ones are kind of hilarious, mostly for one reason: the show is called A Tale Dark and Grimm and the opening narration straight up says it's based on the original Grimm's fairytales which are very gory, it outright says that this show is going to get very dark and grim, that there is violence, that this is a Bad Story, it's basically labeled "Dead Dove: Do Not Eat" . . . and people are still shocked that the story is dark and there is violence.
This is a review on IMDb, about an episode (called "Hansel and Gretel") which features a brother and sister named Hansel and Gretel wandering through the woods and coming across a cottage made of gingerbread and candy. The narrator ravens state that everybody knows that this one ends with the witch trying to eat the children. The reviewer appears to be shocked that the witch "is implied" to be a cannibal.
"Not similar to the real Grimm's stories"? They cut away from the violence and leave it mostly implied (which is why the reviewer says "a woman wanting to eat her newborn" instead of actually eating her newborn). And in the original Grimm version of Hansel and Gretel (and in the book the show is based on) the witch gets burned alive in the oven, rather than goofily impaled on a candy cane. The only way this show is dissimilar to the original stories is that it's LESS GORY.
Very curious what this reviewer thinks the agenda here is.
Look, it's gory. It is, as the title suggests, a dark and grim story based on Grimm's fairytales. AND IT DOESN'T PRETEND OTHERWISE. The narrators explicitly say it's gonna be gross and horrible and scary in the opening scene. If parents don't think their children are ready for it, maybe they should pay attention to the half dozen warnings given before we get to any gore (including the narrators pausing the story immediately before the first violent act, one of them arguing they can't show kids that, which makes the other day they're going to show the beheading "tastefully"). Instead of getting mad at other people for creating something with all these warnings, maybe they should take responsibility for clearly ignoring them.
Some kids love this stuff, by the way, and are totally fine with it; the only problem my four-year-old niece had with it was the presence of wolves in the forest--she doesn't like wolves. So we stopped after the first episode and she got past it; when she's older, I'll give her the book to read--there aren't wolves in the book.
Because, as someone once said, "fairytales don't tell children there is evil in the world. Children already know there is evil in the world. Fairytales tell children evil can be defeated." It's important for children to confront horror in a safe way, so that when they come across it in real life--and they will, there's no stopping that--they know how to deal with it.
But I digress.
I came here to make fun of people making odd criticisms of a series that I thought was great, like the shocking amount of people that didn't understand why one sibling could be blonde-haired and blue-eyed and the other non-white in spite of the fact that they had one blond-haired, blue-eyed parent and one non-white parent and this kind of thing happens all the time in the real world, especially in fraternal twins.
Or this guy and whatever's going on in his head:
Sir. First of all, this is for children. Secondly, in the original, instead of sewing their heads back on they just wrapped the string around it and tied it off. Thirdly, in no way is adaptation of a story cultural appropriation. Fourthly, character development is a thing and this boy is twelve; he makes mistakes, he grows up. He's not actually that silly, I think you just don't like a male character showing fear when a female character is hiding it.
You keep saying "PC." I do not think it means what you think it means.
Anyway, the show is great, as the overwhelmingly positive reviews will show you, and I highly recommend both it and the original series, even if you're an adult! Also, Adam Gidwitz is working on a new series called The Unicorn Rescue Society; I've only read the first book so far, but it's great!
