Lost media quest: H&G Epic Tales (part 5)
Now that I compiled all the info I could find online, it is time for me to share with you the result of my various emails!
... And unfortunately I do not have much to offer you.
I first contacted the people who worked on the storybook's animation and that had either a gmail adress or a Tumblr. So far I have sent messages to Paco Vink, David Muchtar, Jelle Brunt and Sjan Weijers. So far, only David Muchtar answered me. Of the animation team, those I only couldn't reach Ruben Zaalberg (he has a LinkedIn but I am not on this website). I also sent a formal email to Anikey Studio via their official website - no answer so far.
I thought about contacting Lou Attia, the voice actor for the English version of the app, but couldn't find any way to do so.. If I still do not have in the future any answer, I will try contacting other members of the team. I do not expect any answer, but at least I would have tried!
The good news is that, as I told you before, David Muchtar did answer me and we had a quite pleasant conversation!
Unfortunately, he confirmed that he had preserved nothing of the files, art or animation he worked with during his time on the "Epic Tales" project (in fact, he told me if I ever found anything, I should sent it back to him because he would like to see it one more time). So all he could offer me was his testimony and his memory (which was, also unfortunately, quite vague - since it had been twelve years). But it was already a very valuable set of information, and so far the most precious information outlet I could have!
I am not going to speak of the story details here, I will keep this for a different post, but here are some facts he could share with me (some which are just confirmations of what I posted about previously, others which are new):
David Muchtar was an intern at Anikey Studio when he worked on the project. As such he didn't have any overview or decision when it came to the story as a whole, he just, to quite him, "animated what was in front of him". There was a second intern of the Studio who worked on the project: Ruben Zaalberg, who was a classmate with Muchtar at the HKU. They both interned for eight months roughly at Anikey. It was Muchtar's first experience as an animator for a studio.
He is pretty sure Anikey Studio still has the files somewhere, but since they don't own the rights to them, they likely can't release them (but he can't confirm this).
Paul Hanraets was the creator and investor who made the project come to life in the first place. He was a businessman who owned a company called Gambitious - it was a crowdfunding platform meant to help independent game developers and publishers, by helping them get funding. "Epic Tales: Hansel and Gretel" was a personal project of his, a "side-project" in which he poured his own, personal money. And while he had planned to continue the "Epic Tales" line, the first game never made him enough continue to continue the project (despite being quite famous upon its release).
The story and the visual style of the interactive storybook were designed by both Paul Hanraets and Anikey Studio. Anikey was truly a small studio at the time, consisting only of two men (Albert't Hooft and Paco Vink) plus one freelance animator (Jelle Brunt, who notably worked on the Anikey short film "Fallin' Floyd".
One specific animation David Muchtar had to work onto was, in the tableau of the kids sitting in front of their house (I posted several screenshots of it), the squirrel - supposed to come out of a hole in the tree, and run on the branch. He had been given the background art and the squirrel concept art by Anikey Studio. His job was to create the animation, clean-up the art and do the colors. In the same scene he had to animate the characters of Hansel and Gretel, while the woodcutter was done by Ruben Zaalberg.
Outside of this specific example, David Muchtar worked on many different animations throughout the game - each animation he was handed was his sole and entire responsibility, apparently? So, in his own word, this made him act as a "key animator, inbetweener, cleanup animator and colorist". He did note that in the final product, it is his drawings, his animation, directly put into the app - with no other hand or influence modifying his work. And that such a thing is very rare for him, despite having been working as an animator for more than ten years now.
Beyond all this info, he did share with me some story details. While my posts about this lost media are not very popular, I did find a few testimonies of other people who crossed path with this application... However they range from "I saw a demo in a shop a long time ago but couldn't play it" to "I only played the storybook twice, and so I only recall one or two scenes". But, as it is with all serious research, it is not because a testimony is fragmentary that it is less valuable!
We are currently re-creating an enormous puzzle scattered throughout the world, and each piece, no matter how tiny, is important! In fact, this will be the object of my next series of posts. Given all I could collect, I will try to reconstruct the story and content of the animated storybook...
I will mention that I do believe the storybook was actually influenced by some specific cartoon works. Several reviewers described a "Disney-feeling" to this animation - and I hold the belief that the way the witch was vanquished (not though an oven, as the app was designed to be a light-hearted and more cartoony take on the story) is an homage or was inspired by Disney's "Babes in the Woods"...
That being said, I will already post here two precious resources for information about the changes performed to the Hansel and Gretel fairytale by the storybook.
Katie Bircher's review of the app for The Horn Book gives us a lot of insightful information as it highlights key differences and divergences with the original story:
A caveat: as the Kirkus review points out, the characters of Gretel and the children's father are "largely relegate[d]...to passive roles." In the father's case this passivity minimizes his complicity in the wicked stepmother's machinations, rendering him innocent. In Gretel's case, however, it makes her a mere tag-along to the story's star, "clever" Hansel. (And another thing — we're repeatedly told Hansel is clever, but his behavior isn't consistent with this characterization.) Most of the app's changes to the plot are innocuous, if unnecessary, but one change I find troubling is the revised denouement. Instead of Gretel saving the day by pushing the witch into her own oven, here Hansel defeats the witch alone. This version is more Hansel's story than that of Hansel and Gretel.
[... Here is a list of other elements unique to the app's story:]
Tiny, bad-tempered gnomes are ubiquitous in the illustrations and animations, but never mentioned in the text until they eat Hansel's breadcrumb trail.
After the children's wicked stepmother takes them deep into the forest, she gets lost there herself and is never seen again — although her complaining can still be heard.
Hansel shoots the witch with his slingshot, pitching her forward into her own cauldron, which propels her up the chimney and out of the house.
A garden full of modern-day sweets (e.g., fizzy lemonade, gummies, and cotton candy) surrounds the witch's house. The enchanted gummy animals are returned to their true forms after the witch's defeat. A formerly-gummy swan offers to fly the children home.
Hansel, much heavier after his ordeal, is magically restored to his previous skinny state.
I will complete this review by the Kirkus Reviews linked within the previous article, which does note a lack of "psychological melodrama" and notes:
These include grimacing monsters and surly gnomes popping into view, the evil stepmother’s Cockney-accented screeches and fragmentary ditties like a skeletal minstrel’s “Dinnertime dinnertime for the witch, / She will eat the little boy, she’s suuuuch aaaa….” That fortuitously interrupted last line, plus some eerie moments in the dark woods, may be more appreciated by sophisticated audiences. On the other hand, neither the witch nor the stepmother is definitively killed off, and the title screen offers a “Play Around” option that dispenses with the storyline entirely in favor of going to any screen to check out the interactive features.
If you ask me, I think we have enough dark Hansel and Gretel retellings around to allow us a light-hearted, goofier one... But that's just me!
