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Quick - think of a largely known fairy tale from Hans Christian Anderson or the Brothers Grimm. Got it? OK. Chances are very high that there's at least one Disney variation of it. And for the story of "Hansel and Gretel" we have this Silly Symphony short, "Babes in the Woods."
It's not very good and feels more like a test drive for some of Walt Disney's obsessions and scenarios that he wanted to explore further in his feature films. So much of what is presented in this short would crop up in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, that it's very hard to not think of this as a prototype for how well the audience would react to these scenarios. The horrific journey in the woods which turns out to be mere hallucination and visual trickery? Discovering a merry group of diminutive workers who live deep in the woods, take them in, perform an extended musical sequence with brown jugs and come to the aid of the heroes? A twisted old crone with spells that cause terrible transformations? It's all in here, but nowhere near as endearing or imaginative as Snow White. Also, it's pretty well-known that Disney wanted to develop and create a movie version of The Wizard of Oz, and does anyone else get the impression that the wicked witch here was his prototype for the Wicked Witch of the West? It could just be me.
But anyway, back to this short. The animation isn't particularly appealing to look at, and all of the characters seem to be carbon-copies of each other. The final battle is more disturbing for how cutesy it tries to play it off as. The little elves come to the rescue, fire arrows at the witch and they somehow don't pierce her skin or cause her any harm at all. Meanwhile, Hansel and Gretel transform the other victims back into normal children, they wheel out her giant cauldron, which she promptly falls into, gets covered in her magical boiling hot brew, turns to stone and then all of the children join hands and dance and sing around the new statute version of their tormentor/captor. I don't even know how to evaluate and process that final series of images, so I'm just going to let you linger on them in your imagination.
