posted on 23 Mar 2017

Nibble Nibble Mousekin : A Tale of Hansel and Gretel by Joan Walsh Anglund

If we had a category for ‘This book is very weird’ it would fit very neatly into that space. Published in the UK in 1963, a year after its release in the USA, this book by the prolific American poet and illustrator, Joan Walsh Anglund, is really a pretty unremarkable retelling of the Hansel and Gretel fairy story but it’s the illustrations that are what marks the book out as oddly idiosyncratic.

Anglund, now in her 90s, is a prolific author, illustrator and poet who has franchised her characteristic depictions of children to a number of other commercial projects – greeting cards, decorative plates and plenty of other products. The children she draws are the embodiment of a kind of ultimate innocence – disturbingly sickly sweet in my opinion and made all the more so by their pumpkin-like heads devoid of any detail, including noses and mouths. They are even more unrealistic versions of the Cabbage Patch doll if you can imagine that.

What makes this book so odd however is the way these innocents collide with a cast of adults drawn in very much more realistic terms and, in certain instances, with more than a hint of menace. The witch in the story is a genuinely terrifying character who looms over the children with malice-aforethought and you can be left in no doubt what her intentions are.

The equally odd title of this tale – Nibble Nibble Mousekin – is a bit baffling at first but when you read the text you discover these are the words muttered by the witch when she first hears Hansel and Gretel nibbling at the outside of her gingerbread house. Anglund clearly has a darker side to her imagination and I suspect this classic story gives her a great chance to exercise this more brooding element of her personality.

The colours she uses are striking and very much of the period and the full page spread of the witch giving Hansel and Gretel a treat is very typical of the style – the details of the spread of fruit, cake and biscuits are almost tangible and the witch’s menacing expression contrasts with blank expressionless faces of the children. She also uses pen and ink black and white outline drawings on a number of the pages and these are considerably less impactful than the colour ones – but doubtless cheaper to reproduce.

Anglund’s style is not really for me but I can easily see that many people would really love them – her vast sales are a confirmation of this – and I doubt I’d go out of my way to find more. But they are undoubtedly unusual and distinctly strange. Make your own mind up – there are plenty of examples out there and they’re not too expensive.

Terry Potter

March 2017