The Girl Without Hands (French: La Jeune Fille sans mains — "The Young Girl Without Hands") is a 2016 French animated drama film directed, written, edited, and animated (alone by himself) by Sébastien Laudenbach in his feature debut. The film is based on The Brothers Grimm fairy tale of the same name (Das Mädchen ohne Hände). It features the voices of Anaïs Demoustier, Jérémie Elkaïm, Philippe Laudenbach, Olivier Broche, Françoise Lebrun, Sacha Bourdo, and Elina Löwensohn.
When the poor miller (voiced by Olivier Broche) meets a stranger, who is actually a devil (voiced by Philippe Laudenbach) in disguise, the stranger offers him riches in exchange for whatever he found standing behind the mill. Behind the mill is an apple tree, but what the miller didn't know that his daughter (voiced Anaïs Demoustier) was playing on the tree branch. The miller, his wife (voiced by Françoise Lebrun), and his daughter did become wealthy, but he doesn't want to sell his daughter to the devil. Devil eventually reappears to collect the young girl, but finds her too clean to take. He angrily orders the miller to cut off her hands, and the young girl consents. Even then, the young girl makes her arm stumps clean with just her teardrops, and the Devil still cannot collect her. The young girl angrily chooses to leave the mill. Later on, the girl enters into the pear garden owned by the prince (voiced by Jérémie Elkaïm), who fell in love with her and they get married. However, the devil is still wants the girl no matter what, and manipulates the prince's servant (voiced by Sacha Bourdo) into his bidding while the prince is away for the war.
As experimental as the presentation gets with its use of brush strokes and abstract imagery, this animated film takes the nearly Truer to the Text approach to the original Brothers Grimm's fairy tale. It play all of the gnarly aspects of the original story very straight and refuse to be Disneyfied - as some would expect from western animated movies based on old European folklores.
This movie provides examples of:
- Adaptation Expansion: The devil only appears in the first act of the story but disappears. Here, he is the main Big Bad of the story, and wants to get the girl's soul no matter what, even go far as attacking the girl's son in front of his parents.
- Adapted Out: The prince's mother from some editions of the original story is absent in this adaptation.
- Composite Character: The evil queen (and the girl's mother-in-law and the prince's mother) in the original story is Adapted Out, but composited with the Devil as he was the one tempering with the prince's letter.
- Deranged Animation: The animation has no solidity but only with characters made up paint brushstrokes. This gives the director an advantage to make the characters morph into anything and expresses strong emotions.
- Disneyesque: Inverted. All of characteristic you would expect from the Walt Disney Studio animations based on fairy tales along with countless imitators were done in a polar opposite direction. All of the characters' facial design look more grounded than distorted with large eyes. All characters are drawn in brush strokes rather than in solids. The background environments were painted to look like water color paintings overlaying each other instead of solid acrylic/oil paintings.
- Driven to Suicide: The fate of the miller - as he watched his wife killed by the dogs and forced to chop his daughter's hands.
- Truer to the Text: A few differences aside as noted above, this film adaptation is just as dark and violent as the original story. It not only follows the plot point beat by beat, but plays all of the grimmer aspects very straight and averts being disneyfied.
