The Grimm Variations retells six classic fables, with dreary, cynical, and grim spins on each one. The animated anthology series is now streaming on Netflix.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Episode 1: Cinderella
Miss Tsuruko, a Geisha, is proposed by Viscount Otawara. She moves in with her two daughters, Sawako and Makiko, to his house.
Viscount’s daughter from his first wife is Kiyoko, the one who desires a new mother and sisters. She also has a doll that is alive, but to others, it’s just a normal doll, much like its owner, who the sisters take for an obedient little girl.
However, Kiyoko is a psychopathic manipulator and mastermind. They soon realize it when they see how Kiyoko manipulates everyone into thinking the girls are diabolical and unscrupulous masterminds and harassing her.
Kiyoko kills her father after he decides to send off the girls, a decision he comes to after he sees the sisters treating his blood daughter so unfairly so frequently. She makes his death look like an accident.
She later kills her stepmother after years of making her fall ill with the fake medicine she feeds her. The sisters hatch a scheme to get out when they get an invitation to a ball.
There, they’re again made to look like the two most abusive sisters to Kiyoko, who enchants the count’s son Masataka. Later, Masataka visits them and Kiyoko works up her manipulative tricks again.
Masataka is fed up with the two sisters who he thinks deserve nothing and for their continued mistreatment of Kiyoko, he throws them out of the house.
Sawako and Makiko lose their mother but gain freedom at last. Count’s son Masataka eventually marries Kiyoko.
Kiyoko turns her attention to Masataka, a new plaything for her to entertain herself with for the days ahead.
Episode 2: Little Red Riding Hood
Gray is a cold-blooded, psycho-sexual freak with extreme perversions for real blood and flesh, and he satisfies his inhumane cravings by luring in his targets and brutalizing them like a wild beast.
He is part of the elite class who lives in a city entirely enveloped by an AR, made possible by nanomachines. In such a dystopian setting, he longs for the real deal, and preys upon the weak and unsuspecting to do so.
He’s also part of the Wolf’s Club, a group of like-minded wealthy brutes such as Gray, who use their privilege to drench themselves in the blood of their victims.
Gray’s insatiable hunger for blood can cause even the privileged group members trouble, so Mr. Brown suggests a visit to Madam, down in the slums.
He meets Madam, and asks her for a Wolf’s Night, as he wishes to hunt for the real deal. He asks for her service in providing him with a Little Red Riding Hood, and she hooks him up with one — a girl named Scarlet.
He tries to lure in Scarlet by beating up his harasser outside of a party. She takes him to her house after initial disinterest and reluctance. He’s taken away by how real all of it is, and the prospect of devouring this girl excites him.
However, the tables turn and Scarlet turns out to be a dark person with the same depraved tastes and tendencies as Gray.
She knocks him out and when he regains consciousness, he’s subjected to the same dissections, stabbings, and dismembering like he used to take so much delight in.
The prey becomes the predator and the sheep turns out to be the wolf.
Episode 3: Hansel & Gretel
Hansel and Gretel are two of many kids in an orphanage run by a couple that the kids call Papa and Mama. All children are prohibited from crossing the fence to go out into the woods.
Hansel and Gretel continually make trouble and when even numerous detentions won’t deter them, Papa and Mama punish them by sending them to the forest, where they must spend a whole night.
They venture deep into the forest and happen upon a hut inside which they find sweets. The old woman who offers the treats, tells them about the ends of the world and implores them to seek it.
Hansel does, and returns to the old woman later, telling her about the invisible wall he touched outside the orphanage fence. She then gives him and Gretel gems to find their way out.
They use these gems late at night, after sneaking out of the building, and a portal opens before them. They enter through it to eventually end up in a spaceship that they realize they’ve been in all this time, floating through space.
The old woman reveals they are all part of the children that the humans left to be groomed and trained by robots like her and Mama-Papa until they become mature enough to survive on their own, which is when they’re sent to the inhabitable planets.
Apart from Mama, Papa, and the old woman being robots, Hansel is shocked and moved to find that his sister Gretel has been a figment of his imagination all this time.
With tears, he part ways with her, stepping into a shuttle that takes him to an inhabitable planet where some of the kids who had previously disappeared at the orphanage, show up and greet him.
Episode 4: The Elves and the Shoemaker
N was called the wonder boy in the literary world. He’s a washed-up author now.
Once bestselling, he has reached a creative burnout, and yet his arrogance has made him alone, as he grits his teeth at everyone else for being beneath him.
One night, he meets a small girl who asks him to finish the story he left midway, after calling it boring, and his existence pathetic.
The next day, when he wakes up and exits the hangover, he finds a manuscript with his own handwriting, but he doesn’t remember writing it. He submits it to the editor regardless.
The editor meets him and raves about the manuscript endlessly. His work is accepted, he is given advance payments, and the short story is published and received with great success.
More and more editors crowd at his doorstep, demanding other works. He can’t remember writing these manuscripts on topics he knows he would write but hasn’t, ever.
What’s more, is that he doesn’t relate to the work, and can’t get the hype behind them. Anyhow, he begins accepting this absurd turn of events and becomes complacent in the overnight success these manuscripts bring him.
He’s met by the same girl one night, in the same backwater area that he now dreads. He realizes he’s still there and nothing has changed. He can’t accept this lowly world with people who are beneath him.
The girl gives up trying to change his mind and make him finish the novel he wanted to. He doesn’t think he can and after realizing that this prison of a life is his own making, and lack of gratefulness, he takes his own life.
Episode 5: The Town Musicians of Bremen
Sheriff Dog, nicknamed Mad Dog, is fired for her hard-nosed sense of justice.
Donkey and Cat are discarded by their employers too.
The three form a band as their shared societal rejection brings them all together.
On their way to the town called Bremen, they meet a poor girl in rags and with a stomach that growls with hunger.
She warns them from going to Bremen because the saloon there is the base for the notorious outlaws who go by the title of “Wade brothers.” She works as the lookout for them.
The trio enters a bar and orders food. Instead, they get intimidation, haggling, and harassing attempts from the Wade brothers.
Mad Dog kills one of the Wades before the rest of the gang leaves. The eldest Wade brother is informed and the gang returns to the bar for revenge.
A battle ensues and the little lookout girl the trio met on their way turns on the eldest Wade when he offers her a pardon if she kills Mad Dog. Instead, she points the gun at him; she wants to place herself where she belongs.
Mad Dog prevents the girl from killing the man, though, and does the job herself. Meanwhile, the rest of the trio wipes out the rest of the Wade brothers’ gang. The four women start working at the same bar, living in a place where they all belong, together.
Episode 6: Pied Piper of Hamelin
Maria, a bright, mostly nonchalant girl under 17 is bored out of her mind attending school where the teacher teaches the same simple math she already is proficient in.
To escape this monotony, she turns to her grandmother, who’s the strict and orthodox head of the village referred to by all as the Grand Code.
She is alright with marriage if it means she gets to flee the current state of things, and she doesn’t mind that she isn’t 17 yet — the age at which all girls are married in the village.
Meanwhile, the sexually repressed math teacher obsessively likes Maria and wants to marry her himself. He’s visited by a hooded stranger one day, who offers a picture of two lovers about to kiss each other.
In a village where the Grand Code has forbidden everything from music, lewd paintings, and even anything marginally recreational, a picture like that is very taboo.
The math teacher eventually stops the stranger and kidnaps her, locking her up in the basement and using the picture later to entice Maria. He wants her to ditch Lucas, the boy she’s to be married to and choose him.
The picture stirs Maria to a profound degree and she even offers her virginity to the teacher if he lets her meet the traveler. They have sex while the traveler escapes the captivity and Maria follows after, listening to the stirring flute playing.
She chooses the traveler and the escapes to a world of new possibilities, both good and bad, instead of remaining in the regressive, small village under Grand Code’s conservative regime.
The closing shots have her recite her story to a little girl sitting beside her in a public bench, besotted with this red-haired, hooded girl. Maria has become the traveler herself.
Also Read: The Grimm Variations review: Fantastic interpretations of beloved fables