To Quote "Horton Hears a Who": A Person Is a Person, No Matter How Much It Has Been Turned Into a Bird and Let Loose to Seek Its Revenge!

The title really has little if anything to do with my personal opinions—not that my personal opinions have to do with anything or that I even choose to have an opinion—but I had to start with something clever and catchy or else it might not have been recognized immediately that I was the author and then people might make the mistake of actually reading something of mine. Bear with me for a moment now while I actually ponder the subject for a moment so that I can spout more coherent nonsense and decide if I actually have a stance.

Tuna fish…
Orange juice…
Cabinets…
Crock pot…
Thyme…
Time…
Bing-ing-ing-ing-ing!

Soup's Ready!

After careful deliberation and much soup, I have determined that the most appropriate answer is. But I chose is not because the appropriate answer is always too simple…

The boy is no longer human at all, but an enchanted bird after his resurrection in the story. Reasons for this are proven by the fact that the bird does not behave humanly. When the bird sings, it is not understood, but it casts a spell upon the listeners. This spell is the wooing of them in order to secure their items, I pretend, to the point that they offer him the goods of their own accord. It is less of a question of…

Oh I give up.

He remains human the whole time. His ability to cogitate and communicate with people clearly delineates his classification as human encased in an avian exterior. He is more human than the brothers turned into birds in the other stories for multiple reasons, one of which being that he remains the guiding force of his own destiny, a necessary factor for this particular story. In the other stories the boys are no longer human because they give up their ability to interact with the world of humans. Even if they have a limited ability to interact (the boys that could turn human again for an hour a day) this interaction was limited in such a way that even when they were capable of communicating they became incapable of any meaningful interaction. This is the reason that in those stories it is completely upon the sister's character to rescue them and they disappear from the story.

The film inverts this, and I would suggest quite rightly so, in that the purpose of the film was to make the story more coherent. By making him into an actual bird, the suspension of belief of the magical, an important aspect of the film, was preserved. The film tried quite thoroughly to put the magic under scrutiny and question if it was there at all. Although the juniper tree did suddenly appear, along with the bird, the lack of his becoming an agent and character after his death allows for there still to be a question of whether it was him or not. This element is also a direct link to the stories the girl tells wherein the boy returns "knowing what the birds know" but is thereby no longer a part of the human world. Other reasons for the bird being an actual bird in this story are that the remoteness of the location did not allow for the insertion of a village nearby with the required roles to end the story in the way the Grimms did, not to mention the difficult special effects that would have been required. Also, the step-mother in the film was not meant to be evil like in the story, but a realistic person. The attempts to humanize her made the prospects for killing her vanish.

Happy Birthday to all and to all a good millstone… as the saying goes…