THE BEARSKINNER

Accompanied by broadly sketched, loosely brushed watercolors is the Grimms' romantic story of the penniless ex-soldier who takes up the devil's challenge to go unwashed and uncombed and cloaked in a bearskin for seven years--and, nonetheless, Beauty-and-the-Beast-like, wins a worthy, wealthy bride. The pictures have a certain artistic elan but--in the absence of scene-setting detail and developed compositions--no great pictorial interest and, moreover, virtually no dramatic impact, fearful or tender or otherwise. Among fairy-tale picturizations, the next thing to a washout.