Hans Christian Andersen isn't really all that good of a story teller.... He wrote pretty mediocre, sometimes exceedingly short stories which seem to be lumped into the group "Fairy Tales" because they aren't good enough to be anything else. The more of his work I read, the less impressed I am with him. The Little Mermaid, one of his more famous works, is a great example of he does. It isn't good in any reasonable sense of the word: it's filled with oversights, such as references to the mermaids as "tiptoeing" though they don't have toes; it doesn't consider what mermaids would think or believe as a people, they are instead the most one-dimensional characters possible to create; it it's supposed to be a children's story, it's incredibly dark; this man "Needs an Editor"!
Maybe I'm too hard on the children's tale teller, but then I've read some amazing children's literature. Hans does have potential. Maybe this is why adaptations are popular: another artist can take his work and make it into something good by using all the threads he makes but just leaves hanging and then taking out all the crap that doesn't make sense. Editing the hell out of it and you've got yourself a good tale.
The Ugly Duckling the best work of his I have read so far. It's as depressing as everything else he wrote, but it doesn't have quite the internal flaws that characterize most of his work. I'd go so far as to say the Ugly Duckling is "Enjoyable". There are some things he could have used as foreshadowing and used again later and didn't, but it's an overall minor problem constrained to the ending.
I suppose Andersen did write in the mid 1800's, and I suppose he did just write "fairy tales", and part of the problem could be the translation, but I'm not sure any of these are really a good excuse, besides the last, which could be partly to blame, but not entirely.
Then again, he's not any worse than Grimm.
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