Peter in Magicland

Mr Sumsemann, a cockchafer, lost his sixth leg many years ago: a thief cut down the tree he lived in, and the night fairy banished both the man and the leg to the moon. Only two children who have never harmed an animal can break that spell. Playing his violin, the beetle turns up in the room of Peterchen and Anneliese, the two of them agree at once to travel to the moon with him, and the journey begins. Waiting for them up there is the man in the moon, who holds the leg. The animation moves without ever breaking the logic of the tale it comes from; kindness here is not a lesson but the condition of being allowed to go at all. Wolfgang Urchs’s eighty minute German animation was adapted from the classic children’s story by Gerdt von Bassewitz and completed in 1990.