The Pied Piper

The town of Hamelin is overrun by rats. The townspeople are helpless; the merchants are still doing their accounts, the council holds meeting after meeting and nobody does anything. A stranger arrives. He plays his pipe and the rats follow him to the river. The town is saved. Then payment falls due and the town goes back on its word. The stranger plays again. This time others follow him. Jiří Barta directs. It is a Czechoslovak production made in puppet animation. No comprehensible language is used; the characters speak in invented sounds and the narrative proceeds through image. The puppets and the sets are all made of wood; the town, the buildings and the figures are of the same material, and the choice sets the register. The design is openly close to German expressionist cinema; angled structures and distorted spaces are used. The matter it treats is greed; the faces of the townspeople are not human and a parallel is drawn with the rat sections. It is not a children's animation; the register is dark and the ending hard. The music works inside the narrative and includes rock elements. Its limit is accessibility; with no dialogue the narrative stays closed in places. Who it is for: viewers who like Eastern European puppet animation and dark adaptations of fairy tales. Who it is not for: it is not suitable for children, the pace is slow, and the narrative wordless.