Welcome to the town of Hamelin, where the sun slowly rises above the horizon, and it’s time to begin a new day! Except, every new day in this town is one filled with misery and pettiness, as the townspeople of Hamelin are all a miserable, narcissistic bunch of lowlifes. Everything that matters in this town is money and social rank, and people’s gluttony and waste is enormous. The result is a rat infestation, where the rats are having their fun at night and steal both food and other valuables. Things get worse and worse, until a mysterious hooded man arrives in town. This man is a piper, and he demonstrates to the town leaders that the sound of his playing can entice rats to their deaths. How wonderful! The rat problem is soon to be gone an all the assholes in town can go back to their same shit as usual. They offer the piper 1000 gold coins as payment for the job, and so he starts playing and gets rid of the rats.
You probably know this story, of course. The Pied Piper of Hamelin is an old tale dating back to the Middle ages, and have forever stood as a warning of the importance of paying your debts when due. Because the Piper, despite getting rid of the rats and doing the job, doesn’t get paid. When the townspeople have gotten their problem solved, they decide to not pay him after all, causing him to exact his revenge. In the original story he lures all the children away from town, in the same way he did with the rats. In this movie, there’s a different twist on this old tale.
This version of The Pied Piper (Czech title: Krysař) is a 1986 Czechoslovak animated dark fantasy film, directed by Jiří Barta. It was a very ambitious project, where other animation studios in Czechoslovakia mainly made short films for television, usually aimed at children. As someone born in the 80’s and growing up in Norway, these Czech animated shorts were often featured on our local children’s programs on TV, mainly our public broadcaster NRK, with some of the main ones being Krtek and Pat a Mat. Kratky Film was the production company behind The Pied Piper (which is also the company that helped produce Krtek and Pat a Mat). Research for the film took six months, while screenplay and technical preparations took a year.
This movie is certainly a gorgeous and artistic piece of work. The art design is heavily influenced by German Expressionism and medieval German art, which of course is perfect for this film. And the puppets – oh man – they really are something else! Pure nightmare fuel, but in the greatest sense. I can imagine if I saw this as a child, my dreams would probably be really, really weird for the next days. The people of Hamelin look just as ugly as their personalities, which I suppose is very much the point as they’re horrible people through and through. The puppets were also intentionally designed to appear very mechanical to make them even less human, a contrast to the use of several living rats in the film. This is of course an artistic choice to make the rats seem more alive than the humans. There’s no language in the film, so the “dialogue“ is delivered through physical gestures, grunts, mumblings and other sounds.
Aside from the pure uncanny valley territory from the puppets, the whole film has a certain dark and disturbing atmosphere all over. The backgrounds, puppets, rats, music and everything creates this weird and slightly surreal nightmare-feeling to it all. Just taking a quick look at it should make most people realize this isn’t something you put on for the kids, but it’s also not just because of the visual style. There’s several themes here, including some really dark ones when it comes to another of the Piper’s main reasons for taking revenge on the entire town, that’s definitely not suitable for a younger audience.
The Pied Piper is an awesome art-house stop-motion animated film for adults, and definitely one you should check out if you want something strange, nightmarish and oddly beautiful! The movie is available on some streaming sites, including Tubi. A restored version of the film was released in 2023 by Deaf Crocodile, which is the film’s first official Blu-Ray release.
Director: Jirí Barta
Writer: Kamil Pixa
Original title: Krysar
Country & year: Czechoslovakia/West Germany, 1986
Voice actor: Oldřich Kaiser, Jiří Lábus, Michal Pavlícek, Vilém Cok
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0174834/
