The Pied Piper (1986)

Another film that landed in just the other day, so I haven’t taken too long to get to it either… I thought this might be the first animated film in this project, but forgot I’d already watched Adventures of Prince Achmed and the most recent Wallace & Gromit film, so it’s nothing of the sort; it is, however, a markedly different prospect to either of those. I think the story is well enough known that I don’t need to explain it, except that director Jiri Barta drew upon a somewhat different version of it by another Czech author; in this instance, Hamelin is sorely beset by rats, but they really deserve it, even before the piper shows up the burghers of Hamelin come across as, frankly, kind of scummy. (There’s no intelligible dialogue in the film, just a sort of vaguely “Germanic” gibberish, but you don’t need words to understand how godawful the people are.) This is an astonishing piece of design; Barta avowedly drew on German expressionist style, and if the human characters in Caligari had looked like the buildings in that film, I imagine the result might’ve looked like this:

An amazing thing to look at, as you may tell from these screenshots I took, albeit a bleak thing too; there’s a bit of sexual violence in this I don’t think you get from the more child-friendly versions of the tale. But what really stops me being more enthusiastic about what is, otherwise, an obviously remarkable piece of work, is, well, the animal cruelty (the human figures might’ve been puppets, but the rats are the real thing for the most part). I don’t actually have evidence that there was any during the production, but… well, just look at the film, there’s quite a few scenes that I can’t imagine were achieved without at least some. The rats might’ve been real, but I doubt they were all alive while they were on screen. It’s obviously not on the level of Italian cannibal cinema, but somehow I feel a kind of unpleasantness about the whole thing that goes beyond the film’s inherently sour tone… and the film is really good and worth seeing; I’d just feel better knowing the rats were OK…