The Pied Piper is a 1986 Czechoslovakian animated dark fantasy film directed by Jiří Barta. Its original Czech title is Krysař, which means "The rat catcher". The story is an adaptation of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, a fairy tale originated in medieval Germany. The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival
Plot
The film starts with the image of a mechanism beginning to work - as the gears move (behind the scenes), the sun slowly rises up over a town and a new day begins. The town, Hamelin, is shown to be one which is full of miserly and petty people, where everything is wasted and money and social rank are the first priority. The waste leads to an enormous rat infestation at night that spills out into the streets the next day. As the town leaders meet to decide on the best course of action, a stranger appears in the doorway - a hooded piper who demonstrates that with the sound of his playing he can entice rats to their deaths. The town leaders are delighted and offer him 1000 gold coins as payment if he would get rid of all of the town's rats. The piper accepts and begins walking through the city, drawing all of the rats behind him. At the same time, a jeweler, who was among the elite group of leaders, walks into a woman's home and tries to seduce her. The woman (who is the only character who does not look grotesque, implying innocence) refuses. The jeweler persists, but before he can do anything the piper passes by her house and at the sound of the music the jeweler is forced to jump out of the window. After all of the rats plunge off a cliff-side tower into a lake, the piper comes back into town, on the way once again preventing the jeweler's advances on the woman. The piper and the woman sit on a bench together as he plays a beautiful melody that is accompanied by paint-on-wood animation (a complete change of style from the rest of the film).
Finally, the piper goes to collect his promised payment. The town leaders (who are in the middle of gorging themselves on food and wine and among whom is the jeweler seen drinking and telling his sad tale of rejection to his friends) give him only a black button. The piper leaves angrily. That night, the jeweler and his drunken friends break into the woman's house as she is praying, and proceed to rape and murder her (this is implied rather than shown). The piper comes, but this time he is too late - all that he can do is close the eyes of her horrified face.
Now the piper climbs up the highest tower in the town, to the top floor where the machinery for the sun that we saw in the introduction is located. At the very top is the god Saturn, holding an hourglass. The piper and Saturn have a silent conversation, and a decision is made. All of the sand in Saturn's hourglass runs out, and the gears that make the sun rise stop working. As the now-silent day begins, the piper begins to play his pipe and leaves the tower. As he walks through the streets and the citizens hear him, they turn into rats and follow the sound, eventually jumping off the tower just as the rats did previously, the transformed jeweler being the last to jump.
The only person left is an old fisherman (who has been seen watching the city from far off earlier in the film) who comes to watch. When he gets close to the piper, however, the piper ceases to exist - his cloak, now empty of a physical being inside it, is blown away with the wind. The fisherman walks through the abandoned city and finds in one of the houses the only survivor remaining - a baby (who is still uncorrupted). He takes the baby away with him and leaves the now-empty town.
Voices
Oldřich Kaiser
Jiří Lábus
Michal Pavlíček
Vilém Čok
Production
The Pied Piper was an unusually ambitious project for the production company Kratky Film, which like other animation studios in Czechoslovakia primarily made television short films for children. Research for the film took six months. Director Jiří Barta's aim was to make an adaptation of the Pied Piper of Hamelin which captured the German spirit, and which had to be suitable for animation. The film's narrative therefore took traits from several alterations of the myth, but mainly stayed true to the version presented in the novel Krysař by Viktor Dyk. Writing the screenplay and doing technical preparations took one year.