The Pied Piper

The Pied Piper (1986)

Krysař

A darkly brilliant stop-motion adaptation of The Pied Piper of Hamelin about a plague of rats that punish townsfolk corrupt with greed. One of the most ambitious Czech animation projects of the 1980s, notable for its unusual dark art direction, innovative animation techniques and use of a fictitious language.

Date of release
1986-07-29
TMDB
7.5 / 10 (86)
Runtime
53m
Genres
Animation, Fantasy, Drama, Horror
Director
Jiří Barta

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Dealing with the Pied Piper of Hameln
  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 1

The Pied Piper is a 1986 Czechoslovak animated dark fantasy film directed by Jiří Barta. 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.

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 art design was based on German Expressionism and medieval German art conventions. Barta said: "This element has actually solved certain spatial problems in that part of the mediaeval canon is that the important figures are big, and secondary figures are small. So it has solved the whole problem of space, and justifies an illogicality – a lack of logic – about the world of the film." Barta designed the puppets and sets himself.

Filming took one year and after that the sound was added in post-production. The language spoken in the film is fictitious and not supposed to be literally understood by anybody. According to Barta, the language was "somewhat based on German, but the main emphasis was on the rhythm and the onomatopoeic quality of the language." Voice acting was provided by Oldřich Kaiser, Jiří Lábus, Michal Pavlíček and Vilém Čok.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended