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landingtree- and it wasn’t the sort of thing I expected at all. A bit like when someone up the hill put on Akira, which I knew as ‘Maybe an anime of some kind?’ and which caused me to go ‘Holy heck what is happening’ within the first ten seconds.
Jiří Barta’s stop-motion Czech pied piper film from the eighties is wild. All the people and the town are grotesque and characterful, angular like robots or suits of armour: in fact they’re carved from wood. The main things that look organic are the rats. The film starts with slow scenes of people going about their business in Hamlin, with the rats gradually rising around them, eating scraps the town’s greedy rich men throw away.
The Pied Piper story as I know it seems a strange one to add additional motivation to. Here, the Piper falls in love with a woman of the town; when he’s sent away without pay, he goes not to take his vengeance at once, but to her, only to find that she has been killed by her horrible suitor and his gang of thugs. That is when he sets about his vengeance, making a pact with a being which sits upon the town clock and might be Death or Time.
Surprise additional murder of women seems an extra strange thing to add to a story structured around the Piper *already* having a perfectly good thing to seek vengeance for. It’s not as though his response is any more proportionate, even to this worse crime.
Almost no children appear in this film. I’d wondered if the love sideplot was going to lead to the town’s women - or even just that one woman - being charmed away by his pipe instead, and without her murder it's implied that that's what would've happened. But no: everyone in the town is called to his pipe, and they turn into rats as they go, dying like the other rats in the water. This leads to some wonderful/terrible images of rats with angular human heads. It also reduces the aspect of the story that’s a lesson: after this version of the story, no one is left around to say “We really should have paid the piper.”
I find this marvellous to look at, and have recommended it to a particular friend who ‘grotesque beautiful handcrafted depictions of people at their trades’ seems particularly in the wheelhouse of.
Oh, and individual rats are characterised - one rat likes jewellery and sleeps on a bed of it. Alas for the fate of jewellery rat.
Jiří Barta’s stop-motion Czech pied piper film from the eighties is wild. All the people and the town are grotesque and characterful, angular like robots or suits of armour: in fact they’re carved from wood. The main things that look organic are the rats. The film starts with slow scenes of people going about their business in Hamlin, with the rats gradually rising around them, eating scraps the town’s greedy rich men throw away.
The Pied Piper story as I know it seems a strange one to add additional motivation to. Here, the Piper falls in love with a woman of the town; when he’s sent away without pay, he goes not to take his vengeance at once, but to her, only to find that she has been killed by her horrible suitor and his gang of thugs. That is when he sets about his vengeance, making a pact with a being which sits upon the town clock and might be Death or Time.
Surprise additional murder of women seems an extra strange thing to add to a story structured around the Piper *already* having a perfectly good thing to seek vengeance for. It’s not as though his response is any more proportionate, even to this worse crime.
Almost no children appear in this film. I’d wondered if the love sideplot was going to lead to the town’s women - or even just that one woman - being charmed away by his pipe instead, and without her murder it's implied that that's what would've happened. But no: everyone in the town is called to his pipe, and they turn into rats as they go, dying like the other rats in the water. This leads to some wonderful/terrible images of rats with angular human heads. It also reduces the aspect of the story that’s a lesson: after this version of the story, no one is left around to say “We really should have paid the piper.”
I find this marvellous to look at, and have recommended it to a particular friend who ‘grotesque beautiful handcrafted depictions of people at their trades’ seems particularly in the wheelhouse of.
Oh, and individual rats are characterised - one rat likes jewellery and sleeps on a bed of it. Alas for the fate of jewellery rat.
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