Most of us probably know the fairy tale of the Pied Piper in some form, for it’s had a bewildering array of variants in all media. We’ve probably never liked its disturbing idea of the town’s children being led away by the same merry piping that rid the town of its rats. Versions of the tale often end on that sour lesson unless someone tacks on a happy ending, as in Robert Browning’s witty 1842 poem of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”. However, you’re unlikely to see any version ofThe Pied Piperso dark and not-for-kids as the one-hour film of stop-motion animation made by Czechoslovakian animatorJiříBarta in 1986.
As Barta reveals in an interview and in the Blu-ray’s pamphlet, his film failed to “get with the program” in a couple of ways. The head of Czechoslovakia’s famous animation studio at that time was a safe Communist committee-man, a former secret policeman named Kamil Pixa, which uncannily sounds like a stop-motion character. Don’t you want to keep saying the name? Kamil Pixa wrote a script based on the idea of making a pleasant fairy tale for the kiddies, and the commission was given to JiříBarta, a young, award-winning animator.
Although Pixa is duly and prominently credited as the writer of this folk horror film, don’t you believe it. Barta tossed that script because he was attracted to the retelling by the illustrious Czech writer Viktor Dyk, calledKrysarorRat-Catcher.Krysaris JiříBarta’s title, though it gets translated asThe Pied Piperfor English viewers.
As recounted in the pamphlet, Kamil Pixa first saw the finished product in a screening for the German co-producers and was apoplectic. He intended to reshoot but was replaced the next day by the son of a prominent Party official. And so it goes.
The big difference in this version from the standard fairy tale is that Barta’s The Pied Piper, like Dyk’s 1915 novel, has no children in it. Maybe they ran away already, for life is dreary and intolerable in this stony medieval town, which is all jagged Expressionist streets and crooked doorways. JiříBarta’s vision mimics a German silent Expressionist film, if those had been in color and sound. Not that there’s dialogue, for everybody talks in poetic musical gibberish like the “wonk-wonk” grown-ups in Charlie Brown cartoons.
The first half ofThe Pied Piperpresents anecdotes of vicious, greedy, and evil-minded people cheating and hurting each other in the marketplace. They’re all misers hoarding gold, and they’re all animated out of blocky wood with mechanical joints to echo the mechanism of the town clock. Some of them roll about on wheels like little toys.
This dystopia combines the horrors of Robert Wiene’sThe Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1920) with Fritz Lang’sMetropolis(1927), as filtered through medieval carving techniques. It’s as mesmerizing as any lovely, if unpleasant, dream that holds you fixed in its coils.
Meanwhile, there are rats. Now and then, we see a close-up of a real rat sniffing its nose into the camera, but mostly these are stop-motion rats undermining the town, getting into provisions, and bursting out upon the hooting and shrieking people.
Enter the piper, who’s very far from pied. A cadaverous stick wrapped in a cloak, he’s as grey as a tombstone. He watches the town from afar like an Angel of Death, or as if he’s responsible for what we see, like a wicked artist, and is only waiting for his entrance as all goes according to plan. He seems already to have an agenda.
The Pied Piper‘s ending is an apocalyptic warning, as with Sodom and Gomorrah. The town has one righteous woman who says her prayers, but unlike Lot or Noah, she’s not spared. On the contrary, her fate triggers the piper’s wrath.
When artists in the communist Eastern Bloc wanted to utter laments over living in an intellectually cramped surveillance state under military threat, they found a safe outlet in setting stories in the bad old days of the capitalist past or the war or something. JiříBarta Barta’sThe Pied Piperclearly shows the evil of fixation on money, as the minting of new gleaming coins becomes a recurring visual motif. We can see how the film emerges from its own context while pretending otherwise, but we also see how a strong artistic vision continues to apply and reverberate beyond that context.
A fascinating archival “making-of” shows the scale of The Pied Piper‘s sets and models. Caught up in the need to intellectually justify Barta’s vision, the narrator reassures the viewer that in our modern world, we’re not greedy and mean like in olden times, and that’s why it’s important for art to make us reflect on how far we’ve progressed. We hope you’ve got that.
Deaf Crocodile’s Blu-Ray of The Pied Piper is accompanied by seven JiříBarta shorts made from 1978 to 1989. They prove that Barta’s restless brilliance continually seeks new forms of expression as he comes up with different aesthetic approaches for each subject. A viewer might assume some of these shorts are the work of different artists.
Some shorts are exercises in transformation and geometry.Riddles for a Candy(Hadanky za bonbon, 1978) is about an amorphous creature whose loosely discrete parts endlessly rearrange.Discjockey(1980) examines the many circular objects in everyday life, like cups and LPs, which are presented as shiny, airbrushed cut-outs. The final circles are pills being popped into a mouth. The stop-motion hands of a live-action architect inProjekt(1981) draft a building of rectangular apartments, all the same, with cut-out figures pasted onto the line drawings.
In a witty stop-motion apotheosis, we have a delirium of shifting tones inThe Vanished World of Gloves(Zanikly svet rukavic, 1981). A live-action steam-shovel worker uncovers old films that reveal history enacted by gloves walking on their fingers: a silent slapstick chase in black and white, a romantic tragedy, a spoof of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali‘s Surrealist shortUn Chien Andalou(1929), a vision of totalitarian war, and a sci-fi film with nods to famous titles. In between reels, we see the guy’s hand reaching for a drink or a smoke.
More transformations markBallad of a Green Wood(Balada o zelenem drevu, 1984). Sticks of chopped wood (live and stop-motion) evolve magically into a weird bird flying over the forest until it finally fulfills its destiny as firewood. The final image of black smoke emerging from a chimney can’t help but evoke a sinister connotation in a Czech film.
The two last and longest of JiříBarta’s shorts included here use abandoned buildings to comment on the ghastliness of life and how the forgotten past retains the power to waylay our modern ambitions. I believe the most ravishingly beautiful film of the whole set isThe Last Theft(Posledni lup, 1987), a live-action, dialogue-free, sinister dream about a thief who breaks into a house and discovers a seductive world of ghosts, vampires, and mad science.
Perhaps more grotesque is the repetitious lives of decaying articulated mannequins inThe Club of the Laid Off(Klub odlozenych, 1989). Their raucous antics ask us to consider the extent to which we act as mannequins or to which we’re destined to be cast off ourselves. Both films combine a droll comic sensibility with an eye for the unsettling.
Czechoslovakia has yielded several brilliant and famous animators, from Jiri Trnka to Karel Zeman to Jan Svankmajer, and JiříBarta deserves a spot in their constellation. The eight films in this set were first issued on DVD by Kimstim in 2014, and that’s well out of print. Deaf Crocodile released the first disc of this newly restored set in 2023, and that’s out of print, too.
The new two-disc Blu-ray comes in a standard edition or as a Deluxe Limited Edition with an informative booklet and slipcase. Either incarnation makes a comprehensive showcase of this artist, who’s still around to discuss his work in two lengthy interviews. Fans of animation or Eastern European strangeness shouldn’t hesitate.