The Pied Piper (Jiří Barta, 1986)

Presented with a recorded introduction by director Jiří Barta

Wheelchair accessible | English subtitles | Pay-what-you-can tickets (£2–12)

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Master Czech animator Jiří Barta provides a nightmarish and brooding adaptation of the original German medieval fairy tale, in a virtuosic display of stop-motion animation.

Set in an unknown medieval town, The Pied Piper follows its corrupt residents whose lives are punctuated by the mechanical rhythms of money, trade, wealth and exploitation. Hedonism and consumption dominate their everyday lives – in particular the town’s various officials, who often revel and drink into the night. When a rat infestation begins to plague the town, threatening their various riches and way of life, the town calls upon the hooded figure of the Pied Piper to banish these rats forever with his magical flute. Yet, when the townspeople’s greed catches over them at the expense of the piper, they must face very grim consequences.

The Pied Piper is a landmark work of animation that boldly reinvents one of the darkest fairy tales of Europe, adopting painstaking, meticulous animation techniques in the form of wood-carving and engraving to achieve this. In many respects, the film’s spatially disjointed and often illogical setting recalls the visual language of German Expressionism (e.g. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) and Northern Renaissance art, which Barta cites as major aesthetic influences. Through these means, The Pied Piper becomes a haunting universal critique of all society and its various iterations throughout history, including our own and our race towards self-destruction and annihilation.

Content notes: blood, minor depictions of violence towards animals, implied sexual activity, references to sexual violence

Host or Publisher Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival