The Pied Piper (1986 Film) - Production

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.

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. He started with drawings and then made models to provide three dimensions. The puppets were intentionally designed as to appear mechanical, which would contrast with the use of living rats, to create the impression that the rats were more alive than the humans. The exceptions were the characters Agnes and the fisherman, who were given a softer design to represent a world of purity. The puppets varied in size between one and 60 centimeters. One scene in the film features two-dimensional animation in a style radically different from the rest. This segment was inspired by medieval painting on wood, and in particular the art of Jan van Eyck.

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.