The Pied Piper (1986)

image courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com

This movie rules. It’s a Czechoslovakian film, but the language the characters speak is just gibberish. And it’s amazing. If Rankin and Bass spent an evening guzzling whiskey and taking downers, it might just result in this. The handmade animation is so meticulously done, like an entire world carved into an elaborate cuckoo clock that moves with a rigid perfection. The characters have no names; they don’t say any actual words. But the way director Jiří Barta characterizes the city folk with the mechanical stiffness of their movements - jerking upright, snapping their heads, counting coins with the same repetitive twitch - turns greed itself into a kind of clockwork affliction. They don’t look like people who happen to be cruel. They look like machines built for cruelty, wound up and left running.

The rats are the real showstopper, though. Barta doesn’t animate a swarm so much as a tide, hundreds of tiny sculpted bodies pouring through the streets in a single unbroken movement, and knowing someone nudged every one of them into place, frame by frame, for weeks, makes the whole sequence feel less like animation and more like an act of devotion. Compare that to the piper’s payment scene, where the camera holds on his fingers over the pipe holes just long enough that you start to hear a melody that isn’t actually there, that your brain invents to fill the silence, and you realize how much this film trusts you to do half the work.

That paint-on-wood interlude between the jeweler and the woman is the film’s only soft moment, and it lands harder for how briefly it’s allowed to exist. Everything before and after it is grotesque - bulbous noses, sagging jowls, the whole town sculpted like it’s rotting from wealth - but that one scene is rendered almost impressionistically, brushstrokes over grain, like the film is momentarily embarrassed by its own cruelty and looks away. It doesn’t last. The murder that follows is staged with the same blunt, matter-of-fact horror as everything else, no music sting, no cutaway, just puppets doing something unspeakable to another puppet, and it’s more unsettling for how little the film dramatizes it.

And then that ending. The transformation of the townspeople into rats isn’t a special effects showpiece, it’s almost clinical, bodies folding in on themselves one by one as they march off the tower, and the stillness Barta holds beforehand does more work than any score could. No triumphant music (though the score might be my favorite part), no clear morality being underlined. Just an old man, a crying baby, and a town that’s been erased. It’s a folk tale being told by someone who doesn’t feel obligated to comfort you afterward.

It’s brutal, funny in the way only stop motion can accidentally be, and unlike anything else from its era. Barta made a movie for children out of nightmare logic and rot, and somehow it still feels like a fairy tale.

4 out of 5 Stars