The Pied Piper 1985

The film opens with the image of a mechanism coming to life—gears turning behind the scenes—as the sun climbs over the town and a new day begins. The town, Hamelin, is depicted as a place ruled by penny-pinching minds and petty ambitions, where money and social rank take precedence over community well‑being. As the day begins to unfold, a terrible wake of waste and greed accelerates, and a night‑time infestation of rats spills into the streets, gnawing at food and valuables alike. The piper, a tall, hooded figure, steps into view just as the crisis peaks, and his entrance signals a strange and troubling shift in the town’s fate. The piper, voiced by Jiří Lábus, is both a lure and a judgment, using his music to bend reality to his will.

From the start, the town’s leaders—consumed by gluttony and the pursuit of status—watch the crisis unfold with anxious eyes. The piper demonstrates his power by guiding the rats to their doom with a single, haunting melody, drawing them through the streets and toward a deadly fall. As the rats leap to their deaths, a sense of eerie order returns to the town—yet it is a hollow calm. Among the town’s elite, a jeweler appears in a woman’s home, attempting to press a predatory advance; the woman is the sole figure who does not appear grotesque, a quiet emblem of innocence in a world gone coarse. The piper’s music interrupts the jeweler again, and the man is driven to jump from a window, forced away by the unseen force of the melody.

After the rodents are vanquished, the piper resumes his walk through the city, and the woman and the piper share a brief, intimate moment on a bench as he plays a beautiful tune. This moment is accompanied by a striking visual shift—paint-on-wood animation—marking a rare stylistic departure from the rest of the film and underscoring the surreal, almost dreamlike quality of their encounter.

When the time comes to collect his payment, the piper is offered a mere black button instead of the promised 1000 gold coins, a petty taint on a job well done. Enraged, he accepts his fate and departs in silence, but the ugliness of the town’s greed does not end there. That night, the jeweler and his drunken friends force their way into the woman’s home as she prays, and a brutal act unfolds—rape and murder are implied rather than shown. The piper arrives again, but this time his intervention comes too late, and all he can do is close the woman’s eyes, a haunting reminder of lost innocence and the town’s collapse into violence.

Driven by the loss and the town’s moral rot, the piper ascends to the highest tower where the sun’s machinery is housed. At the top, Saturn holds an hourglass, and the two engage in a silent exchange that seals a cruel fate: all the sand drains away, the gears freeze, and the sun’s light stalls. With the day suddenly quiet, the piper begins to play once more, and the townspeople—now transformed—become rats, drawn to the sound of his pipe and wandering the streets in a new, grim procession. The transformation culminates with the jeweler, the last among them to leap.

Only a lone old fisherman, who had been watching from a distance, remains as the town empties. When the piper vanishes, his cloak collapses into the wind, leaving no trace of the musician’s presence. The fisherman steps into the ruined streets and discovers the town’s last survivor—a baby, untouched by corruption. He takes the child under his care and exits the desolate city, carrying with him the fragile spark of life that remains in a place emptied of its former humanity.

The film features a layered soundscape and a deliberate pacing that invites reflection on greed, power, and the costs of turning away from one another. The visual language shifts between stark, grotesque caricature and tender, painterly moments, highlighting the stark contrasts between a community’s fear and its rare displays of innocence and grace. In the end, the story leaves viewers with a quiet, unsettling ambiguity: the price of a town’s moral decay and the fragile hope carried by a single surviving infant.

Other voices in the production are provided by Oldřich Kaiser, Vilém Čok, and Michal Pavlíček. Their contributions help shape the film’s unusual soundscape and character palette, underscoring the collaborative nature of this distinctive retelling of a familiar tale.