Past Misdeeds: Krysar (1986)

a.k.a. The Pied Piper of Hamelin

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


The people living in the medieval town of Hamelin are full of perverse industriousness, greed in all of its forms, and narrow-minded cruelty. It's probably not an accident that the town is hit by a plague of rats hell-bent on taking away the only things the people of Hamelin love - food, money and jewels. There seems to be no way to stop the hairy plague once it has begun, so it looks as if it will be only a question of time until Hamelin's inhabitants will either all go mad (or rather even more mad than they already were in the beginning) or will have to leave their once prosperous town.

Until a stranger arrives in town. The man pulls out a pipe, and once he begins playing his instrument, the rats are compelled to follow him. He leads the animals onto the city walls from where they jump down into the surrounding moat to drown.

Afterwards, the inhabitants of the town begin anew exactly where they left off, breaking probably every religious and moral law you can imagine in the process, or at least as many of them as the movie's theoretical status as a children's movie allows. One especially unpleasant member of the town's upperclass tries to seduce the only uncorrupted girl (as easily identifiable by her puppet not looking like a nightmarish freak) in town with money and trinkets, and twice only the timely arrival of the piper saves her virtue.

The piper (or so I suppose) is not very amused by the townspeople's actions, and presents the town council with his invoice. Not surprisingly, the townies are quite unwilling to pay him, and - being not just unpleasant, but also a bit dumb - even mock their saviour openly by throwing a button at him for payment. As if that weren't enough to make anyone with magical powers pretty pissed off, the especially unpleasant man and some of his cronies have raped and murdered the innocent girl while the piper was away.

Finding the girl dead is the straw that breaks the camel's back, and the piper takes horrible vengeance, though, interestingly enough, vengeance that is quite a bit more fair to modern sensibilities than that in the original legend this is based on.

As should be clear by now, Czechoslovakian director Jiri Barta's Kysar is rather loosely based on the old German legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (or "Der Rattenfänger von Hameln", as we say around here), taking much of the initial set-up and structure of the legend, but using it for different purposes. As should also be clear, one of these different purposes is - alas - to turn the - less morally uplifting than some people assume - original into a very clear and straight moral allegory.

If you know me, you know that if there's one thing I can't abide in my art it's allegory, because allegory is nearly always a cheap and easy way for an artist to score points on the scales of "usefulness" and "moral uprightness" that only the truly bourgeois find important in their art. All too often, allegory simplifies everything and everyone. Artists using it all too often betray "minor" things like truthfulness or the knowledge of how complicated the world or people really are or the multi-dimensionality of their characters so everything can fit neatly into their allegorical (and ideological) system.

Having said that, it might come as a minor surprise when I say that I find Barta's film to be absolutely fantastic. It's not that I've suddenly discovered my love for way too simple morals (would you be surprised to hear that people aren't just absolutely good or bad? Well, Barta seems to be), but what the director does here visually and atmospherically is so convincing (and - at times - incredibly creepy) that I can accept - or at least ignore - the lazy moralizing for it.

As far as I know, there aren't that many stop motion animated movies starring deformed, angular wooden puppets and a bunch of rats (some alive and - I think - some puppets too) acting on backgrounds of angular, non-Euclidean houses that - depending on one's temperament - might make one slightly queasy with a feeling of total wrongness/weirdness (in the "weird tale" sense) that makes me wish Barta had put his talents to adapting Lovecraft. Whatever I think of the film's allegorical content, it would be pretty dishonest not to admit how impressed I was by how completely Barta's design (the director also signs responsible for the art direction) fits what he wants to say - not just on an intellectual and interpretative level, but also, more importantly, on the level of the film's emotional impact.


It's one thing to design a "boohoo, materialistic people are bad" allegory, but it is quite another one to really make a viewer see and feel one's allegory in every aspect of one's movie, be it character design, music, the decision to not have the film's character's speak in any natural language but in a disquieting gibberish (except for the pure girl, of course, who sings beautifully) or the use of disturbing camera angles. Barta is so successful at what he does here that I take his film to be a major achievement even though I feel deeply uncomfortable with the ascetic elements of its ideology (never had much of a problem with a good bit of capitalism bashing); which is something Barta has in common with some of my favourite artists (hello Mister Lovecraft, Mister Howard).