Die Sieben Raben (1937)

aka The Seven Ravens

Closely following the version of the fairy tale as written down by the Brothers Grimm, this early example – the Internet tells me it is the third of its kind but counting firsts has never been its strength – of a puppet stop motion animated film tells the tale of a girl who learns from her parents that she once had seven brothers. Her brothers were turned into ravens and flew away after her father muttered an unkind wish when they didn’t come back with the water for the (then) baby girl’s emergency baptism they were sent to catch from the nearest well. Apparently, there have been unkind words among their neighbours about the whole affair ever since – turns out, in the realm of fairy tales, this is not the sort of occurrence to produce horror but gossip.

Anyway, once the girl learns about these matters from her mother, she sets out to put thing right and find their brothers, for she has the heightened sense of responsibility that in today’s pop culture would combine perfectly with a spandex costume. Ergo, she wanders off into the woods telling everyone she meets plaintively that she’s looking for her brothers. Eventually, she encounters a fairy (the girl calls her “good” but I dunno). The fairy explains that the raven brothers (brother ravens?) are now living in a mountain of glass but she will turn them back into humans and send them home if the girl swears to not speak for seven years and weave seven shirts for her seven brothers. The girl, clearly going for saintliness here, agrees, and moves into a tree where she befriends animals and spins, spins, spins. Until six years later, the local ruler comes upon her, is instantly smitten with her beauty and poise, and makes her his wife. Note to the modern viewer: she seems pretty okay with it. This, not surprisingly, is only the beginning of more troubles and suffering.

The brothers Ferdinand and Hermann Diehl were pioneers of puppet stop motion animation in Germany – and not just here – working together from 1929 until 1970 (with a couple of things done by a single brother alone afterwards), mostly making their mark through fairy tale adaptations like this one but not shying away from other source materials. If you are a German of a certain age, you’ll probably have vague childhood memories about having seen something they’ve done on TV when you were little.


And the brothers’ work is well worth remembering. Their version of stop motion isn’t quite as slick as what later creators in the style would deliver, a certain stiffness coming from the more traditional puppets they are working with as well as from their decision to give their puppets animated mouths but keep the rest of their faces still and unmoving. To me, however, watching something like Die Sieben Raben is still totally engrossing. In part, it’s because this, like the best of the Diehls’ work I’ve encountered (though not at all like everything they ever did) doesn’t try to play over their source material’s sombre and upsetting elements to console a family audience. In fact, it’s exactly the sombre and sometimes even upsetting tone that’s responsible for most of the surprising emotional the impact of the film, and I assume very much the point of the whole affair. This is not so much a tale of wonder but one of suffering and endurance by a saintly woman, closer in spirit to the female-centric melodrama of a couple of decades later than you’d expect from a stop motion puppet fairy tale. It is also a film that realizes that fairies in folklore are utter pricks with a decided sense of self-righteous cruelty; and as in folklore, it’s best to avoid telling the fairy you’re having business with that.