PIED PIPER 2023 restoration trailer

Now available on Blu-ray. https://shop-deafcrocodile.company.site/The-Pied-Piper-Blu-ray-p566081900 In the past few decades, the art of stop motion animation has seen a tremendous renaissance, beginning with films like Henry Selick’s and Tim Burton’s THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, CORALINE and CORPSE BRIDE and the work of Aardman Animation in the UK (the wildly creative “Wallace and Gromit” films). It’s continued and expanded both in TV and streaming (“Robot Chicken”) and features (FANTASTIC MR. FOX, Guillermo del Toro’s PINOCCHIO). The recent arthouse success of VFX master Phil Tippett’s nightmarish MAD GOD has stirred renewed interest in the work of the great troika of Surreal Masters of Stop Motion from the 1970s and 1980s: the Brothers Quay (STREET OF CROCODILES, 1986), Jan Švankmajer (ALICE, 1988) – and arguably the least-seen of the three, the brilliant Czech animator Jiří Barta. Born in Prague in 1948, Barta studied film at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, and began making his first stop motion animated shorts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, often using wood, fur, hair and other organic materials to create his strange and Gothic visions. His early short “The Vanished World Of Gloves” (Zaniklý svet rukavic, 1982) is a marvelous and eccentric tour through cinema history, told entirely through animated gloves. In the mid-1980s, Barta began work on his first feature – and acknowledged masterpiece -- THE PIED PIPER (KRYSAR, 1986). Based on The Pied Piper of Hamelin, is set in a dark and twisted medieval village of narrow streets and weird Gothic arches, half-CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI and half-Jan van Eyck. The money-obsessed citizens, carved out of wood blocks and speaking in an onomatopoeic babble (invented by Barta himself) are like George Grosz caricatures, literally spouting coins from their mouths instead of words. The rats are far more organic and sympathetic, made of real fur and whiskers, constantly tunneling and burrowing under the towering arches and cobblestone streets above. (In one of the film’s many surreal moments, a rat emerges from a gargoyle’s gaping maw.) For the first-time ever on Blu-ray, Deaf Crocodile and Comeback Company will be releasing Barta’s THE PIED PIPER in a newly-restored version.