The Pied Piper is a 1986 Czechoslovakian animated dark fantasy film directed by Jiří Barta.

The town, Hamelin, is shown to be one which is full of miserly and petty people, where everything is wasted and money and social rank are the first priority.

The waste leads to an enormous rat infestation at night, stealing food and valuables, that spills out into the streets the next day.

As the town leaders meet to decide on the best course of action, the hooded stranger, a piper, appears in the doorway, who demonstrates that with the sound of his playing he can entice rats to their deaths.

After all of the rats plunge off a cliff-side tower into a lake, the piper comes back into town, on the way once again preventing the jeweler's advances on the woman.

The piper and the woman sit on a bench together as he plays a beautiful melody that is accompanied by paint-on-wood animation (a complete change of style from the rest of the film).

The town leaders (who are in the middle of gorging themselves on food and wine and among whom is the jeweler seen drinking and telling his sad tale of rejection to his friends) give him only a black button.

Now the piper climbs up the highest tower in the town, to the top floor where the machinery for the sun that we saw in the introduction is located.

Director Jiří Barta's aim was to make an adaptation of the Pied Piper of Hamelin which captured the German spirit, and which had to be suitable for animation.

The film's narrative therefore took traits from several alterations of the myth, but mainly stayed true to the version presented in the novel Krysař by Viktor Dyk.

"[3] Voice acting was provided by Oldřich Kaiser, Jiří Lábus, Michal Pavlíček and Vilém Čok.

The DVD contains most of Barta's filmography (this film, A Ballad About Green Wood, The Club of the Laid Off, The Design, Disc Jockey, The Last Theft, Riddles for a Candy, The Vanished World of Gloves).

One can only hope that someday there will be a much better version of Jiri Barta: Labyrinth of Darkness that will restore his gorgeous animation to its full glory, so that we can see treasures like The Pied Piper of Hamelin and The Vanished World of Gloves as they were intended.

"[14] Keith Allen from MovieRapture.com gave the film a positive review stating, "Instead of attempting to fool us into becoming involved with persons portrayed as though they were individuals such as ourselves, Barta creates a land that exists independently of our own universe, one that so envelopes the viewer that he can forget about his own existence and submerge himself in his experience of watching the film.