only a black button. The piper leaves angrily. That night, the jeweler and his drunken friends break into the woman's house as she is praying, and proceed to rape and murder her (this is implied rather than shown). The piper comes, but this time he is too late - all that he can do is close the eyes of her horrified face. 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. At the very top is the god Saturn, holding an hourglass. The piper and Saturn have a silent conversation, and a decision is made. All of the sand in Saturn's hourglass runs out, and the gears that make the sun rise stop working. As the now-silent day begins, the piper begins to play his pipe and leaves the tower. As he walks through the streets and the citizens hear him, they turn into rats and follow the sound, eventually jumping off the tower just as the rats did previously, the transformed jeweler being the last to jump. The only person left is an old fisherman (who has been seen watching the city from far off earlier in the film) who comes to watch. When he gets close to the piper, however, the piper ceases to exist - his cloak, now empty of a physical being inside it, is blown away with the wind. The fisherman walks through the abandoned city and finds in one of the houses the only survivor remaining - a baby (who is still uncorrupted). He takes the baby away with him and leaves the now-empty town. Voices Oldřich Kaiser Jiří Lábus Michal Pavlíček Vilém Čok Production The Pied Piper was an unusually ambitious project for the production company Kratky Film, which like other animation studios in Czechoslovakia primarily made television short films for children. Research for the film took six months. 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. Writing the screenplay and doing technical preparations took one year. The art design was based on German Expressionism and