Studio: Walt Disney Productions
Distributor: United Artists
Produced by: Walt Disney
Short Synopsis
The town of Hamelin is overrun with rats, which breed and eat every scrap of food. The mayor offers a bag of gold to anyone who can get rid of them. A piper appears and takes the job. He plays a tune that hypnotises the rats into following him out of town. With his magic pipe he conjures a giant wheel of cheese; the rats swarm inside to eat it, and the cheese vanishes, taking every rat with it. The Piper returns for his reward, but the mayor says playing a tune is not worth a bag of gold, gives him a single coin, and the townspeople laugh at him. Furious, the Piper decides to take the town's children, to save them from growing up like their parents. The adults have locked the town gate, but the Piper's music makes the gate tear itself open, and the children follow him out to the mountains and into an enchanted Garden of Happiness, full of games and sweets, while the mayor faces the anger of the parents.
Why It Matters
- The disappearing cheese is the cleverest touch: Disney replaces the grim drowning of the rats in the legend with a magic-trick gag, and turns the abduction of the children into an escape to a paradise, a revealing example of how the studio softened folk tales while keeping their moral bite against greedy adults.
- It is one of the 1933 Silly Symphonies in full Technicolor made in the wake of Three Little Pigs, when Disney was deliberately adapting well-known stories to give its shorts the narrative pull that the pigs had proved audiences wanted. It belongs to the line of fairy-tale shorts that prepared the studio for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Notes and Trivia
- Leigh Harline, who scored it, later won Academy Awards for Pinocchio (1940).
- See also: Three Little Pigs (1933), The Goddess of Spring (1934).