As a kid, I wondered what "pied" meant - it means multicolored, I soon learned - but the mystery of the Pied Piper of Hamelin goes deeper than that unfamiliar word. The story is hundreds of years old, and its most famous literary versions come from the Brothers Grimm and the poet Robert Browning in the 19th century. Is it based on a real historical event - maybe an epidemic or famine that killed many children and devastated a town? Nobody knows for certain, and you won't get the facts from Disney's colorful 1933 cartoon, titled simply The Pied Piper. But you will get a lively animated treat.

The tale takes place in a village with such a huge rodent population that the citizens decide to take drastic measures. When a traveling musician says he can lure the rats permanently out of town, the mayor promises to give him a bag of gold when the job is done. The piper is sensationally good - his single pipe sounds like a whole ensemble - and sure enough, the critters fall instantly under its spell. After leading them outside the village gate, he makes them disappear for good.

Mission accomplished! But the townspeople pay only a tiny fraction of the promised fee, so the piper does a similar vanishing trick with the town's children. In the story as it's traditionally told, he leads the rodents to a river, where they drown, and takes the children to a cave or mountaintop, from which they'll never return. In the Disney version, we get a feel-good variation on the legend. The piper disappears the pesky rodents - who look like mice, not rats - by conjuring up a giant Swiss cheese and making it vanish after they leap happily into its holes. Then he brings the children to a sort of magical theme park where fun, games, and candy canes are everywhere.

Disney gives an upbeat moral to the actions of the piper, who doesn't lead the children away out of revenge, but to save them from growing up to be greedy chiselers like their parents. A spirited song on the soundtrack narrates the cartoon, which was made for the Silly Symphony series, and Disney's artists keep the screen jumping with marvelously detailed animation that makes you feel like you've followed the piper right into that magical theme park.

Director: Wilfred Jackson
Producer: Walt Disney
Story: Webb Smith, Ted Sears
Music: Leigh Harline
Technicolor-8m.

by David Sterritt