SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Humbersi The first must-see film of the year.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Caryl It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

OllieSuave-007 A Silly Symphony where a piper saves a town from rat infestation. However, he gets mad and takes revenge when the King refuses to pay him. Lots of singing and sappy songs, with weird-acting characters and over-imaginative scenes. Definitely one of the more whimsical cartoons from Disney.Grade C+

MissSimonetta That Disney did not want to keep the sinister nature of the original poem is okay with me, but they could have improved this insipid ending. I was once in a musical children's production of The Pied Piper and the ending had the townspeople repenting and the Piper returning the kids. No, that doesn't have the punch of the original story's creepy conclusion, but it works better dramatically than, "The piper steals the kids and they all live happily forever in Toy Land!" That feels like a parody of a Disney film, not an actual one! I usually don't mind the changes Disney makes in their output, but this was too much.Everything that happens before is great though. The character animation experiments with a more realistic human form and the music is fantastic. It's a shame the ending had to be so bad, because I would otherwise give this cartoon an 8 out of 10.

MartinHafer The Pied Piper of Hamelin is a hard-edged story about honoring your commitments. This is because what exactly happened to the kids at the end was always kind of vague. For all we know, the Piper was a pedo or fed the kids to a dog food company! But since this is a cartoon for kids and comes from Disney, they weren't about to allow the story to go that way! The artwork was okay--not up to the standards of many of the better Silly Symphonies but still much better than the competition. The faces of the characters (especially the kids) are very simple--with little character. And, like some of the Silly Symphonies, this one has quite a bit of singing--a definite minus. But what bothered me is, as I said above, the stupid need to make this tough story happy--with the children all being taken to Toy Land AND the little kid who could barely walk being carried into this wonderful world by the nice Piper (in the original, he could not keep up and was left behind). All in all, not a bad cartoon--but it played too fast and loose with the original story to be of more interest.

Ron Oliver A Walt Disney SILLY SYMPHONY Cartoon Short.Hamelin Town is beset with an infestation of rats and the harried Mayor is only too glad to offer THE PIED PIPER a bag of gold to rid them of the plague. But once the rodents are removed, the Mayor reneges on his promise, leaving the Piper to take a most effective revenge...This cartoon offers a good interpretation of the story from the famous Robert Browning poem. Notice how some of the elements of the original have been altered by Disney: the rats no longer drown, they are simply made to vanish into thin air; and the Hamelin children are shown to be used almost as slave labor by their parents, making their removal by the Piper more like a rescue.The SILLY SYMPHONIES, which Walt Disney produced for a ten year period beginning in 1929, are among the most interesting of series in the field of animation. Unlike the Mickey Mouse cartoons in which action was paramount, with the Symphonies the action was made to fit the music. There was little plot in the early Symphonies, which featured lively inanimate objects and anthropomorphic plants & animals, all moving frantically to the soundtrack. Gradually, however, the Symphonies became the school where Walt's animators learned to work with color and began to experiment with plot, characterization & photographic special effects. The pages of Fable & Fairy Tale, Myth & Mother Goose were all mined to provide story lines and even Hollywood's musicals & celebrities were effectively spoofed. It was from this rich soil that Disney's feature-length animation was to spring. In 1939, with SNOW WHITE successfully behind him and PINOCCHIO & FANTASIA on the near horizon, Walt phased out the SILLY SYMPHONIES; they had run their course & served their purpose.