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+

This early Disney Technicolor short, part of the Silly Symphonies series, tackles the old story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The story is the one most of us know - town is overrun by rats so the town leaders hire the Piper to lure the rats out of town. He does this but they refuse to pay him, leading the Piper to exact his revenge in a manner that has creepier undertones these days than it did when this was made. Anyway, this is a good cartoon version of the story and teaches kids valuable lessons about paying your debts and the power of wind instruments. I guess it also teaches kids if a strange man shows up playing a flute you should follow him because he'll lead you to Toyland. The animation is very good, especially the backgrounds. The color is just gorgeous. The music is lively. All of the voice work is fine. Really not much bad to say about it except that, while it's good, it's not great.

Another reviewer cites this story as a morality tale with a happy ending. Well I don't know about that, I saw all those kids sealed off from the rest of the world behind that mountain entrance into an unknown place. The Piper called it Joyland, but how would we ever know?So there's a bit of a creepy factor in all this that most viewers won't take the time to recognize or acknowledge. On the flip side though, I can't disagree with the Pied Piper's getting his revenge on the citizens and Mayor who promised a bag of gold to get rid of the town's rodent problem, and then reneged on the deal. They had it coming to them by and large, but it seemed a heavy price to pay.I'm probably putting too much thought into this story, after all it was a Silly Symphony and I guess the objective was to be light hearted and silly. It worked for the most part, but maybe the Piper could have simply banished the Mayor to a life of servitude.

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.