The fairytale “The Town Musicians of Bremen” tells of four animals who are getting on in years and are thus destined to be killed. Donkey, dog, cat and rooster are able, however, to escape their destiny and decide to try their luck as town musicians in Bremen. On their nocturnal journey they discover a lit-up house and a big adventure begins.

Initially, everything is as idyllic as on a farm from 200 years ago. But it quickly becomes clear that the farm animals are in danger, because they are too old to accomplish their work. The cat can no longer catch mice, the rooster only crows at midday, the donkey can hardly carry any more sacks and the guard dog is blind and deaf. The donkey suggests a way to rescue the situation. He intends to go to Bremen to become a town musician and persuades his fellow stable inhabitants to set off on this journey with him. Following his initial efforts, the donkey succeeds in convincing them to run away with him, since the alternative means death. Behind the farmer’s back, the animals sneak away from the farm and set off for Bremen.

In the screenplay, they didn’t want to exclude real actors from playing main roles and thus integrated a romantic love story involving the family, on whose farm the animals live. The farmer’s wife had sent away the young man who was in love with her daughter, Lissi, in order to marry her off to another man, but Lissi follows Johann in order to bid him back. Soon, everyone is on the way to Bremen, as the farmer and his wife also follow their daughter Lissi.

On the search for a place to sleep, the aspiring town musicians see a light in the distance and find a house of robbers, who are sitting down to eat and telling ghost stories. The animals stand on one another’s backs to make a pyramid in front of the window, with the donkey at the bottom and the rooster right at the top. When they then start to perform, the robbers are frightened and flee. In the wood, the fear-stricken villains bump into Lissi’s parents, and send them to the house to discover the unwanted guests. But under the hood of night, the old animals can play on their strengths – the dog bites, the cat scratches and hisses and the donkey kicks the intruders. Thus the robbers and farmer husband and wife continue to believe in an eerie ghost, leaving the house to the animals. The story reaches a happy ending when Johann and Lissi bump into one another in the robbers’ former den, where the animals are now in control.

However, this story’s ending does not fully correspond to that of the Grimm fairytale. The animals practise such a long time for their musical debut that they indeed finally appear to perform at the wedding of the couple in Bremen. In the Bremen town hall, they sing a song which was specially written for the film rendition of “The Town Musicians of Bremen”. Even the animal-pyramid can be realistically portrayed with the help of technology.

The Brothers Grimm wrote animals into the main roles of the fairytale, but they still possess definite human characteristics. The voices of prominent actors are used for the pets’ ironic and audacious commentary which gives this filmic version of the fairytale its character. On screen, we see a donkey, a dog, a cat and a rooster. In the post-production process, their mouth movements are computer-simulated and the studio recordings give the animals their characteristic voices. Peter Striebeck is the voice of the donkey, TV entertainer Harald Schmidt is the rooster, Hannelore Elsner plays the cat with its obsequious voice and Bastian Pastewka plays the barking dog.



Renate Heilmeier

Production Country

Germany (DE)

Production Period

2009/2010

Production Year

2010

color

color

Aspect Ratio

1:1,78

Duration

Medium-Length Film (31 to 60 Min.)

Type

Feature Film

Genre

Fantasy / Fairy Tale, Literary Adaptation

Topic

Senior

Target Group

Youth film (12-17), Junior film (7-11)

Available Media

DVD

Original Version

German (de)

DVD

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (es), Portuguese (Brazil) (pt)