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PHOTO S. SIVA SARAVANAN

Thorough entertainer A scene from The Little Magic Flute

And, the month-long entertainment began with the screening of Die kleine Zauberflote (The Little Magic Flute). The plot is unoriginal – a prince pledges his life to save a princess in distress. However, the clever treatment stands out to make it a wonderful entertainer.

Young Prince Tamino finds himself in a foreign land. The Queen of the Night asks him to save her daughter Pamina from the dreadful clasps of Sarastro. Accompanied by a complaining Papageno, and armed with a magic flute, Tamino begins his journey. Three genii, Simplicity, Logic and Genius, whom he bumps into on the way, help him.

After facing failure at the Gates of Nature and Reason, he gains entry through Wisdom, and meets the beautiful princess Pamina, and Sarastro.

Sarastro puts him and Papageno through a battery of tests to check if the prince is really not after his possession, the Circle of Sun.

Tamino emerges successful, and in the process Papageno gets himself a ravishing Papagena, he had so yearned for. Using the magical flute, Pamina and Tamino come out of fire and water unscathed – during the final test of love. The reasonable Sarastro asks Tamino to rule both Day and Night.

And, this is when Tamino wakes up to find everything was an outlandish dream!

Curt Linda had worked on the animation for four years, and every frame bears testimony to this meticulous work.

Three most outstanding features of the film are the rich colours, cheeky dialogues (brilliant translation in English) and the music.

The colours! Be it Papageno’s outfit which is borrowed from the plumage of birds, the dark forest, the variety of food items or the Nature-rich pathways the duo cross, the intelligent use of varying shades in green, red, blue and yellow sparkles in every shot.

From the calm Sarastro to the cowardly Papageno, each one comes up with tongue-in-cheek one-liners. Particularly when Papageno passes a remark about Tamino’s Bird Protection League. The music is at once classic and contemporary, especially when subordinates of Sarastro spontaneously break into a dance, under the spell of the magical chimes.

The 63-minute animation is inspired by Mozart’s two-act opera to a work by Emanuel Schikaneder in 1791.

However, it did not fail to capture the fancy of children and adults even today. Ask the 70-odd people who had assembled at the hall!

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