A Nap és a Hold elrablása (The Kidnapping of the Sun and the Moon, aka The Abduction of the Sun and the Moon) is a highly abstract and experimental 1968 animated short from Hungary's Pannonia Film Studio, directed by artist Sándor Reisenbüchler. It's considered an influential artistic milestone for Hungarian animation.
Loosely based on an old folk story and its deeply grotesque poem adaptation, the 11 minute short tells about a black dragon devouring the Sun, the Moon and the stars, leaving Earth, its people and creatures to wither away in the ensuing Primordial Chaos, until a brave knight carrying a torch sets out to slay the monster and restore nature's order. What sets it apart from most previous animated works is the presentation: an almost collage-like animation style where figures change, undulate, flash and redefine themselves with every frame, each drawn in an abstract graphical style that evokes primitive art, traditional folk decoration and modern surrealism, looking at once like microscopic organisms and incomprehensible cosmic-scale entities and just barely recognizeable as humans, animals, monsters or objects. The editing is similarly brazen, letting the film play out like a fever-induced nightmare. In place of dialogue, the animation is accompanied by classical music themes.
Though almost unknown among the mainstream, this little film was something of a rousing wake-up call to Hungarian animation directors at the time, and it redefined the artistic and expressive potential of their craft. Its bold style influenced later works, for instance Marcell Jankovics's entire filmography (Johnny Corncob, Son of the White Horse, Song of the Miraculous Hind and The Tragedy of Man).
Tropes related to the short:
- Allegorical Character: The dragon can represent anything bad and the hero can symbolize humanity's strength to fight back and restore peace.
- Adapted Out: The folk story, or at least its more famous poem version, has actual characters, a king and his kidnapped daughters, the fallen brothers of the heroic young prince, a horse and its foal temporarily replacing the Sun and Moon, the dragon's witch mother, and even a talking key. In the short, the only recognizable figures are the dragon and the rider who kills it.
- Dark Is Evil: The dragon is black with white outlines.
- The Dark Times: Quite literally, the period following the dragon's rampage.
- Deranged Animation: Puts most other works of the studio, who later became famous for their unique animation, to shame.
- The Dragonslayer: The nameless torch-bearing hero who musters enough bravery to stand up against the dragon.
- Eldritch Abomination: Technically everything looks like an unearthly blob due to the art style, from plants to animals and humans, but the dragon still manages to stand out, being a squirming, multi-headed mass of vibrating graphic design, blackness and fire, capable of doing impossible deeds like sucking up every celestial body.
- Eldritch Location: The world becomes this once the dragon devours all sources of natural light.
- Extreme Omnivore: The dragon, gulping up the Sun, the Moon and the stars. In the folk tale, it also ate human women and sucked a lake dry.
- Lighter and Softer: Amazingly, the short is this compared to the poem, despite its nightmarish images. While the poem is playful in a grotesque way and has a similar happy ending for the survivors, it also goes into much, much more visceral, stomach-churning detail on literally everything, to the point that it reads like nauseating gore fetish fiction.
- Pragmatic Adaptation: The short tries to be more universal with its story rather than adapting the folk tale's specifics, with the dragon representing evil in a broad sense and its slayer representing the good of humanity.
- Primordial Chaos: The dragon's action reduce the world into an unlivable, chaotic state.
- Public Domain Soundtrack: All the music.
- Reality Is Out to Lunch: The whole short is unabashedly experimental in its presentation and fairy tale-like in its content, playing out as an unfiltered dream.
