The Periwig-Maker is a 1999 animated short film (15 minutes) directed by Steffen Schäffler.
It is Inspired by… Daniel Defoe's novel A Journal of the Plague Year. The setting is 1665-1666 London, during the "Great Plague", the last large outbreak of the Black Plague in London in which some 25% of the population died. The protagonist is a wig-maker who is essentially sitting out the plague in his house. His attention is drawn to an apartment above a bar across the street, which has been locked shut as was standard practice to contain the spread of plague. The wig-maker watches as a dead woman is taken out of the apartment, as her daughter, a little girl with flaming red hair, sobs with grief. The red-haired girl is immediately thrown back into her apartment and locked up. Later, she escapes—as seen by the wig-maker, who is still watching from across the street.
Kenneth Branagh narrates, reading passages from Defoe's book.
Tropes:
- The Black Death: The Black Death is rampant in London. The sick are locked up in their homes and the dead are shoveled into pits.
- Chekhov's Skill: The protagonist is a wig-maker. Is his attention drawn to the girl because of the tragedy of her fate? No, he wants her hair. At the end of the cartoon the wig-maker climbs into the dead pit, cuts the hair off the little girl's corpse, and makes it into a wig.
- Dead-Hand Shot: The mother's arm flops out the shroud as she is tossed into the cart, causing the little girl to cry.
- Empathy Doll Shot: The little girl's doll is knocked out of her hand when she is pushed away from the corpse cart carrying her mother. After the girl is again shut up inside, the camera shows the doll lying abandoned on the street.
- Imagine Spot: The wig-maker has a vision of the little girl appearing in his shop, telling him that she has "the sickness" and she will die that night. Sure enough, the next day she's loaded onto the cart and thrown into the dead pit.
- Incurable Cough of Death: Ambiguous, as the wig maker is actually still alive at the end of the cartoon. But the fact that he coughs as he is fashioning the dead girl's hair into a wig is certainly ominous.
- Job Title: The protagonist is a wig-maker. This proves directly relevant to the ending.
- Narrator: Kenneth Branagh reads passages from Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. It is ambiguous how much of the narration is actually supposed to be the inner monologue of the wig-maker. The narration speaks of methods of avoiding the plague and makes some shrewd guesses about how microscopic "creatures" might be spreading the plague, but there is no direct reference in the narration to the story. Notably, the anonymous narrator of Defoe's book was a saddle-maker, not a wig-maker.
- The Plague: A wig-maker hides in his shop, trying to avoid the Black Death, while a little girl is locked up in her apartment across the street.
- Splash of Color: The film is actually in color, not black and white, but it is made with a Real Is Brown, drab, limited palette. This makes the girl's red hair stand out amidst all the other brown and gray.
- The Stinger: After all the credits roll, there is a quote from the diary of Samuel Pepys, whose diary included a first-hand account of the Great Plague. Pepys writes about how people are reluctant to buy wigs, because they wonder if the wigs might have been made from the hair of plague victims.
- Stop Motion Animation: Stop-motion animation used throughout.
