Network’s Tales From Europe collection consists of a number of double-feature, two disc DVD releases of DEFA children’s films made during the fifties. The collection gets its name from a BBC program that screened these films with an english dub. Network’s release restores the original german audio track but offers the english language dub track as a special feature. I first saw Siegfried Hartmann’s Das Feuerzeug (1959) as a double feature with The Singing Ringing Tree (1957) as released by Network (both films look gorgeous in these restorations).
Of these two DEFA classics, The Singing Ringing Tree is the superior film, boasting a theatricality and production design equal to anything Jean Cocteau or Vincente Minnelli ever put on the screen. But Das Feuerzeug (or The Tinder Box in english) is still highly imaginative in its own right. Hartmann is adept at matting images so the effect of the giant hounds is pretty seamless for the time. There’s also a terrific use of color that recalls the works of Ivan Bilibin.
Das Feuerzeug is a relatively faithful adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale that never leans too far into the realm of Disney excess. Anneliese Kocialek and Hartmann’s screenplay preserves the child-like logic of Andersen’s tale, content to leave matters uncomplicated by a more contemporary sense of melodrama. The quick pace of the film compensates for this simplicity, as does the catchy score by Wolfgang Pietsch.
In these DEFA productions there’s a kind of synthesis at work between the limited means afforded by modest budgets and the fantastic scope of the filmmakers’ imaginations. It’s the ingenuity of artists like Hartmann or Francesco Stefani that set these fairytale films head and shoulders above children’s films made elsewhere at the same time.
