Periwig Maker
Periwig Maker is a 1999 short stop motion animation film.minutes long, it is based on Daniel Defoes novel A Journal of the Plague Year 1722. The film was produced by Ideal Standard film, directed by Steffen Schffler and narrated by Kenneth Branagh.
The camera pans through the dark, dilapidated city filled with death. The wig maker focuses on a newly orphaned girl with striking red hair who lives across the street. He watches her mothers corpse get tossed to the body collectors and the girl succumb to the plague herself. The night before she dies, the girls spirit visits the periwig maker and informs him of her imminent death. After her death, he goes to the mass grave and retrieves her red hair to make a wig from it. In the final scene, the wig maker lies in bed, wearing the red wig, describing the reconstruction of London after the dissipation of the plague.The short film utilizes several characteristics of the Gothic style. It includes the physical terror that the Periwig Maker experiences as he shuts himself in his house in order to prevent contracting the plague, while also the psychological terror of observing the sickness and death through his window and being unable to aide the victims and secure his own health. The mystery of the cause of the spread of the plague pervades the short film, the periwig maker rhetorically records in his journal his speculations of the cause but is never able discover the answer. The young orphan, another common component of the Gothic, takes center stage of the story when we see her mothers corpse being carried away and her subsequent death inducing contraction of the plague. The supernatural is incorporated into the story with the apparition of the young redhead, it remains unclear if this is a construct of his psyche or an actual occurrence. Death dominates and lingers not only with the plague victims but also in the air that transmits the illness and then finally in the wigs that contain the hair of the deceased. Though the Periwig maker has escaped the clutches of the plague, the last scene of him wearing the redhaired wig indicates that he has lost some semblance of sanity. Therefore, far after the plague has dispelled, his psychological degradation and madness remai
Source: Wikipedia