FAQ

The film focuses on symbolism over narrative. Its figures are classic archetypes of traditional storytelling, not developed characters. As the opening says, this pays homage to the fables of ancient steppe peoples.

The main theme is the circularity of time, which is expressed in many ways:

* The three brothers have to attempt a task three times to succeed. The weakest always fails, the second makes some progress but doesn't reach his goal, and it's up to the strongest to finally complete the task.

* The three brothers represent different parts of a day. They are Sun Gods whose head is the Sun itself. In the Hungarian language, the same word (nap) is used to refer to the Sun and day. Stonecrumbler is Sunset, when the Sun is at its weakest. He is the eldest brother, and his coloring is mostly red and orange. Irontemperer is the middle brother; he represents Sunrise with seven strands of hair, and is yellow-green in color. The youngest and most powerful of the brothers, Treeshaker, is Midday, the peak of the Sun's strength, has twelve locks of hair and mostly is colored yellow and orange.

* Stonecrumbler's facial features are shaped like water droplets to evoke the Yin-Yang symbol of cyclical time. Irontemperer's features are triangular, symbolizing the ironclad three-way unity of the siblings. Treeshaker's rounded facial features evoke perfection and wholeness.

* Their Forefather or Rain King represents night, but he manifests himself as weather phenomena as well, like clouds, lightning and a fog. His single eye (a reference to the similarly one-eyed Odin of Norse Mythology) is the Moon.

* The three princesses are seasons. The eldest is the Bronze-Haired Autumn Princess, the middle one is the Silver-Haired Spring Princess and the youngest is the Gold-Haired Summer Princess. Animals and plants representative of those seasons sprout from their dress, and their spinning around in the cauldron that lifts them up from the Underworld is a clear analogy to the yearly cycles.

* The Snow Queen goddess represents winter. Snowfall follows in her wake and the young Treeshaker suckling her dry represents the strengthening Sun melting away the winter snow. In her White Mare form, her mane is a snow blizzard and her crown-like antlers are snowdrop flower petals. The loss of her antlers is also a reference to how ancient Scythians switched from deer herding to horse breeding as they wandered to warmer climates.

* Circularity is expressed in the visuals. The world is drawn as a circle when viewed from afar, the Underworld is a hollow circle. The film uses the rainbow's primary colors, with red often being placed next to purple to show where two rainbows (or cycles) connect.

* The story is a constant cycle. Though the heroes win in the end, the movie concludes with the words "... they lived happily, until they died", and the image of a crying eye. Besides being a callback to the sorry tale the White Mare tells in the beginning of the film, this send-off is customary in Hungarian folk tales and suggests that the film's events may happen again in some way.

* While keeping the Mare shackled up when she gets pregnant for the third time, the evil chain snake is shown biting into its own tail like the mythical Ouroboros snake, itself a symbol of time's cyclical nature.

The villains represent technological advancement. This is a unique idea added by the director:

* The 3-Headed Dragon is a stone caveman, carrying a club. He is the most human-like, and Treeshaker feels sorry for killing him. He later shows no remorse for the other dragons, who are more inhuman.

* The 7-Headed Dragon is a mid-20th century armored war machine with guns ablaze. In place of a club, he fires an atomic bomb.

* The 12-Headed Dragon is an amalgamation of a computer and a living metropolis, a representation of what the director calls the "false promise" of modern urban society. His building-like heads have computer displays, he reflects light and becomes a confusing fake-image of reality, and his clothing is smog.

* The rest of the smaller dragons combine into a snake-like chain whose color alternates between black and red. Some think the red chains shackling and torturing the White Mare represented the Communist regime controlling Hungary at the time of the film's production, but the creators haven't confirmed this.

* Before the credits, Treeshaker is seen walking over a smog-laden cityscape, as the smoke slowly draws closer. This represents the survival of ancient morals in the modern day, but also act as a warning against environmental pollution.

The hero testing his might by trying to uproot a tree is a recurring folk fable element. In the film, this tree is the World Tree itself. In many versions of this tale, Treeshaker (sometimes called Treetearer) is the weakest of the three brothers, but the film chose to portray him as the strongest, as he is the only one powerful enough to uproot the World Tree. In most Hungarian folk stories, the youngest son (or daughter) is traditionally the purest and strongest.

Several elements of the film symbolize "divide". This is, again, a thematic relative of circularity, as divides mark when one era ends and another begins.

* The planet Saturn, a reference to the ancient Roman god of the same name, makes brief appearances in conjunction with the three dragons. Saturn in Eurasian myths was a former Sun God himself, but has since become the God of Death. Since the planet Saturn is the farthest planet in the Solar System visible by the naked eye (even if just barely), it represents a divide between the light and life we see around us, and the unknown darkness that lies beyond it.

* The griffin in many folk tales is a creature capable of traversing the divide between the Underworld and the real world. It serves this role in the film as well. As it is about to exit the Underworld, it's drawn with two heads looking in opposite directions. This could be a reference to the two-headed eagle seen in the emblem of the Orthodox Church, a symbol of resurrection that looks both forward and back.

An archetypal version of the "hero's journey", the film is a tale of humanity overcoming various trials, defeating evil and learning self-sacrifice. The White Mare is an extremely significant symbol in the myths of former horse-riding peoples, and some nations claim they are in fact the descendants of the Son of the White Mare. In this film, Treeshaker is this Son, he represents the immaculate heroic archetype these people used to tell stories about. His brothers (or servants in most other versions of the tale) represent imperfections and sometimes outright evil intentions he has to overcome.

Cutting off his own limbs to feed the griffin and escape the Underworld is a show of self-sacrifice. The film adds another scene in which Treeshaker almost kills his brothers for their apparent betrayal, but he learns a vital message of compassion and forgiveness that prevent him from becoming a monster like the dragons. As such, his development into a prince and a perfect human ideal is complete.

The movie also has extremely blatant sexual symbolism. This too can be seen as a part of a man's upbringing and his relationships with the other sex.

* The Autumn Princess is essentially an immoral slut. She is almost always naked and causes most of the story's problems by disobeying God and releasing the dragons. She is the most down-to-earth but restless of the princesses, and gets together with the similarly simplistic brother Stonecrumbler. Despite her shortcomings, she does help the hero defeat the dragon holding her captive. She is assertive and has agency, though the morally superior hero rejects her offer to take her as his own and ignore the other two princesses.

* Her husband, the 3-Headed Dragon has clear sexual connotations, as displayed by his prominent testicles. However he is also the weakest of the dragons, and is easily distracted by his wife's sexual/sensual actions. Lacking a penis, he can only expel material from his mouth, such as when he vomits over Treeshaker to encase him in molten rock. He cannot procreate, only regurgitate.

* The frail Spring Princess represents woman hysteria and potentially a person suffering from domestic abuse. She has a much more jagged design and is often manhandled by her husband, the 7-Headed Dragon. Even the hero is somewhat abusive to her. She later becomes the bride of Irontemperer, the second brother, a strong-handed but otherwise somewhat inept showoff.

* The 7-Headed Dragon also has an obvious sexual design element in his massive tank-turret "penis", but he lacks testicles. This essentially means his sexual side lacks substance, in fact, he only "ejaculates" destruction. He is violent and temperamental but blows his load (his missiles) too quickly. Without his weapons, he is weak and reverts into a squirming, screaming mass of machinery that oozes disgusting, polluting machine oil.

* The Summer Princess embodies emotion and heart, with no clear sexual traits aside from her large breasts. She is the purest of the fairies, and actively helps the hero in his fight not just against the dragon but also against his own anger. Being the youngest and the most moral, she gets together with the main hero Treeshaker and helps purify him morally.

* The 12-Headed Dragon is likewise "perfect" compared to his less powerful but more sexual brothers, but mostly in a negative sense. He is inhuman and strong, not even caring about one of his heads when it gets blown off. Though he is the film's most powerful evil character, he is less impulsive than his brethren and he has manners, he even offers a lunch and wine to the hero before fighting him.

The film's image composition has a further meaning. Zigzag patterns and uneven shapes symbolize fragmentation. To counter this, mandala compositions symbolize the roundness and unity of the world.

The final lines are a mishmash of different traditional Hungarian and Székely (Transylvanian Hungarian) folktale sendoffs.

"Son of the White Mare, Fanyüvö, and his two brothers got into an eggshell, and laid on the diamond field."

The eggshell, or nutshell in some cases, is a recurring motif of Székely story endings. The sentence is usually followed by "And they traveled down the River Küküllö (Târnava in Romanian). May they also visit you." The shell in this case appears to mean a kind of boat, but some stories replace the river with a chimney chute, meaning there is no defined interpretation. The overall message is that although the story is over, the characters are still out there, and they might pay a visit to the listeners.

The film's director refers to the Finnish national epic Kalevala, and interprets the eggshell as the sky dome around Earth. This is underlined by the "diamond field", which is analogous to the field of stars. Though the film's dialogue does not mention any rivers, it is obvious that the Milky Way could be the "river" leading the characters to the sky. Constellations play a big role in the film's symbolism, and the ending hints at the characters becoming constellations themselves. In this sense, it could be said that they pay us a visit on clear, starry nights.

"They lived as happily as little birds do. Happily ever after. Until the day they died."

The final line carries a bittersweet message, and refers to the story's characters dying, which is customary in almost all Hungarian folk tales. This ties back to the film's message about history's repetitive, cyclical nature. While this story is over, similar events may play out in the future, and the three brothers may eventually lose their lives the same way their predecessors had in the beginning.

The closing shot follows Fanyüvö walking among a modern, polluted city. This means heroes like him may survive in modern times, but the side effects of technological advancement could lead to their doom or the traditional values fading away. The film's fictitious dragons have been defeated, but the evils they represented have not. As the smog closes in to cover Fanyüvö, even the constellations that remind us of them may vanish from view.

No, director Marcell Jankovics has gone on at length that he hadn't taken any drugs and that his intent was not to dabble in psychedelia, but to make an artistic, surreal and sublime movie that feels like a dream and also respectfully captures the otherworldly magic of myths and folktales. The film's symbols, motifs, designs and colors were carefully chosen to reflect his ideas and to imbue every segment of the movie with meaning and symbolism. Some of this symbolism is obvious, others only make sense to those that have studied folk traditions and iconography.

Jankovics is famously fascinated by the idea of metamorphosis and strongly believes animation should strive to be fantastical and artistic rather than realistic. Even his other movies, including those released post-2000 have kept to this notion. He holds a low opinion on the way big, mainstream studios like Disney have influenced animation the world over with their strive to imitate realism and oftentimes stale art design that tries too hard to appeal to the masses. This is why he made this movie feel so different and experimental.

The movie combines many similar Hungarian folk stories, but it was mainly based on "Fehérlófia" (as penned by the 19th century poet László Arany) and "Fanyüvö, Vasgyúró, Hegyhengergetö" (collected by 20th century folklorist Gyula Illyés).

There are at least fifty variations of the fable, under various names, but all of them follow the same structure and the same beats. The main difference is in the number of characters: some versions have four, others have three protagonists. The director adapted the latter version, as he had felt watching the characters doing tasks four times would be too boring. The film also expands these stories with unrelated myths, reaching back to ancient steppe mythology. The following are examples of mixing and matching these different tales:

* The film takes place in a surreal, otherworldly universe beyond the "Operencian Sea". While magical entities do appear in the folk tales, and part of the story takes place in the Underworld, the rest is more grounded in the real world. There are regular forests, houses, villages, animals and people. Some versions of the story feature the main characters fighting a boar, a bull and a bison sent to kill them by an angry landlord, and they also meet a king whose daughters have been kidnapped. The movie combines elements from these scenes but puts them into different perspectives and changes their order. In the film, the land beyond Operencia is a fantastical, dreamlike realm inhabited only by the main characters.

* The main character, Fehérlófia (Son of the White Mare) and Fanyüvö (Treetearer or Treeshaker) are the same person, whereas in Arany's tale, Fanyüvö was one of the Son's three servants. He was also the weakest instead of the strongest. However, in the story titled "Fanyüvö, Vasgyúró, Hegyhengergetö", Fanyüvö is in fact the main and strongest character, but he has regular human parents. It is usually thought that Arany's version is the closest to the original Fehérlófia story, while all the others are later variants full of deliberate changes or misunderstandings.

* The White Mare begins her tale by talking about 77 dragons living on the World Tree's 77 roots and 77 ravens living on its 77 branches. These are traditional opening lines of numerous Hungarian folk tales that don't actually pertain to the contents of the tales themselves. They're meant to grab the listeners' attention in a fanciful way. The movie, however, incorporates the lines into its universe where the White Mare talks about a literal World Tree. The 77 ravens don't feature in the film, though it can be surmised that the 77 dragons are the smaller chain link monsters who combine into a giant snake.

* Depending on the story, the hero suckles for 14 or 21 years. His mother either dies or doesn't die. In "Fanyüvö, Vasgyúró, Hegyhengergetö", the hero has regular human parents who remain alive after Fanyüvö abandons them. In "Fehérlófia", he only has a mother, a White Mare. In rarer versions of the story, his mother is a cow or a sheep.

* Uprooting trees or tearing down their bark is a recurring theme. In some tales, these are everyday trees, others give them bigger significance. In the movie, the tree sheltering the Son and his mother is the World Tree.

* In the original stories, Fehérlófia/Fanyüvö is an only child. The two or three partners/servants he meets on his journey are not relatives, though they do represent personality types that reside in the hero.

* In the film, Fanyüvö's companions are called Kömorzsoló (Stonecrumbler) and Vasgyúró (Ironkneader or Ironrubber). In some variations, a character called Hegyhengergetö or Hegyforgató (Mountainroller) replaces Kömorzsoló. The film combines the latter two into one.

* In the movie, Fanyüvö/Fehérlófia spares his brothers' lives when he thinks they've betrayed him. In Arany's tale, Fehérlófia kills all three brothers, since they were real traitors. He then takes the youngest princess for himself. In other versions, Fanyüvö does let the traitors live and marry their respective princesses, but he throws the apples that grow into their castles into other countries as punishment.

* The 12-headed dragon threatening the chain-snake with death if he loses sight of the White Mare's third son was taken from the story Juhfi Jankó (Sheep Son Johnny), in which a king says the same to a shepherd watching over a Black Sheep. In this story, the main character is Jankó, the Son of the Black Sheep.

* In some tales, the heroes cook porridge out of the boar, bull and bison they've killed. In the movie, the porridge appears to be made simply out of snow.

* A twist at the end of the story reveals that the Rain King and the Hétszünyü Kapanyányimonyók ("Seven-Hearted Lobahobgoblin") are one and the same, the latter being the King's depowered form. In the most well known versions of the original tale, the Kapanyányimonyók or Hétröfös ("Seven-Ell", referring to the length of his beard) is a simple mischievous villain-like character, and the King is a human ruler who only appears at the end. One constant is that the goblin's power stems from his long beard. Most versions of the story also emphasize the size of his genitalia. In the movie, this is only referred to in the dialogue.

* The film's characters take refuge in what appears to be the Goblin's own hut that already has a half-made rope and a kettle in it. But in some of the stories, they make their own encampment, forge their own kettle and weave their own rope from materials they harvest from the woods.

* In the film, Fanyüvö's sword is forged out of the Goblin's beard. In certain old stories, he uses an ax forged out of iron and only keeps the Goblin's beard to gain leverage over him.

* The movie contains references to more ancient creation myths that were not present in the folk tales, such as the backstory about the ancient Rain King and Snow Queen, the World Tree, the origin of the dragons and the disaster that stuck the world. This backstory contains elements similar to certain ancient Greek myths (the dragons resemble the Titans, deities turn into animals or natural phenomena), Nordic mythology (the Rain King in particular is a nod to Odin), and other aspects not present in most versions of the folk tale (the dragons' locks being opened are clear references to the Biblical Eve and the forbidden apple, or the tale of Pandora and the box).

* In the movie, Fehérlófia has to avenge her mother, who was originally the Queen, for all the suffering brought on her by the dragons. In the original folk tales, she has no backstory. The dragons likewise lack any backstory.

* In some tales, Fehérlófia heads to the Underworld because he's chasing the Kapanyányimonyók, not because he wants to save the princesses. In others, the King informs him and his peers that his three princesses have been kidnapped, but in other versions he merely picks up the info on his travels. In the movie, her mother, the White Mare delivers exposition.

* In the film, the first princess tries to seduce Fehérlófia, but he rejects her to save her sisters. In Arany's story, it's the other way around: Fehérlófia is ready to leave until the princess informs him that her sisters need rescuing.

* Fanyüvö cuts off the dragons' tongues after their defeat, to show them to the people as proof that he had killed them. This doesn't happen in the movie because there are no other characters around.

* In the movie, Fehérlófia saves the Griffin's chicks from a snake. In Arany's telling of the fable, he shields them from the rain, however a snake does show up in rarer variants (such as the story titled "Borsószemecske"). He then has to gather twelve oxen and twelve barrels of wine to give the Griffin enough strength to fly out of the Underworld, and he cuts off his own leg too when the food doesn't suffice. In Arany's tale, it's three loaves of bread and three pork bellies, and he cuts off a leg and an arm. These grow back thanks to the wine the Griffin gives him, unlike in the movie where the Griffin simply barfs his leg back and his chicks affix it to his body with magic plants. Certain tellings of the story replace these plants with magic feathers.

* The Griffin in the movie is male (further proven by the credits which list him as "Mr. Griffin"), but in some stories it's a female.

* The depictions of the three dragons (a stone-caveman, a 20th century war machine and a modern metropolitan cityscape) are of course also unique additions. In some tales, the first dragon has seven heads instead of three and the middle dragon has six or nine instead of seven. The Hungarian word for dragon (sárkány) can actually refer to a variety of monsters instead of just the generic reptilian, snake or lizard-like creatures.

* The designs and symbolic natures of the three brothers and princesses/fairies are also unique to the film. In most tales, they look like regular people dressed in garments you'd expect them to wear. The movie emphasizes the protagonists' superhuman powers by depicting them as demigods, and adds a lot of sexuality to their and the princesses' appearance.

* Beyond the typical "hero's journey", the themes of the film also include repetition, the cyclic nature of time and history, the evils of progress, modernity and urbanization, and the ending credits carry an ecologic/environmentalist warning. The folk tales also have multiple interpretations, mainly overcoming evil and the negative sides of our nature and learning self-sacrifice. Other analyses view the fable from religious perspectives, spanning from Christianity to nomadic steppe mythology, so a full list of interpretations would be too long to include here.

The main thing to take away is that the movie is its own thing, it wasn't meant to be a faithful interpretation of any single folk tale.