when the big bone monster steals the baby. and the nurses get worried they use a puppies blood and tell the king or whoever that the mother killed it. but what about the body? surely they would need a body of the baby to make it look real enough. or where the dudes just dumb?
OMG!!!! ME NEED CARS MOVIE NOW. RAMONE AND DOC ARE TEH SEXEH!!!! 1337ORZ
I've just watched that bit again (I've watched this film about a dozen times. is that a record? Few outside Wales have seen it at all, apparently!).
One of the nurses is in fact Llwyd, the evil sorcerer, in disguise (whose spell conjured up the monster in the first place) and it is HE who suggests the lie to the others having devised the whole plot in advance, telling them that they must all tell the same story to be believed (the others are fearful of their lives should they be blamed for the baby's disappearance once discovered).
They repeatedly attempt to convince the mother that she has "destroyed" her child and use the puppy's blood and show her the blood-soaked baby's blanket as 'evidence'. Naturally the mother is distraught but refuses to accept that she has "destroyed" her baby. Note the careful use of that word - not just killed - "destroyed" - and that's about as many times as the nurses use the word too! In this animated Celtic fantasy in which the mildest violence involves horses being hacked to death, is it not beyond the bounds of our imagination to accept that perhaps the sorcerer wants the mother to think that she has [gulp!] DEVOURED her own baby?!
Sadly the kangaroo court relies soley on the [non-DNA tested] circumstantial evidence; the fact that the child IS indeed missing; and the perjury of the nurses and their leader-in-disguise.
In all this mellie no-one counted the puppies or noticed one had mysteriously disappeared the same night as the child...
Has anyone seen the Welsh language version "Y Mabinogi" ("Otherworld" is the English version) and who speaks Welsh... and er, English?
I have read the story in Welsh, medieval Welsh actually, and it is very cleverly written. We do not know who took the baby who would become Pryderi (that's the medieval Welsh manuscript spelling before anyone corrects me). The idea is that, like all the women in the room, Rhiannon included, we sleep through the disappearance of the child. Likewise, when the child appears outside the 'outhouse' where Teirnon (medieval spelling again folks), the audience naturally assumes it is the missing child. There is no monster in the manuscript. There is 'a great noise' which Teirnon runs to investigate. We never find out what is making the noise. However, what we can say is that, if the same thing took the child and dropped it off, it was only noisy so the child would be found.
On the subject of the ladies in the room with Rhiannon, they decide to use deerhound blood and bones to make it look like Rhiannon ate her own child. The scatter the bones around and smear blood on her.
I desparately want to see the programme, as the stories as they are written would make excellent cartoons. They tell fantasatic, and morally unobjectionable tales. But I gather from some of the posts on here that they are not very true to the original medieval manuscript tales. That's quite sad.