Der Perückenmacher
Directed by
1999
Europe; the plague years. A wigmaker, locked in his shop, observes the events and writes about them in his journal. Mostly, we see shrouded bodies, and a young girl who lives in the tavern across the way that gets progressively sicker. When she dies, the wigmaker goes to the mass grave where she's buried and cuts off her luxurious red hair; he makes himself a wig from it, and soon dies.
The puppet animation film tells the story of a wigmaker in London in 1665, the year of the plague, in a superbly crafted way based on a text by Daniel Defoe. The development of a human being from a fearful observer to an actor who accepts life and thus death is convincingly portrayed.