Part of the reason for the obscurity of The King and the Mockingbird is the film’s troubled production history. Paul Grimault began working on The King and the Mockingbird in 1948 where he had intended it to be France’s first feature-length animated film. The film suffered from production and financing troubles and was eventually beaten out in becoming the first French feature-length animation by Johnny the Giant Killer (1950). Grimault had a major falling out with his producing partner Andre Sarrut after Sarrut showed an uncompleted version of The King and the Mockingbird in 1952. The ownership of the film was fought over for fifteen years with Grimault finally regaining the material back in 1967. It would be nearly as long a period of time before audiences managed to see the completed film in 1980.

When finally seen, The King and the Mockingbird is a major discovery. It is often claimed The King and the Mockingbird influenced master Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, director of Princess Mononoke (1997), Spirited Away (2001) et al. You can see the similarities to Miyzaki in the boldness of storytelling, the painterly use of colours and the wondrous contrasts of big scale and the touchingly small. Certainly if you compare The King and the Mockingbird to pretty much any other film that was being made around the time they pale in comparison – Disney had had their classic era during the period 1937-42, but nowhere else were animated films with such vision being made.

There’s a real lovely beauty to The King and the Mockingbird. Especially dazzling are the backgrounds of the film – all amazing architecture-defying parapets, rooftops and towers. Indeed the palace is almost its own character in the film. In other ways, the film is slightly flatter than what we are used to today. The hero and heroine are rather lacklustre characters and never particularly come to life – today they’d be much livelier and more rounded and almost certainly the romance would be pushed to the forefront of the film. The king however is a wonderfully pompous character who quite shines throughout, while the bird narrator is a rather engaging character. And there are some really magical pieces of animation – especially delightful being the scenes with the blind violinist charming the lions, and with king rampaging about inside a giant robot. The whole of the film really quite surprises one with Grimault’s vision.

The King and the Mockingbird is often seen as a political work in the light of the career of screenwriter Jacques Prevert who wrote several other films around this time, most notably The Devil’s Envoys (1942), which was a direct allegory for Wartime occupation by the Nazis. The King and the Mockingbird is seen in terms of the King representing corrupt and decadent authority, although it should be said that such pompous figures feature regularly in animation and that the argument for allegory is a rather slight one.