Le Roi et l'oiseau
Encyclopedia
Le Roi et l'oiseau is a 1980
1980 in film
- Events :* May 21 - Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back is released and is the biggest grosser of the year ....

 traditionally-animated
Traditional animation
Traditional animation, is an animation technique where each frame is drawn by hand...

 feature film
Feature film
In the film industry, a feature film is a film production made for initial distribution in theaters and being the main attraction of the screening, rather than a short film screened before it; a full length movie...

 directed by Paul Grimault
Paul Grimault
Paul Grimault was one of the most important French animators. He made many traditionally animated films that were delicate in style, satirical, and lyrical in nature....

. Begun in 1948
1948 in film
The year 1948 in film involved some significant events.-Events:* Laurence Olivier's Hamlet becomes the first British film to win the American Academy Award for Best Picture.-Top grossing films : After theatrical re-issue- Awards :...

 as The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep
The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep
"The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep" is a literary fairy tale by Danish poet and author Hans Christian Andersen . The tale follows the romance between a china shepherdess and a china chimney sweep who are threatened by a carved mahogany satyr who wants the shepherdess for his wife...

(loosely based on the fairy tale of the same name by Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish author, fairy tale writer, and poet noted for his children's stories. These include "The Steadfast Tin Soldier," "The Snow Queen," "The Little Mermaid," "Thumbelina," "The Little Match Girl," and "The Ugly Duckling."...

), it underwent a long production, eventually being finished over 30 years after it was started. The film is today regarded as a masterpiece
Masterpiece
Masterpiece in modern usage refers to a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or to a work of outstanding creativity, skill or workmanship....

 of French animation and has been cited by the Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese director Isao Takahata
Isao Takahata
is a Japanese anime filmmaker that have earned critical international acclaim for his work as a director. Takahata is co-founder of Studio Ghibli with long-time collaborative partner Hayao Miyazaki. He has directed films such as the war-themed Grave of the Fireflies, the romantic-drama Only...

 as an influence.

, the completed version of the film has not been released with English subtitles on home video, nor is it available in the English-speaking world except by import, although the film does not contain a lot of dialogue, and is available in France and Japan. Various low-budget English-language editions have been released of the 1952 version, and it is now in the public domain
Public domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...

, with a version with Peter Ustinov
Peter Ustinov
Peter Alexander Ustinov CBE was an English actor, writer and dramatist. He was also renowned as a filmmaker, theatre and opera director, stage designer, author, screenwriter, comedian, humourist, newspaper and magazine columnist, radio broadcaster and television presenter...

 voicing the main role of the bird available at the Internet Archive
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...

 at The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird.

Plot

The huge kingdom of Takicardia
Tachycardia
Tachycardia comes from the Greek words tachys and kardia . Tachycardia typically refers to a heart rate that exceeds the normal range for a resting heart rate...

 is ruled by a king under the unwieldy title of Charles V + III = VIII + VIII = XVI. He’s a heartless ruler, hated by his people as much as he hates them. The king is fond of hunting, but is unfortunately cross-eyed – not that anyone would dare acknowledge this in front of him, as the numerous statues and paintings that adorn the palace and the land show. Occasionally the king does hit his target though, notably the wife of the bird, known only as "l'Oiseau", the narrator of the story who takes pleasure in taunting the terrible king at every opportunity.

In his secret apartment, the king dreams of the beautiful shepherdess whose painting he keeps on his wall, but the shepherdess is in love with the chimney sweep whose hated portrait is on the opposite wall. At night the paintings come to life and attempt to escape from the palace, but are pursued by a non-cross-eyed painting of the king that also has come to life, deposed the real king and has taken his place. He orders the capture of the shepherdess and the sweep, but the bird is there to help when called upon. They are pursued to the depths of the Lower City where the inhabitants have never seen the light of the sun and strange creatures including bat-police take up their chase.

Connection with The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep

Only the early scene in the secret apartment is based on The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep, while the rest of the movie focuses much more on the king and the bird, hence the ultimate title. In Andersen's tale, the shepherdess and the chimney sweep are china figurines, rather than paintings, and a wooden (mahogany) satyr wishes to wed the shepherdess, supported by a Chinaman, rather than a king and a classical statue. In both tales, the Chinaman/statue breaks, and the duo escape up the chimney, and delight in celestial bodies, but in Andersen's tale the shepherdess is afraid of the wide world and the duo return; this is echoed in the movie where the statue predicts that they will return.

Production

Originally titled La Bergère et le Ramoneur (The Shepherdess and the Chimneysweep), Grimault and Prévert began the film in 1948 (following their first collaboration, Le Petit soldat (The Little Soldier), also a Hans Christian Andersen adaptation), and it was highly anticipated, but in 1950 the film was taken out of their control, and subsequently the expense of the film caused the failure of the studio (Les Gémeaux). Grimault’s partner André Sarrut (the producer) then showed the film unfinished in 1952
1952 in film
The year 1952 in film involved some significant events.-Events:* January 10 - Cecil B. DeMille's circus epic, The Greatest Show on Earth, premieres at Radio City Music Hall in New York City....

, against Grimault and Prévert’s wishes, which caused a rift between partners, and they went their separate ways. In 1967
1967 in film
The year 1967 in film involved some significant events. It is widely considered as one of the most ground-breaking years in film.-Events:* December 26 - The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour airs on British television....

, Grimault got possession of the film, and spent the next decade lining up financing. By 1977 he had arranged financing, and thus the film was completed over the two year period of 1977–79. In 1980
1980 in film
- Events :* May 21 - Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back is released and is the biggest grosser of the year ....

 the finished film was finally released under a new title, Le Roi et l'Oiseau – to make clear the distinction from the earlier version – and shortly after the death of Prévert, to whom the film is dedicated.

In English, the film has been released under many names. The official international English name is The King and the Mockingbird. Others include: The King and the Bird, The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird, The King and Mr. Bird, Mr Bird to the Rescue and Adventures of Mr. Wonderful.

The completed film uses 42 of the 62 minutes of the 1952 footage, and, at 87 minutes, includes significant new animation, completely different music, and a very different, more symbolic ending. Some footage is cut, such as an elaborate dance by the lions, the bird taking over the role as announcer at the wedding, and the original ending. The new footage includes both entirely new scenes, and changes to existing scenes. For example, in the completed film, the initial scenes of the king practicing target shooting and having his portrait painted are new, while the scene of the king shooting at the baby bird, which falls between these two, is from the 1952 footage. The differences between the old and new animation are visible at some points in a single scene, most noticeably in the lion pit, where the lions are drawn in two very different styles; the simpler, more abstract lions are the new animation.

The production of the music is unusual in that Grimault left it entirely in the hands of Wojciech Kilar
Wojciech Kilar
Wojciech Kilar ; b. 17 July 1932 in Lwów, Poland) is a Polish classical and film music composer.-Biography:Wojciech Kilar is one of Poland’s esteemed composers. Born in 1932 in Lwów . His father was a gynecologist and his mother was a theater actress...

 – Gimault gave no instruction as to what music he desired, nor was there any back-and-forth, but simply shared the movie with Kilar, who studied it carefully, then went to Poland, recorded it, and returned with the completed score, which was accepted unchanged.

Reception

It is popularly considered one of the best animated feature films of all time. , it has an average vote of 8.0/10 on IMDb.com, making it number 13 on the site's list of animated feature films (including films with at least 1,000 votes).

It has been called one of the greatest French animated films. In July 2006 Studio Ghibli
Studio Ghibli
is a Japanese animation and film studio founded in June 1985. The company's logo features the character Totoro from Hayao Miyazaki's film My Neighbor Totoro...

 decided to release a Japanese-dubbed version of the film to theatres under the name . Starting in just one cinema, it became a hit and spread out to many other theatres, eventually reaching over 20,000 people.

Cultural references

The movie is rife with cultural references. Most basically, the castle is similar to 19th century fairy-tale castles, the best known of which is Neuschwanstein Castle, while the best-known such model in France is the medieval town Carcassonne
Carcassonne
Carcassonne is a fortified French town in the Aude department, of which it is the prefecture, in the former province of Languedoc.It is divided into the fortified Cité de Carcassonne and the more expansive lower city, the ville basse. Carcassone was founded by the Visigoths in the fifth century,...

, which notably has a surrounding ville basse (lower city), as in the movie. The city, with its dark, industrial underbelly recalls Metropolis
Metropolis (film)
Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist film in the science-fiction genre directed by Fritz Lang. Produced in Germany during a stable period of the Weimar Republic, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and makes use of this context to explore the social crisis between workers and...

by Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute...

, and the enslaved work recalls Modern Times
Modern Times (film)
Modern Times is a 1936 comedy film by Charlie Chaplin that has his iconic Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in...

of Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...

.
The castle, presiding over a city, has been compared to a "Neo-Sacré-Cœur", this basilica being the highest point of Paris, presiding over the city from the top of Montmartre
Montmartre
Montmartre is a hill which is 130 metres high, giving its name to the surrounding district, in the north of Paris in the 18th arrondissement, a part of the Right Bank. Montmartre is primarily known for the white-domed Basilica of the Sacré Cœur on its summit and as a nightclub district...

. The visual style is painterly, with strong perspective, recalling surrealist artists, most notably Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement...

, but also Yves Tanguy
Yves Tanguy
Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy , known as Yves Tanguy, was a French surrealist painter.-Biography:Tanguy was born in Paris, France, the son of a retired navy captain. His parents were both of Breton origin...

, friend of Prévert's youth. See this article for a sampling of scenes.

There are extensive allusions to Germany, particularly connections between the king and Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...

, most obviously in the king's appearance on leaving water (mustache and hair strongly resembling Hitler's) and in the cult of personality
Cult of personality
A cult of personality arises when an individual uses mass media, propaganda, or other methods, to create an idealized and heroic public image, often through unquestioning flattery and praise. Cults of personality are usually associated with dictatorships...

, but also in the king's statement that "work…is liberty", alluding to the infamous "Arbeit macht frei
Arbeit macht frei
"'" is a German phrase, literally "work makes free," meaning "work sets you free" or "work liberates". The slogan is known for having been placed over the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust, including most infamously Auschwitz I, where it was made by prisoners...

" (work makes [you] free), written over the entrances to concentration camps, and also the iconic Stahlhelm
Stahlhelm
Stahlhelm is German for "steel helmet". The Imperial German Army began to replace the traditional boiled-leather Pickelhaube with the Stahlhelm during World War I in 1916...

 (steel helmets) seen in places.

The king's number alludes to Louis XVI of France
Louis XVI of France
Louis XVI was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre until 1791, and then as King of the French from 1791 to 1792, before being executed in 1793....

, though visually the film recalls more the "Sun King" Louis XIV
Louis XIV of France
Louis XIV , known as Louis the Great or the Sun King , was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre. His reign, from 1643 to his death in 1715, began at the age of four and lasted seventy-two years, three months, and eighteen days...

, and parts of the castle resemble Venice
Venice
Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

, with the canals, gondola
Gondola
The gondola is a traditional, flat-bottomed Venetian rowing boat, well suited to the conditions of the Venetian Lagoon. For centuries gondolas were the chief means of transportation and most common watercraft within Venice. In modern times the iconic boats still have a role in public transport in...

, and bridge of sighs
Bridge of Sighs
The Bridge of Sighs is a bridge in Venice, northern Italy . The enclosed bridge is made of white limestone and has windows with stone bars. It passes over the Rio di Palazzo and connects the old prisons to the interrogation rooms in the Doge's Palace...

. The mustached, bowler-hatted police recall Thomson and Thompson
Thomson and Thompson
Thomson and Thompson are fictional characters in The Adventures of Tintin, the series of classic Belgian comic books written and illustrated by Hergé. Thomson and Thompson are detectives of Scotland Yard, and are as incompetent as they are necessary comic relief...

 (Dupont et Dupond) from The Adventures of Tintin
The Adventures of Tintin
The Adventures of Tintin is a series of classic comic books created by Belgian artist , who wrote under the pen name of Hergé...

.


The robot's behavior recalls King Kong
King Kong
King Kong is a fictional character, a giant movie monster resembling a gorilla, that has appeared in several movies since 1933. These include the groundbreaking 1933 movie, the film remakes of 1976 and 2005, as well as various sequels of the first two films...

, notably both in his chest-pounding and in his waving off the circling bird. He also rests in the figure of The Thinker
The Thinker
The Thinker is a bronze and marble sculpture by Auguste Rodin, whose first cast, of 1902, is now in the Musée Rodin in Paris; there are some twenty other original castings as well as various other versions, studies, and posthumous castings. It depicts a man in sober meditation battling with a...

,
by Auguste Rodin
Auguste Rodin
François-Auguste-René Rodin , known as Auguste Rodin , was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past...

.

Some potentially unfamiliar phrases and concepts used in the movie include lettres de cachet, gallows birds (gibier de potence), lèse majesté
Lèse majesté
Lese-majesty is the crime of violating majesty, an offence against the dignity of a reigning sovereign or against a state.This behavior was first classified as a criminal offence against the dignity of the Roman republic in Ancient Rome...

 (Contempt of the Sovereign), and the Mayor of the Palace
Mayor of the Palace
Mayor of the Palace was an early medieval title and office, also called majordomo, from the Latin title maior domus , used most notably in the Frankish kingdoms in the 7th and 8th centuries....

. The bird also mentions having seen Les cloches de Corneville
Les cloches de Corneville
Les cloches de Corneville is an operetta in three acts, composed by Robert Planquette to a French libretto by Louis Clairville and Charles Gabet based on a play by Gabet.In 1876, the director of the Théâtre des Folies-Dramatiques, Louis Cantin, hired Planquette to compose the operetta,...

,
having been to the Place d'Italie
Place d'Italie
The Place d'Italie is a public space in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. The square has an average dimension somewhat less than 200 meters in extent , and the following streets meet there:*Boulevard Vincent-Auriol...

, and having attended the Neuilly festival (Neuilly-sur-Seine
Neuilly-sur-Seine
Neuilly-sur-Seine is a commune in the western suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the center of Paris.Although Neuilly is technically a suburb of Paris, it is immediately adjacent to the city and directly extends it. The area is composed of mostly wealthy, select residential...

 is the birthplace of both Prévert and Grimault). It also mentions dernières cartouches (Last Cartridges) which alludes to an episode in the Franco-Prussian War
Franco-Prussian War
The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...

 involving the Blue Division
Blue Division (Second French Empire)
Created during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Blue Division is the name given to the division d'Infanterie de Marine which - for the first time in the history of the marines - joined 'marsouins' or marine infantry and 'bigors' or marine artillery .Commanded by general de Vassoigne, it was...

 of the French marines, memorialized in a painting by that name by Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville
Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville
Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville was a French Academic painter who studied under Eugène Delacroix. His dramatic and intensely patriotic subjects illustrated episodes from the Franco-Prussian War, the Crimean War, the Zulu War and portraits of soldiers. Some of his works have been collected by...

.

Others see connection with Ubu Roi
Ubu Roi
Ubu Roi is a play by Alfred Jarry, premiered in 1896. It is a precursor of the Theatre of the Absurd and Surrealism. It is the first of three stylised burlesques in which Jarry satirises power, greed, and their evil practices — in particular the propensity of the complacent bourgeois to abuse the...

 (King Ubu) of Alfred Jarry
Alfred Jarry
Alfred Jarry was a French writer born in Laval, Mayenne, France, not far from the border of Brittany; he was of Breton descent on his mother's side....

, Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an Italian artist famous for his etchings of Rome and of fictitious and atmospheric "prisons" .-His Life:...

, and Magritte.

Grimault details some of the specific inspirations: for example, the bird was inspired by Jean Mollet (secretary of Guillaume Apollinaire
Guillaume Apollinaire
Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....

) and by actor Pierre Brasseur
Pierre Brasseur
Pierre Brasseur , born Pierre-Albert Espinasse, was a French actor.He was the son of actor Georges Espinasse and actress Germaine Brasseur while the latter was married to Albert Brasseur. His grandfather, Jules Brasseur, was an actor as well...

, playing the character of Robert Macaire
Robert Macaire
Robert Macaire was a noted criminal and assassin who appears in French plays. His name is renowned in French culture as that of the archetypal villain....

 (via the character Frédérick Lemaître
Frédérick Lemaître
Frédérick Lemaître — birth name Antoine Louis Prosper Lemaître — was a French actor and playwright, one of the most famous players on the celebrated Boulevard du Crime.-Biography:...

) in Les Enfants du Paradis.

Connections with other works

In the context of the principal authors' other works, it is notable that this is not the only Andersen adaptation that this pair animated – Grimault and Prévert also adapted The Steadfast Tin Soldier
The Steadfast Tin Soldier
"The Steadfast Tin Soldier" is a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about a tin soldier's love for a paper ballerina. After several adventures, the tin soldier perishes in a fire with the ballerina. The tale was first published in Copenhagen by C.A...

as Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier) (1947), which is included in La table tournante (The turning table) on the deluxe edition of Le Roi et l'oiseau. In the early 1970s, Prévert and Grimault also made two dark animations, one apocalyptic – Le Chien mélomane (The Megalomaniac Dog) (1973), which features a dog wielding a violin that caused destruction at a distance and leaves the world a gray waste (as in the end of Le Roi); both are collected in La table tournante.

Grimault did not directly reuse characters between his animations, but similar characters recur – the twin police officers in Voleur de paratonnerres (The lightning rod thief) are recalled by Le Sir de Massouf in La Flûte magique (The Magic Flute), then reappears as the chief of police in Le Roi et l'Oiseau. Similarly, Gô from Passagers de "La Grande Ourse" (Passengers of "The Big Bear") is recalled by Niglo in Marchand de notes, then becomes the chimney sweep in Le Roi et l'Oiseau.

For Prévert's part, he had previously written a poem about the Neuilly festival, mentioned by the bird ("La Fête à Neuilly", in Histoires, 1946), featuring lions, and a lion character features prominently in Children of Paradise
Children of Paradise
Les Enfants du Paradis, released as Children of Paradise in North America, is a 1945 French film by French director Marcel Carné, made during the German occupation of France during World War II...

,
as do other bombastic characters, recalling and in fact inspiring the bird. He also wrote of birds in "Pour faire le portrait d'un oiseau" (To make [paint] a portrait of a bird) in Paroles (1945), which, fittingly, given the long production of the movie, includes the lines "Parfois l'oiseau arrive vite / mais il peut aussi bien mettre de longues années / avant de se décider" (Often the bird arrives quickly / but he can also take many years / before he decides himself).

Influence

Le Roi et l'oiseau had a profound influence on Hayao Miyazaki
Hayao Miyazaki
is a Japanese manga artist and prominent film director and animator of many popular anime feature films. Through a career that has spanned nearly fifty years, Miyazaki has attained international acclaim as a maker of animated feature films and, along with Isao Takahata, co-founded Studio Ghibli,...

 and Isao Takahata
Isao Takahata
is a Japanese anime filmmaker that have earned critical international acclaim for his work as a director. Takahata is co-founder of Studio Ghibli with long-time collaborative partner Hayao Miyazaki. He has directed films such as the war-themed Grave of the Fireflies, the romantic-drama Only...

, who later founded Studio Ghibli
Studio Ghibli
is a Japanese animation and film studio founded in June 1985. The company's logo features the character Totoro from Hayao Miyazaki's film My Neighbor Totoro...

. They discuss this at length in a documentary on the deluxe edition of the DVD, noting for example that they took frame-by-frame photographs of some sequences (such as the king elbowing the court painter aside) to be able to study how the animation was done.

Miyazaki states, inter alia, that "We were formed by the films and filmmakers of the 1950s. At that time I started watching a lot of films. One filmmaker who really influenced me was the French animator Paul Grimault." and "It was through watching Le Roi et l'Oiseau by Paul Grimault that I understood how it was necessary to use space in a vertical manner." For his part, Takahata states "My admiration towards Paul Grimault and Le Roi et l'Oiseau has always been the same, probably because he achieved better than anyone else a union between literature and animation." The influence is also visible in The Castle of Cagliostro
The Castle of Cagliostro
is a 1979 Japanese animated film co-written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. It is one of the films featuring master thief Arsène Lupin III.The second animated Lupin III movie and arguably the best known, Castle of Cagliostro was written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, who also co-directed the first...

,
whose castle resembles the castle in Le Roi et l'Oiseau.

Due to their great affection for the film, Ghibli secured the Japanese distribution of the film through their Ghibli Museum Library
Ghibli Museum Library
The is the collection of classic and non-Japanese animated films which have been dubbed or subtitled and released in Japan by Studio Ghibli, in collaboration with Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment and Cinema ANGELICA...

 imprint, and thus it is available in Japan.

Editions

Le Roi et l'oiseau has been released in various editions, in various languages. Beyond the fundamental distinction between editions based on the incomplete 1952 version, and those based on the 1980 version, there have been various English translations of the 1952 version, and more recently, a remastered deluxe (2 disc) edition of the 1980 version, with French and Dutch audio.

In the English-speaking world, the film has been released on video under various titles but these have generally been low-budget releases of the unfinished 1952 version. The 1952 version is now in the public domain
Public domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...

, and is available with English language narration by Peter Ustinov
Peter Ustinov
Peter Alexander Ustinov CBE was an English actor, writer and dramatist. He was also renowned as a filmmaker, theatre and opera director, stage designer, author, screenwriter, comedian, humourist, newspaper and magazine columnist, radio broadcaster and television presenter...

 at the Internet Archive
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...

 at The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird. Further, English subtitles for the completed 1980 edition are available at this page at Open Subtitles.

Deluxe edition

The deluxe version includes a 1988 documentary of Grimault and his work, La table tournante, (The turning table), filmed by Jacques Demy
Jacques Demy
Jacques Demy was one of the most approachable filmmakers to appear in the wake of the French New Wave. Uninterested in the formal experimentation of Alain Resnais, or the political agitation of Jean-Luc Godard, Demy instead created a self-contained fantasy world closer to that of François...

, together with various shorts. La table tournante features Grimault's most noted short animations (and some live action), in some cases abridged, namely:
  • La séance de spiritisme (The spiritualist seance) (1931, live action advertisement by Jean Aurenche with stop-action animation by Grimault and Jacques Brunius) – features a moving table, after which the documentary is named
  • Le Marchand de notes (The [musical] note merchant) (1942)
  • Les Passagers de "La Grande Ourse" (The Passengers of "The Big Bear") (1941), abridged
  • L'Épouvantail (The Scarecrow) (1942)
  • Le Voleur de paratonnerres (The Lightning Rod Thief) (1944)
  • La Flûte magique (The Magic Flute) (1946)
  • Le Diamant (The Diamond) (1970)
  • Le fou du roi (The king's lunatic) (1987–88, made for La table tournante)
  • Le Chien mélomane (The Megalomaniac Dog) (1973)
  • Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier) (1947)

Note that most of these were made during and immediately after World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

, some during the occupation of France; indeed, Les Passagers de "La Grande Ourse" started as Gô chez les oiseaux (Gô among the birds), but was interrupted by the war. During this time, the studio Les Gémeaux was the only animation studio in occupied Europe (Germany did not have an animation industry, and American animation did not come in), and thus found a captive audience.

The additional shorts are
  • Les Passagers de "La Grande Ourse" – full version

together with 4 advertisements:
  • Le Messenger de la Lumière (The Messenger of Light) – for a light shop
  • La Légende de la Soie (The Legend of Silk) – paid for by the silk industry
  • Sain et Sauf (Safe and Sound) – for Danon yogurt
  • Terre! (Land ho!) – for an optician

See also

  • History of French animation
    History of French animation
    The first pictured movie was from Frenchman Émile Reynaud, who created praxynoscope, animation system of 12 pictures, and films of about 500~600 pictures, projected on its own théatre optique, system near from modern film projector, at Musée Grévin in Paris, France, the October 28, 1892.Émile Cohl ...

  • List of animated feature films

Other animated movies with long production histories

  • The Thief and the Cobbler
    The Thief and the Cobbler
    The Thief and the Cobbler is an animated feature film, famous for its animation and its long, troubled history. The film was conceived by Canadian animator Richard Williams, who worked 28 years on the project. Beginning production in 1964, Williams intended The Thief and the Cobbler to be his...

    ,
    in production 1964–1995, released unfinished (or rather, hastily finished)
  • The Overcoat
    The Overcoat (animated film)
    The Overcoat is an upcoming animated feature film that has been the main project of acclaimed Russian director and animator Yuriy Norshteyn since 1981. It is based on the short story by Nikolai Gogol with the same name....

    ,
    by Yuriy Norshteyn
    Yuriy Norshteyn
    Yuriy Borisovich Norshteyn , or Yuri Norstein is an award-winning Soviet and Russian animator best known for his animated shorts, Hedgehog in the Fog and Tale of Tales...

     :: still in production, since 1981

Sites

(The 1952 The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird)

Trailers


Commentary


Media

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