The First Animated Surrealist Film | The King and the Mockingbird

46 thoughts on “The First Animated Surrealist Film | The King and the Mockingbird”

1. Thanks for making this video. I have to tell you one thing very important, maybe you didn't get enough; the english title breaks the initial balance and maybe that's why you didn't get the thing the most important in this poetic movie. The whole concept is based on the balance of "le roi" (the law/the rules) and "l'oiseau" (the freedom),. Freedom is the only who can moke the Law but also the true Love is possible thanks to Freedom. Mariage/law, rules can't understand love. If you really want to understand the movie you have to watch movies that Prevert wrote before. "Le Roi et l'Oiseau" is like the final allegory of what Grimault and Prevert worked on all there life: freedom. Sorry my english is not good enough so I could really explain you in details. I hope you will see the movie again to understand and feel what I try to explain. This movie has the best happy ending Prevert and Grimault ever dreamed of: the city of Law(rules) is down, freedom has the last word.

   Si vous voulez aimer ce film essayer d'apprendre le français, car dans la langue passe une culture qu'aucune traduction ne saurait rendre. Si vous voulez aimez, soyez libre et sachez rêver. C'est le conseil d'une french girl

2. It's probably the most powerful among all the "moving paintings".

3. I found this incredible film in a junk DVD bin at some discount store in my hometown in Oregon. Its called ‘The Curious Adventures of Mr.Wonderbird’ with Peter Ustinov as the Wonderbird(Mockingbird). My kids, born post 911, love it! As do I. The surrealist angle makes beautiful sense and Im happy to have found it. Great to see others aware of and interested in this film. .The Djinn Fairy’, The Sorceress(Kiriko) all the Studio Ghibli films have been influenced! Makes full sense!

4. I had to laugh at "Renaye", I'm sorry 😀 But great video! Thanks!

5. Très bon travail, tu résumes très bien cette œuvre et surtout le grand Paul Grimault, quel Homme… Pour la paix, l'humanité et la poésie et le parfait duo entre lui et Jacques Prévert a donné l'un des plus grands classiques de l'animation française.
   Aujourd'hui, la poésie se meurt et les sourires s'envolent on ne sait où, la vie c'est l'amour, la poésie et la tolérance et avoir été éduqué par ça dès l'âge de 4 ans c'est une fierté car l'amour fait peur aujourd'hui mais j'y croirai jusqu'à la fin quitte à passer pour un faible ou quelqu'un de trop candide ! LOVE POWER

6. That was an honnest try at french pronunciation 🙂
   Next time try google translate for some reference ;p

7. :30 c-awe-saw bl-awe-n-caw

8. HAH! My great grandmother made a surrealist flipbook WAY before this and it's great. Next time, do your research, chump.

9. This was so interesting. Well done!

10. this is awesome, check out mine! 🙂
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2qSKghjuVs

11. Really informative, thanks for talking about this!

12. @ 6:18 The king's concern was his actual role in history as a ruler. A caring and open-minded leader is always preferable to a king that "can't see beyond the end of his nose". And he tried to change the history by simply changing a painting.
    A great video for a great movie!

13. This looks really fun to watch baked.

14. Lol,at the Thumbnail I thought it's a upgrade boss,great video btw

15. Am I wrong or is the King noticeably similar to Salvador Dali also? After the twenties a lot of the original surrealists broke with Dali over politics and considered him kind of a sellout so its not totally unbelievable that the king could be at least partially a dig at him.

16. This is my first exposure to both your work and the King and the Mockingbird, and I am extremely grateful for my introduction to both. Very well done, very informative and well scripted. Thank you very much. Have you considered doing something with Alice In Wonderland?

17. Well done!

18. I can imagine a modern adaptation of The Sheppardess and the Chimeny Sweep where two deeply troubled celebrities/pop culture icons meet and fall in love between the blurred lines of time, e.g. Judy Garland and Michael Jackson (I would use Elizabeth Taylor, but they were already good and close friends), or Marilyn Monroe and Kurt Cobain, etc. Perhaps Mr. Lonely is close enough.

19. This 'narrator' bloke is linguistically provincial. I have never heard such poor pronunciation of French. Try saying: "Lay Je Moe".

20. I am very sorry but the audio is so goddamn interrupted, that i couldn't concentrate on the subject.
    for a while i thought either the video was buffering too hard, or i was actually having a stroke.

    You don't need to edit out every peak and breath, it makes it sound unnatural.
    It also sounds like you had a noise reduction, or high pass filter, applied. This was way too strong, because some parts are really muted, or too low.
    and please get a better mic, you deserve it.

21. I wish you hadn't spoiled the whole plot of the movie but I appreciate the video though. I totally forgot about this movie.

22. what's the name of this soundtrack?

23. The idea of including a bird reminds me of Thumbelina, (1994) where a swallow (bird) narrates and becomes somewhat a pivotal character in the movie.

24. The s in les is silent, it's french not spanish!!

25. Please try to check out when making a video containing foreign words how to pronounce them….. jacques is not pronouced jacko — no matter whether it's french or another language, the videos loose a lot of their seriousness otherwise

26. Thank you so much for sharing!

27. Its my favorite film so far

28. I think it's arguable that this is the first.

29. Stop complaining about his French pronunciation. He pronounces English equally badly.

30. I'm sorry, what is this beautiful song that was used?

31. Would have loved to see Dali in the Jodorowsky Dune movie if it had been made!

32. Dude your French needs work

33. First animated surrealist film? Sorry, not even close. Surrealism was already present in animation before the word surrealism existed. An example, "Fantasmagorie" from 1908. If this isn't surreal, then what is it? https://youtu.be/nyTYNZUd3hQ

34. It's ok to pronounce French wrong but you can do a little better if you find those French words, get a pronunciation on the internet and write it down in a phonetic approximation and then just read the phonetic approximation. Like Jacques Prevert you can say JACK PRAY VER with ver being like very with no y. To remember you just write JACK PRAY VER(y). Renoir is just REN WAR where WAR is just pronounced to rhyme with TAR. So you write REN WAR (tar). No one has to pronounce a language like French perfectly just not mindbogglingly wrong.

35. FINALLY! someone finally talks about the king and the mockingbird holy fucking finally.

36. I never expected to come accross a video on this film, let alone by someone who isn't a natural french speaker.
    I grew up with this movie, thanks to the same DVD you show at the end of the video. Even back then, it stood out from other similar cartoons, mainly disney movies, in ways that were always fascinating to me. Its slower pace or its unusual setting and characters, to name a few. The fact that even as a child, I had the feeling that there was a lot I wasn't getting about this movie while still being able to enjoy it is a testiment to its quality. Going back to it as an adult was just as much a delightful nostalgia trip as it was a rediscovery of the movie and of all its themes and meaning.
    Thank you for the video, the surrealist analysis of the film seems like an obvious pick now that I think about it.

    Also, don't pay too much attention to the people criticizing your french. A lot of french people have a very strict (if not elitist) relationship to our language, even those who barely know how to speak english or any other foreign language. Your french isn't great, but to anyone who doesn't obsess over it it's not really a distraction from the video.

37. I had this movie on a DVD. The creepiest shit I've seen to date. Sure, as I child I've watched a lot of horror movies. Some of them were scary, others were not. Later, as I grew up, would discover a lot of dark, creepy corners of internet. But nothing made me fell so unease like watching this weird, alien movie.

38. your french prononciation makes it impossible to watch.

39. Funny I was thinking the King was like Trump but then he turns out modeled on Nixon. That was freaky. Totally relevant for today's predicament.

40. what a rubish film.the narrator it's try to suspend this into to much explanation. when it's just a stupid cartoon

41. My ears are bleeding from the pronunciation of some of these names. It’s like he didn’t even try to pronounce them

42. I wish Criterion would release a collection of Grimault's work. His animation style actually strongly reminds me of Mr Williams'. Both extraordinary and exceptional animators.

43. I think this the most deep catoon I ever see.

44. I really like the artwork at 1:10. Could anyone tell me what it is?

45. Can't imagine how that cartoon king was anything like Nixon, but okay

46. the king seems to look rather like Dali

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