Hacker Cinema
The King and the Mockingbird
Le Roi et l'Oiseau
1980 · Film · 83 min
Directed by Paul Grimault
A young shepherdess and a chimneysweep plan to get married and escape the clutches of a tyrannical king in love with her, assisted by the guile of a cheeky mockingbird, the king's archenemy.
3 positivefrom 3 commenters
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3 comments on Hacker News
> Internet Archive was the ONLY place where I could enjoy a completely random piece of lost media from a children's television show called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Same for me with Le roi et l'oiseau and Peter and the Wolf by Disney.
Japan has been in a dialogue with Europe for a long time regarding anime and manga. Anime has been huge in Western Europe since probably at least the 70s. France and Italy commissioned some in the 70s to cut on animation costs and it worked so well that it spiralled into a ton of imports. France is still the second largest market for manga in the world in front of the USA despite having a sixth of its population. Strangely I think France and Japan are culturally a lot more permeable than the USA and Japan are.
> Do Studio Ghibli fans care to know what Miyazaki's favorite films are? I guarentee almost none of them are anime or even animated
Miyazaki got part of the King and the Mockingbird by Grimault actually printed to study them when he was a student. It’s notable because the movie was written by a famous French poet and screenwriter from the poetic realist movement and you can some the influences that had on Miyazaki career are fairly obvious.
I globally agree, with two nitpicks.
Anime from the last twenty years seems less directly influenced by foreign tendencies. Of course, since Japan is impregnated of the American culture (including the language), its anime cannot ignore this context. But decades ago, the Japanese pioneers like Tezuka were following the steps of previous pioneers like Disney, but now, the anime has grown enough to claim a relative independence, meaning their internal tendencies are much stronger than foreign influences.
> Miyazaki (who mostly made very Disney-like westernised things
The level of "Disney-like thing" hugely varies across Miyazaki's films. Mononoke is obviously Disney/Hollywod compatible, but Totoro not so much.
Miyazaki and Takahata, who co-founded Ghibli, repeatedly stated that the work that most influenced them was "Le roi et l'oiseau" (Grimault & Prévert, 1953, 1980). This masterpiece is of course a "western thing", but very far from "Disney-like", especially toward the second half of the film. I heard that the Ghibli museum often had screenings of it.