The King and the Mockingbird (Paul Grimault, 1980)
I can't remember offhand the last time I finished a movie and immediately wanted to buy the score. It's not something that happens often. But Wojciech Kilar's music for
The King and the Mockingbird is magnificent — equal parts romantic, hypnotic, whimsical, and haunting. (You can listen
here.) If I remember correctly, Kilar's score for Krzysztof Zanussi's
Quarterly Balance gave me the same feeling, so I supposed it's past time I learned his name and paid more attention to his collaborations with Zanussi, Polanski, and Wajda.
My experience with the film as a whole reminds me of the first time I watched Miyazaki's
Castle in the Sky — that great feeling of watching something that feels so utterly fresh and original in its style, tone, and details, even while the film's structure and pacing take some getting used to. Grimault's film is a surprisingly understated affair, one that I expect to appreciate more on subsequent viewings, when I'm less impatient for narrative developments and focused instead on the great imagination and sense of whimsy. On this first viewing, for example, I kept waiting for the real king to return and challenge his doppelgänger, naively thinking that all those trap doors had to lead somewhere.
The animation itself was is a bit hit and miss for me. The backgrounds are impressive throughout — I love the geometry of this world — and I liked the color palette, but periodically I'd find individual details distracting, especially with
lighting and effects like
transparency. There also seemed to be some imprecision between cels and a lack of continuity between shots. Having some sense of the film's long, troubled production history, I was forgiving of most of this ... but it was still a distraction.
I'm not sure I ever laughed out loud, but it's a very amusing film, full of wonderful little touches. By far my favorite scene is the concert in the lion pit.
That's everything I like about the movie distilled to a single moment. I also loved the rendering of the shepherdess and sweep, including their voices, and wish there'd been more of them. (There's something a bit "off" about the way they're drawn, but it still works.) The Disney-esque dog is super cute, too, and used well. As for the mockingbird, he's ... very French. Or maybe just very Jacques Prévert. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
The final shot is perfection.
Grade: B+
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