Today is the anniversary of a gorgeous and influential animated film that took a very long time to make. The King and the Mockingbird is a French animated fantasy film that finally had its full release today in 1980 after being in production for 32 years. I know that a number of people know about this film because The theatrical anime director Hayao Miyazaki is a big fan of it.
The plot of the film is a very loose adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen story "The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep", where a king develops a crush on a shepherdess who is already in love with chimney sweep, but it's not the real king, it's a painting and there's a bird, and… it's one of those things you just gotta watch. There's a few different versions of the film available, but I'd recommend the full 80's version of the film in French with subtitles. There is an unfinished cut of the film in the public domain, but it's far from being an ideal way to watch this animated masterpiece.
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