"The shepherdess and the chimney sweep", loosely based on the fairy-tale of the same name by Hans Christian Andersen), the film was a collaboration between Grimault and popular French poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert.

The film is today regarded as a masterpiece[2] of French animation and has been cited by the Japanese directors Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata as an influence.

[6] A low-budget English-language release of the 1952 version, titled The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird, is in the public domain and available free online.

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 him with regular eyes.

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.

"The shepherdess and the chimney sweep"), Grimault and Prévert began the film in 1948 (following their first collaboration, Le Petit soldat, lit.

The production of the music is unusual in that Grimault left it entirely in the hands of Wojciech Kilar – Grimault 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.

However, Simon Bozonnet, an amateur musician and fan of the film, released a faithful transcription of the piano theme on his website.

The visual style is painterly, with strong perspective, recalling surrealist artists, most notably Giorgio de Chirico, but also Yves Tanguy,[11] friend of Prévert's youth.

The bird also mentions having seen Les Cloches de Corneville, having been to the Place d'Italie, and having attended the Neuilly festival (Neuilly-sur-Seine 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 involving the Blue Division of the French marines, memorialized in a painting by that name by Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville.

[8] 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" as Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier) (1947), which is included in La Table tournante ("The turning table") on the deluxe edition of The King and the Mockingbird.

In the early 1970s, Prévert and Grimault also made two dark animations, one apocalyptic – Le Chien mélomane (The Melomaniac 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 The King and the Mockingbird.

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, as do other bombastic characters, recalling and in fact inspiring the bird.

"[16] 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."

They discuss this at length in a documentary on the deluxe edition of the Japanese 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.

The 1980 version of the film was also dubbed into English with a cast of France-based American voice actors, and released in the United Kingdom in 1984, in cinemas under the title The King and Mister Bird by the Institute of Contemporary Arts[1] and on VHS under the title Mr Bird to the Rescue by Entertainment in Video.

[20] A Japanese-subtitled DVD version, titled Ō to Tori (王と鳥), is available through Ghibli Museum Library, and went on sale 4 April 2007, following a theatrical release in Japan starting 29 July 2006.

Rialto Pictures released the film in select theaters in the United States and Lionsgate made it available on Amazon Prime Video and on Vudu.