Paul Grimault, Jacques Prévert, and Engagée Animation: The Case of The King and the Bird

Abstract: Few people are familiar with the animator who at one point was known in France as the French Walt Disney. But his 1980 The King and the Bird is no saccharine Snow White . Drawing from “The Shepherdess and the Chimneysweep” by Hans Christian Andersen, Grimault and Prévert created a film that not only allegorizes the Vichy Regime headed by the Maréchal Pétain. It also provides more broadly a critique of autocratic regimes and societies of surveillance in which mass-produced, industrialized art serves the purpose of political propaganda instead of freedom. I foreground Grimault and Prévert’s continuous dedication to committed or engagée animation emblematized in the film and consider the ways in which their work brings together questions of artistic freedom and social justice.