"The King and the Mockingbird" just might be the best animated film of the year.

On a basic level, The King and the Mockingbird is a fun fantasy. But to the two poets who first imagined it, it must have felt like a repository for all the madness of a still-smoldering world.

The film is suffused with a subversive attitude toward the rich and clueless, epitomized by a king at war with a talking bird.

An exhausting, exciting use of animation's unique power of moving caricature.