By the same people who made the famous "I want my Mayo!" TV commercials, John and Faith Hubley. Their sons' voices are featured. Mark Hubley (of Marky Maypo fame) is the older boy's voice in the film. Wonderful -- Thank you for posting it.
This is such an AWESOME cartoon! No wonder it won an award. I found out about it last month when I bought this dvd for like $5 dollars with 200 classic cartoon episodes such as: Little Audrey, Popeye and Betty Boop. Amongst these they had this special cartoon, "Moonbird!" Of course I loved it and my sister loved it as well. The voices are just THE CUTEST EVER and it's just a sweet cartoon of two brothers. This is a genius creation. Too bad we don't see cartoons like this anymore. ;o(
Thank you,Barry.When I first saw this cartoon on a special in 1968 I knew the kids sounded familiar.I realized at the end of the cartoon it was from the Maypo adds I had seen in the early 1960s.
I have searched for this for 40 years and THANK you so much for this! Hubley's kids actually just made this up, and he created the cartoon around their fantasies--and history was made, too!
My interpretation of the title goes like this: "Moon" is because it's the night time when the two brothers go on their adventure. "Bird" of course is what they're trying to capture, which is the main purpose of them leaving their home so late at night. Just a thought anyhow.
Mark was the voice of "Marky Maypo" in Hubley's famous Maypo cereal commercials of 1956-'57...both of them provided voices for those spots, and this was the eventual result of John's "collaboration" with the boys. And it won an Academy Award as "Best Cartoon of 1959" to boot!
Silverstein's poem Where the Sidewalk Ends references the chalk-white arrows and the moonbird depicted in this film. Now I know the source of his inspiration for the poem. Thanks for posting this animated short film!
While this is undoubtedly a high mark of animation, Faith did not work on any Charlie Brown specials. She was trained as an editor and her animation skills developed into a specific -decidedly non-Schulzian style. One of her main collaborators, Bill Littlejohn worked with Bill Melendez Productions on many of the Peanuts films, so the confusion is understandable.
I'm confused...some videos on my playlists say they're deleted but when I tapped on and activated them...they're not deleted...and the not-deleted videos say they ARE deleted when they end up looking like they're not...what's up with that???😕
@halfvader Yes, but UPA's animation was so stylized that it kept degrading year after year because there weren't less stylized works for people to relax and new staff to cut their teeth on. They encouraged filmmakers to regress into graphic abstraction when there were still improvements to be made on more literal styles. Their films regressed from stylistic representations to flat angles to excuse poor knowledge of draftsmanship with graphic zing. Just look at Gerald McBoing Boing on Planet Moo.
By the gods. This little child is incredebly annoying. Especially this horrid, horrid, voice. I might have enjoyed it otherwise, as I'm a bit of an animation junkie.
I guess kids will like this, like the squeaky voices etc. But from my point, it shows that animation was pretty much dead at this point if this one takes the best animated short film. Taking into account that Disney kicked ass already more than 25 years ago, it's desastrous. The 50s were way worse than the 30s and 40s.
You're comparing apples and oranges. This is an independent short, an artistic experiment. Totally in a different category from anything Disney or the other studios were doing.
