The film had a profound influence on Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, who later founded Studio Ghibli. Miyazaki states, inter alia, that "We were formed by the films and filmmakers of the 1950s. At that time I started watching a lot of films. One filmmaker who really influenced me was the French animator Paul Grimault." and "It was through watching "Le Roi et l'Oiseau" by Paul Grimault that I understood how it was necessary to use space in a vertical manner." 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." The influence is also visible in "The Castle of Cagliostro," whose castle resembles the castle in "The King and the Mockingbird." 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.