L’OISEAU BLEU (1908)
aka The Blue Bird
Article 5177 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 6-6-2016
Director unknown
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Fairy tale

An evil queen schemes to have her ugly daughter marry a visiting prince, but the prince prefers the queen’s other daughter, who is beautiful. The beautiful daughter is imprisoned and the prince is turned into a blue bird. Will he be able to rescue her?

I’ve seen a couple of other movies with the title THE BLUE BIRD based on the Maeterlinck play and was expecting this to be an earlier version, but it’s an entirely different story with the same name. It’s a fairly standard fairy tale, though in these condensed early silent shirts, it can be a little difficult following the plot. The print I saw is in fairly poor shape, but it does look like the hand-painted color effects were well done. All in all, it’s a passable silent short of the era.