Pasolini coined the term “ideo-comic” to describe this unusual film that is at once a trenchant political critique and a delightful, offbeat comedy. Uccellacci e Uccellini (literally, “Big Birds and Little Birds”) is an allegorical tale following the on-the-road exploits of three characters: a father, his son and a talking crow who recounts Marxist fables and philosophies along the way. Pasolini, who rarely used professional actors and, when he did, chose them “for what they really are,” cast the famous Italian clown and pantomimist Toto as the wistful, comic and awkward father. Ninetto Davoli, a non-professional actor discovered by Pasolini, plays the son who, like his father, combines “total humdrumness and something magical.” As for the crow, Pasolini stated, “The crow is extremely autobiographical.”
With The Hawks and the Sparrows, a pivotal work among his films, Pasolini announces “the end of neorealism as a kind of limbo” (“the age of Brecht and Rossellini is finished,” crows the crow). The two men eat crow for dinner, but there is the promise of something new as they walk off, digesting, or assimilating, their marxist friend. (Quotations are from Oswald Stack's Pasolini on Pasolini)