together into a narrative, and John enlisted Ed Smith and former UPA director Robert Cannon for animation. The resulting film, Moonbird (1959), marked one of the earliest examples of using real children voices in an animated film. Moonbird won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 1960, becoming the first independent film to win in the category. The success of Moonbird caught the attention of Susan Burnett, the film officer of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), who commissioned the Hubleys to make a film for UNICEF. For the first time, Hubley used the voices of all of he and Faith’s children, though most of their vocals are gurgles and mumbles made by his infant daughters Emily and Georgia. The film, Children of the Sun (1960), addressed “how hunger affects the world’s children”. Hubley wanted to make a film about Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and was inspired after reading Harlow Shapley’s Of Stars and Men (1959) in 1959. Intrigued by Shapley’s attempts to understand mankind’s place in the universe, Hubley wrote to Shapley with the idea to adapt the book’s themes into an animated film. Instead of simply writing a script and getting Shapley’s approval, Hubley and Shapley chose to collaborate closely on nearly every aspect of the film, with Hubley sending Shapley detailed outlines for the film’s structure and frequently traveling to Shapley’s home in Peterborough, New Hampshire, to meet with him. Hubley and Shapley became close friends during this period, resulting in Of Stars and Men (1962), the Hubleys’ first feature-length film. The film follows a very loose narrative style, relying predominantly on Shapley’s narration. Hubley’s children would again appear in the film, with their improvised conversations again being presented much in the same way as in Moonbird. Due to the nature of the film’s presentation, the Hubleys, audiences, and distributors alike were unsure if the film could be categorized as a documentary. At the 1961 San Francisco International Film Festival, the film won Best Documentary, and at the Venice Film Festival - where the Hubleys’ films had been previously screened as part of the animation category - the film was placed in the feature category alongside live-action films. Author Sybil DelGaudio cites the film as one of the earliest examples of an animated documentary. While the film was screened in festivals as early as 1962, the Hubleys would continue to revise the film and appeal