Animals as varied as bees, beetles, mice, foxes, crocodiles and elephants play a wide variety of roles in literature and film.[59] A genre of films has been based on oversized insects, including the pioneering 1954 Them!, featuring giant ants mutated by radiation, and the 1957 The Deadly Mantis.[60][61][62] Birds have occasionally featured in film, as in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 The Birds, loosely based on Daphne du Maurier's story of the same name, which tells the tale of sudden attacks on people by violent flocks of birds.[63] Ken Loach's admired[64] 1969 Kes, based on Barry Hines's 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave, tells a story of a boy coming of age by training a kestrel.[64]