| “ | Pathetic wretch! You dare speak to me in such a tone? | „ |
| ~ King Charles responding to the Mockingbird's taunt. |
Charles V and III make VIII and VIII make XVI, King of Tachycardia is the central antagonist of the 1980 classic French animated film Le roi et l'oiseau (The King and the Mockingbird); loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen's tale The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep.
He was voiced by the late Fernand Ledoux in the 1952 version and the late Pascall Mazzotti in the 1980 version. In the 1952 English version, he was voiced by the late Max Adrian.
Personality[]
King Charles rules the Kingdom of Tachycardia (Tachycardie in French): an immense and wondrous tower-like city, inspired of beautiful cities like Venice, mostly consisting of his palace. The gorgeous buildings are reserved to his palace and his court, with the population relegated in subterranean slums away from daylight, in atrocious squalor.
He is a misanthropic, cruel, entitled, whimsical, short-tempered, vain and horribly egomaniac tyrant, who hates his subjects and is hated by them. He always acts with grandiose, exaggerated flair surrounded by lackeys and sycophants, but he cannot bear criticism of any sort. He imposes a cult of personality by having countless paintings, statues and representations of himself all around the kingdom, (often imitating famous real-life artworks but always "omitting" his strabismus).
Everyone failing to meet the King's expectations or merely displeasing him is sentenced to slavery in the factory where the statues and portraits of him are mass-produced, if not thrown to lions to be devoured, or worse.
His tyranny is enforced by a bumbling yet ruthlessly efficient and blindly devoted State Police, and his entire kingdom is full of trap doors, with which he can dispose of anyone. No one knows what fate befalls victims of these trap doors, but it is obviously not pretty and most likely fatal. (Amusingly, the trap doors can pursue their targets throughout a room.) Moreover, he owns a monumental, human-like robot full of gadgets and with tremendous strength as a last resort.
King Charles loves hunting but terribly bad at it due to his strabismus. Yet, he once managed to shoot dead the wife of the titular Mockingbird, who nests over his keep with his family.
Since then, the grieving Mockingbird does everything he can to taunt and annoy the tyrant: including singing very loud lullabies to his children over and over, with the obvious intent of preventing the King from getting any sleep.
As such, the King staunchly hates the Mockingbird and has birds drawn on his targets when he practices his aim with guns. (Since he always misses, his servants always pierce holes on the target before bringing it to him.)
The King's only positive traits (relatively speaking) are his fondness for art and his affection for his dog, the only living creature he treats decently. He owns an immense collection of statues and paintings in his bedroom, whose subjects come to life by night and become real people. The King wants to marry a Shepherd girl represented in one of his paintings, but she in turn is in love with a Chimney Sweep from a painting on the opposite wall. He seems genuinely fond of her, but whether he truly loves her is doubtful, more probably feeling entitled to her as he does with everyone and everything.
Biography[]
The film first displays King Charles' daily life and his conflict with the Mockingbird. The story begins when an artist draws a portrait of King Charles for his private collection. Unfortunately, the portrait shows the monarch's obvious strabismus, leading him to dispose of the artist after giving him a medal, before retouching the portrait himself.
That night, as the King was sleeping, every artwork of his gallery came to life, including his portrait. As the Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep are professing their love to each other, the painting of King Charles states that he alone will marry the Shepherdess, since "it is written in books that shepherdesses always marry royalty".
Disgusted, the Sweep throws fruit at the Painted King and uses his ladder to escape the paintings with his beloved. The Portrait King targets him with his shotgun, but shoots at the painted lady above the chimney instead, for laughing at him. The bullet breaks her jar and its water extinguishes the fire, enabling the children to flee by the chimney with the Sweep's ladder.
Incensed and determined to claim the Shepherdess for himself, the Portrait King unhorses the statue of an old and obnoxious horseman, using the stone steed in hot pursuit, but it rebels and kicks him in the painting of a swamp. The ensuing ruckus awakes the real King, who notices his wrecked statue and that his Portrait is no longer in its painting. Seeing the Portrait King emerging from the swamp, the horrified King Charles frantically calls for his State Police to get rid of the intruder. But behind his back, the Portrait King presses a button that sends the real King Charles down his own trap. His fate afterwards is uncertain.
Gallery[]
