"Double King"

This review was comissioned by @firefossil


If there was ever a ten minute video that felt like a full length feature, it's "Double King" by Felix Colgrave. Part of this is down to it being packed with high concept content. Part of it is down to the video striking a very difficult balance of being viscerally uncomfortable and unpleasant, but also intriguing and...almost hypnotic...in a way that prevents you from looking away. The minutes pass slowly as you experience the work, but they keep passing and passing until you've seen the entire thing. I doubt that many people have ever been able to click away from "Double King" without watching it through first.

Part of the strange hypnosis that this short weaves is attributable to its combination of bizarre, grotesque imagery with interlocking geometry. Round-shouldered characters that fit perfectly in and out of doors. Suns and moons being seen through castle windows whose arched tops perfectly outline them. Crowns on heads, crowns on fingers, crowns sliding into other crowns. Etc. It has an almost Sesame Street animation short kind of OCD pattern-filling allure.

Another part of it is down to the sound design. Felix Colgrave is primarily a music video director, and that skillset is on full display here. Overbearing vocals, ominous metal beats, psychedellic techno jingles, and music-less stretches occupied only by diagetic sounds are packed densely together, but never seem to clash or whiplash. I feel weird saying this, since the tracks are all so short and strictly without lyrics, but "Double King" feels like a really succinct animated concept album.


The story told is that of a greedy king with a maniacal obsession with accumulating more crowns. He's not human. There are no humans in this world. I'm not sure what he is exactly, given that his body is covered at all times by cloaks and finery and the only other members of his species we see are only silhouettes in the darkness, but something with a rounded body and huge strong hands. He spends the first half or so of the ten minute video engaging in a series of brutal murders of the neighboring kings, stealing their crowns and stacking them on his head or...anywhere else on his body that they'll fit. His first conquest is of the friendly rat-king, who recieves him warmly as a royal guest...only for the doubleking to rip his skull out and march out the door again with his crown before the guards can even get over their shock.

So too fare the butterfly king, the snake king, and many others. A particularly disturbing case is that of the pumpkin king. After smashing him for his organic crown of plant matter, the Doubleking finds that the organic crown is prone to rotting right there on his head. Maggots grow inside of the rotten crown, and the maggots mature into flies, including a very naive and friendly-looking fly king with a tiny golden crown of his own; new life born from what was destroyed, inheriting some of the royalty as well as the vitality. As soon as the imago fly king has taken off from Doubleking's head though, Doubleking brutally murders him as well and jams his tiny crown onto one of his own fingers like a ring.

After each killing, the Doubleking has an entourage from his victims' peoples approach his own castle - amid sorrowful Gregorian chanting - to sadly pledge allegiance to their new monarch by right of murder.

Doubleking ignores them all at best, and tries to get rid of them at worst.

He might live in a castle and have wealth and resources at his disposal, but the Doubleking doesn't really seem to do any governing. He shows no interest in being a king at all. Not even in being a bad king. He just wants crowns, for the sake of having them, and that's where his logic begins AND ends.

Periodically throughout his crown-accumulating rampage, we catch glimpses of what I think are supposed to be Doubleking's original, rightful subjects. They share his silhouette, his googly eyes, and his giant hands. But they're all hiding in caves and holes, only peering out at him judgementally when he happens to come close to them and otherwise not making themselves seen or known at all.

Did he abandon them in the same way that he ignores all his newer conquered peoples? Or were they the ones who abandoned him? Why are they all living underground, while he alone goes out in the sun - albeit covered head to toe in obscuring robes?

In all cases, he appears to lock eyes with them only very briefly before continuing on with his violent crown-hunt.

Eventually, he uses an animal cruelty-filled contraption to propel himself onto the gigantic head of the mountain king. This crown is a little too big to steal, so instead Doubleking apparently wants to just live inside of it on top of the mountain king's head.

He runs around the forest within the crown for a while, killing worm-kings for their crowns and chasing after birds that happen to have yellow feathers on top of their heads. Eventually, seemingly delirious with exposure, he sees one of the little crowns on his fingers, forgets that it's already his, and cuts his own finger off to take the crown from it. There's a *really* unsettling hallucinatory effect as he bleeds to death, accompanied by ethereal techno beats, where the field of bushes he's standing in warp in wave-pattern into disfigured screams and twisted anatomy symbols as he loses consciousness.

It's not that he didn't deserve it, but it's just such a simultaneously beautiful and horrible death. It'll stay with me.

It turns out that this world has an afterlife. Actually, it turns out that this world might actually be a living creature, with the eerily life-life traits of some of the landmarks being more than just superficial. Reptilian psychopomps manoeuvre Doubleking's soul onto the moon, which it rides down into the literal maw of the world where the dead reside.

The afterlife looks pretty dismal, but fortunately there's a special little heaven just for kings that the Doubleking gets permission to enter. Here, the souls of all slain kings - including those murdered by the Doubleking himself, still bearing the spiritual scars of the wounds he inflicted on them - sit at a feast table headed by the skeletal goddess of the underworld. Doubleking's sins are all forgiven, it appears. Even the kings he murdered and who remain disfigured by him even in death are willing to forgive him and enjoy this new, peaceful eternity together.

But Doubleking won't accept it, because this afterlife doesn't have any crowns in it.

The only adorned head in the room is that of the goddess herself, and she will not permit any of her ex-royal subjects the vanity of covering their heads before her. Even trying to fold a paper napkin into a crown for himself gets Doubleking a stern finger-waggling.

He throws a tantrum. And...in so doing, reveals more of his physiology than we'd seen previously.

Eeeeesh. What the hell even are his people?

Not!Persephone eventually gives him her crown just to shut him up. It's big enough to cover his eyes, causing him to accidentally step out the door off the underside of the world-entity and into the void. Where he floats, alone with his crown, forevermore.

The end.


I want to say that this was a tale of greed and hunger for power, but I'm not actually sure that it was. The Doubleking didn't seem to want power. Or even wealth. He specifically just wanted crowns. I don't even know if this is about spectacular thinking, because it doesn't seem like he valued them as status symbols either. It's more like he wanted them for the same reason a toddler might randomly decide they need to hold all of the red-colored blocks in their hands right now at this second. Just...he really liked crowns.

In light of that, I don't know what - if anything - "Double King" is saying. But I don't know that it needs to say anything to succeed at being itself. So, uh, yeah. That's Double King. It's apparently been a very popular piece of web animation since it came out seven years ago, to the point where I'm a little surprised I hadn't heard of it before.