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The long considered lost Kingdom Hearts animated series pilot has been uploaded to YouTube. Kingdom Hearts has always been one of media's strangest crossovers, bringing the worlds of Final Fantasy and Disney together with a cast of original, Tetsuya Nomura-designed characters. This fusion has helped the series achieve major success over the years, which at one point almost led to an animated series that could have aired alongside beloved Disney Channel shows like Kim Possible and Lizzie McGuire. Now, after 20 years, the pilot for the canceled Kingdom Hearts animated series has appeared online, giving fans an idea of how it might have looked.
Fans of lost media will know that in 2014, Seth Kearsley, an animator and artist who has worked on films and TV series such as Eight Crazy Nights and The Looney Tunes Show, released storyboard artwork of what he claimed to be a canceled Kingdom Hearts animated series pilot that he worked on at Disney in 2002. According to Kearsley at the time, Disney canceled that project for being "too dark," however it was not revealed until recently that Keasley was in possession of a full unfinished pilot for the series and was preparing to release it for the project's 20th anniversary.
That finally happened today when Kearsley uploaded the full 11-minute animatic to his YouTube channel, revealing in the video's description that he is still proud of his work on the project despite its issues, particularly with how the show adapted the story of the game. The animatic is a fascinating watch, taking numerous moments of the game and stringing them together with narration from Pinocchio's Jiminy Cricket.
It's interesting to think of how different the legacy of the Kingdom Hearts video game series would be if this show was to have been greenlit and grown in popularity. TV adaptations of video games have been a growing trend with projects like HBO's upcoming The Last of Us series and Amazon's Fallout, and while adaptations have certainly been more common in animation throughout the years, recent series like Arcane and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners have seen major mainstream success that has lent itself to video game sales increases. It's not too unbelievable to think that a show like this could have made Kingdom Hearts even more of a sales success than it already was, and the show could have lasted a while thanks to the never-ending amount of Kingdom Hearts spin-off releases.
It's not known if Disney will take action to have this pilot removed, especially since it is still the intellectual property of the company's, so fans wishing to take a look at it should act immediately. The success of the Kingdom Hearts property likely means that a project like this is still possible to reappear in the future, albeit in an entirely new form on the likes of Disney Plus.