A 'Kingdom Hearts' Anime Is Exactly What the Series Needs After 25 Years
Disney and Square Enix have everything they need to make a great Kingdom Hearts anime, so what are they waiting for?
In Mickey Mouse Clubhouse season 1, the Halloween episode “Mickey’s Treat” sees the gang race to Pete’s house for his annual Halloween party. Mickey and Minnie dress up as a magician and a witch. Donald Duck is a cowboy. And Goofy cosplays as “Sir Goofy,” a brave knight… wielding a metal garbage can lid as a shield.
When I watched this episode with my four-year-old daughter late last year and saw Goofy with a shield, I instantly transformed into the “Pointing Leonardo DiCaprio” meme in real life (minus the cigarette and beer, of course). Because for the last quarter-century, Goofy brandishing a shield has meant only one thing: Kingdom Hearts. I anxiously told my daughter and wife all about it. Their eyes glazed over a little bit as I got too deep into the convoluted lore. But this little mini-crossover event left me wanting more.
“Mickey’s Treat” first aired in 2006, four years after the first Kingdom Hearts game was released. While whoever makes Mickey Mouse Clubhouse dropped the ball by having Donald dress up like a cowboy instead of a wizard (like he is portrayed as in Kingdom Hearts), I’ve had the same thought for years: Why haven't Disney and Kingdom Hearts developer/publisher Square Enix adapted the game into an anime series yet — or at least some kind of silly animated show for kids I can watch with my daughter?
If you count some of the remasters and remakes, Kingdom Hearts has had more than a dozen games released over the last 25 years. If it truly is the billion-dollar franchise Disney said it was earlier this week, then some kind of TV show feels like a logical step forward.
This weekend, Disney is devoting an entire hour of D23 to celebrating Kingdom Hearts. The “Deep Dive into Kingdom Hearts” panel on Saturday brings together creatives from Disney, Pixar, and Square Enix to look back at the franchise ahead of its 25th anniversary next year. The English-language voice actors for Sora and Riku (Haley Joel Osment and David Gallagher) will appear alongside Kingdom Hearts 4 co-director Tai Yasue. We still don’t have a release date, but it seems likely that we might get another glimpse of KH4 during this event, especially since we got a polished trailer during a June Nintendo Direct. The hype cycle has begun — and it’s bound to continue. And it’s time for Disney to make an anime a part of that.
X-Men ’97 remains one of Marvel’s most buzzed-about projects in years and just wrapped season 2 this week. Star Wars: Visions gave some of Japan’s best animation studios permission to remix a galaxy far, far away. Earlier this month, Disney released the full eight-episode series The Ninth Jedi as a Visions spin-off. There’s also Disney Twisted-Wonderland: The Animation, a dark fantasy isekai anime set in a magic academy with dorms modeled after classic Disney villains. It was co-produced by animation studios Yumeta Company and Graphinica, in collaboration with Aniplex and Walt Disney Japan. A-1 Pictures also produced NieR: Automata Ver1.1a, an adaptation of Square Enix’s widely beloved RPG Nier: Automata. So there are precedents for anime productions from both Disney and Square Enix. How do we get them to meet somewhere in the middle?
The wider entertainment industry has spent years demonstrating how well games can make the same transition. Netflix found enormous success with Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Castlevania, and Devil May Cry. It has made multiple animated Witcher movies. Meanwhile, Kingdom Hearts has been sitting here for nearly 25 years, and it already looks like an anime.
You’ve got spiky-haired teenagers, impossibly elaborate weapons, and dramatic speeches about the nature of the big-H Heart. The games already employ episodic, procedural storytelling across a collection of colorful worlds with their own characters and conflicts, mainly based on Disney movies. Sora, Donald, and Goofy are essentially an adventuring party who arrive somewhere new, solve a local crisis, defeat a big monster, and continue on their way.
Some kind of animated series could give normal people a way to actually get into Kingdom Hearts, sidestepping or even just streamlining the series’ daunting mountain of lore for newcomers. And it would be a tremendously easy sell for millions of kids who already love Donald and Goofy, and Sora would remain the lovably good-natured audience surrogate.
On the flip side, I would watch a more stylized and slightly mature anime. The Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days story already feels similar to something like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, with a found family of exploited young people navigating a dangerous world. The Birth By Sleep prequel is also arguably one of the best games in the entire series, focusing on a trio of Keyblade wielders — Terra, Aqua, and Ventus — and featuring more unique worlds than usual (though there are still plenty of Disney lands to visit).
The strangest part in all this is that Disney already tried to make a Kingdom Hearts show.
Shortly after the original game’s release, Disney developed an animated Kingdom Hearts series with director Seth Kearsley. The pilot followed Sora, Donald, and Goofy to Agrabah, where their search for Riku and Kairi collided with the story of Aladdin. Kearsley later said the animatic tested exceptionally well with children, but Disney shelved the project before it could become a series.
Kingdom Hearts works as a cartoon. You’ve got an earnest anime hero, a hot-tempered duck, and an easygoing dog man. Their dynamic is every bit as charming outside the scope of a video game. At its core, the original Kingdom Hearts is about children separated from their homes and one another, clinging to friendships across impossible distances. It is very ridiculous more often than not, but it has never been cynical. That combination of sincerity, cosmic melodrama, and Disney cheer is exactly what makes it special.
Disney could make a lavish anime with a major Japanese studio. It could make a lighter Disney animated series for children. It could adapt the games directly or tell an entirely new story. Almost every version of this idea sounds really, really fun.
25 years ago, a collaboration between Disney and Square Enix sounded so implausible that producer Shinji Hashimoto had to pitch it during a chance encounter with a Disney executive in an elevator. Today, Kingdom Hearts is a beloved institution important enough to command its own marquee D23 celebration. It shouldn’t take another chance elevator ride to realize that it would make one hell of an animated series.