Despite the involvement of many well-known Disney characters in the Kingdom Hearts Over the years, Square Enix and Disney have kept the relationship between the two franchises relatively distant. Kingdom Hearts characters tend not to appear at Disney parks, for example, outside of the rare costumed appearance. But there was a time when Disney itself intended to involve Sora and others more directly. Kingdom Hearts characters from his media empire. Animator Seth Kearsley has revealed an animatic sequence once intended to serve as a pilot for a Disney-produced film Kingdom Hearts cartoon.
Check Kingdom Hearts animated cartoon below. An “animatic” is essentially a “concept art” scene for animated and live-action productions. It is generally designed to give production personnel a rough outline of how a given sequence will play out while in motion. Animations are often created by shooting storyboard footage in sequence and setting the result to music or dialogue reads. More modern productions sometimes use rough CGI animation or pre-existing placeholder models and assets.
The 11-minute pilot takes place in the media, plotted as if it were an episode set somewhere after the start of the series. It uses Jiminy Cricket narration to lay out the basic principle of Kingdom Hearts, as well as briefly recap his take on the relationship between Sora, Riku, and Kairi. In the Kingdom Hearts cartoon, Sora would travel the universe in search of his lost friends, while Riku would be stuck cooperating with Maleficent for the same reason. Meanwhile, Donald and Goofy would act as guides and mentors for the young traveler, as they are tasked with finding a prophesied hero to fend off an invasion by the Heartless. The trailer shows a rough summary of Sora, Goofy, and Donald’s adventure in Agrabah.
Kearsley, who worked as an executive producer on the project, found a VHS recording of the animatic late last month. It was originally produced in 2003 to launch the Kingdom Hearts cartoon to the executives of Disney and Square Enix. Although the project was initially greenlit in 2002 (after the first game launched on PS2), it was eventually scrapped.
In a video on his YouTube channel, Kearsley explained his motivation for sharing the content despite not having spoken much about it for nearly 20 years. Additionally, he showed off more production material that had almost never been seen publicly. An interesting trivia point: actor Haley Joel Osment was unavailable to voice Sora due to programming commitments, although much of the game’s voice cast reprized their roles.
Although the Kingdom Hearts cartoon was canceled before it could be produced, the games are available on different platforms. kingdom hearts 4 is also in development.