Kingdom Hearts is a series of crossover action role-playing games owned by Disney and developed and published by Square Enix (originally Square). Under the direction of Totsuya Nomura, a longtime Square Enix character designer, it is a collaboration of Disney Interactive and Square Enix, crossing over multiple Disney Properties and Final Fantasy Characters, based in a fictional universe tailored to the game narrative.
While it has garnered immense popularity over the years, it is a little known fact that Disney almost pushed full steam ahead with an animated series way back in 2002. Thanks to host Hector Navarro's latest episode of
Animation Investigation, we now have some juicy details on what the series would have entailed! It seems that Seth Kearsley worked on the pilot episode, though it was never picked up to series. Kearseley was willing to discuss the course that the first season would have taken had Disney allowed the series to see the light of day.
It seems the first act would have been centered around the famous Destiny Islands, familiar to any fan of the game as that is the location players start at in the first
Kingdom Hearts title. Act two heads to the nostalgia breeding Traverse Town, where Sora meets Donald, Goofy, and Squall (er, Leon). Meanwhile, act three would have served to set up the journey ahead.
The project was so serious that Kearsley worked with a writer on the game to get the tone right, and also with Disney to perfect the
Kingdom Hearts look. He was even able to get ahole of backgrounds from
Aladdin to use in the pilot presentation, and you can see those images in the reveal video below.
What do you think? Would you have wanted to see a Kingdom Hearts cartoon, or is that a step too far? Sound off below!