Video: Lost pilot animatic for scrapped Kingdom Hearts animated series unearthed

Nearly two decades after an animated series based on Kingdom Hearts came to be, a lost pilot animatic has surfaced online.

Seth Kearsley, who has worked as a director, producer, and more on a variety of movies and TV shows, was heavily involved with the project. It turns out that the anime wasn’t allowed to follow a sequential story and instead the episodes needed to be standalone. Many of the voice actors from the game would be reprising their roles other than Haley Joel Osment as Sora due to a scheduling conflict. Kearsley had pushed for a rewrite of a script he was given to make it feel more like Kingdom Hearts, but in the end, the show never materialized.

Today, Kearsley put out a pilot animatic for what the Kingdom Hearts animated series intended to be. While admitting that it has some flaws, he “was really proud of the story we were able to tell in the time we had.” He added, “Setting up the entire premise of a series, and doing a ‘typical episode’ is a tall order. I feel like we pulled that off, and when they tested it with kids, it tested better than anything else they were testing in that round.”

Here’s the full video:

What do you think of the pilot? Is a Kingdom Hearts animated series something you’d like to see? Let us know in the comments.

All of the Kingdom Hearts games are currently available on Switch in cloud form.