Disney ‘Kingdom Hearts’ Series — Commentary

Had I known at age 12, when I was first playing the original “Kingdom Hearts” video game on PlayStation 2, that there would be a Disney Channel anime series based on the game, I would not have been able to contain my glee. For me and many others my age, “Kingdom Hearts” was one of the formative pop culture moments for the Millennial generation.

Well before the MCU or “The Dark Knight,” here was a franchise that married our childhood nostalgia with more mature themes and characters, one in which Disney movies mash-up with the spiky-haired, brooding anime figures of the “Final Fantasy” video games. The gut punch of hearing the game’s soaring anthem “Simple and Clean” over its opening cinematic and closing finale was something that showed me that even kids’ stuff could operate on the grandest canvases of love and friendship, good and evil, light and dark, and still feel profound, moving, and beautiful. That’s the kind of reverence people have for a video game like “Kingdom Hearts,” which speaks to how it has endured across 25 years and a dozen obscure side games, even as fans have waited years in between the main flagship entries.

Despite the passion people have for it, it never really graduated in popular culture to anything beyond just a video game. Any fan of the franchise will tell you that the full lore of the world crafted by Tetsuya Nomura is virtually nonsensical to explain to a layman. The writing, full of hearts, darkness, light, Heartless, Nobodies, light within dark, etc., is often beyond parody, even if we love it anyway. People’s eyes would glaze over if they knew that grown men and women were spending hours inside worlds playing mini-games with Winnie the Pooh, clicking in rhythm to “Little Mermaid” sing-a-longs, or taking selfies with Woody from “Toy Story.” It can be hard to imagine too how such a sprawling narrative — one that literally inserts its hero into Disney classics everyone already knows — could ever be adapted into a short form film or series. The idea that casual audiences on TV — people who weren’t gamers willing to grind to 100 percent completion to unlock an esoteric, secret two-minute cutscene ending — was almost unthinkable.

Disney, despite lending its most iconic characters to the franchise time and again, has (perhaps wisely) kept itself at arm’s distance from “Kingdom Hearts.” You would never see Mickey Mouse wielding a Keyblade running around Disney World. OpenAI named its now defunct AI video model “Sora,” the same name as “Kingdom Hearts’” iconic hero, and nobody blinked. Michael Eisner was even once asked by a gaming journalist if he recalled green lighting the original game and he came up blank.

But 25 years after its release, it feels like Disney has finally recognized “Kingdom Hearts” as one of its true tentpole franchises. Here it is on stage at D23 as a major announcement alongside news about the X-Men, a legend award for Lin-Manuel Miranda, and “Coco 2,” which coincidentally will be a playable world in 2027’s “Kingdom Hearts 4.” D23 gave us not just the series but a new trailer for the game, a target release date, and a reunion panel featuring the voice of Sora, Haley Joel Osment. Sora will soon to be a playable character in “Fortnite,” which is part of Disney’s big ongoing partnership with Epic Games. “Kingdom Hearts” even seeped into larger entertainment news this weekend because one of the franchise’s main characters, Kairi, was long voiced by none other than the late Hayden Panettiere.

All this should be very exciting for fans who have long known one of their favorite games is still unbelievably nerdy and cheesy, but still wanted to see it in the mainstream. But my question to Disney after all this is: do you know what you’re getting into?

Making an anime “Kingdom Hearts” series for streaming and cable is among the lower-risk moves the studio could’ve taken to throw a bone to dedicated fans. Had Disney instead greenlit a live-action movie with a Marvel-sized budget, that suddenly sounds like a way bigger risk for, again, a video game adaptation in which you fight shadow monsters with a giant key alongside Donald and Goofy. (For anyone reading this that has never played or seen these games I promise all this is true.)

Disney didn’t even go as far as to announce anything more than the fact that a series is happening. Nomura and game developer Square Enix are involved, but that’s it. The anime will have a “brand-new story that will expand on the universe of Kingdom Hearts while celebrating the characters,” per the release, which could mean just about anything. In fact, “Kingdom Hearts” is still a working title for the series, so maybe I should scale back a bit about how committed or knowledgeable anyone at Disney+ is about this franchise.

But the fact that something exists or will exist on the flagship streamer — and not, say, stream on Hulu or be licensed to Peacock — still speaks in my mind to the value Disney sees in this IP. CEO Josh D’Amaro comes from the Parks and Experiences division, he clearly values video games as a form of growth for the company, and he’s likely seen some Disney adults running around cosplaying as Riku, Roxas, or Aqua (more real character names for the uninitiated!) and figured out there’s something there to mine.

With all that said, there’s a nagging darkness lurking within me, to borrow some euphemisms from the game, that Disney could still walk away from all of this with a ton of egg on its face and make all of us who love “Kingdom Hearts” look like even bigger dorks than we already are.

I want to back up and do my best to explain in the broadest terms the plot of “Kingdom Hearts.” There are literally hours-long videos on YouTube attempting to explain all the ins and outs of the franchise across the games, and the most passionate will tell you that plot details revealed in many of the side games (often with inscrutable titles involving decimal points and fractions like “2.8 Final Chapter Prologue” and “358/2 Days”) are as important to comprehending the story as playing the main three games, “Kingdom Hearts 1, 2, and 3.”

Truth be told, I’ve actually put an embarrassing amount of thought into what an adaptation should look like, and I took a stab at writing this synopsis:

Sora is a care-free island boy who dreams of visiting other worlds beyond his own. But when his own world vanishes and is consumed by dark, shadow creatures called Heartless, Sora discovers he is the wielder of a mystical weapon called the Keyblade, capable of “locking” the hearts of worlds and saving them from the encroaching darkness. Now teamed with his new companions Donald Duck and Goofy, whose own world is consumed, he sets out on a quest to find his missing friends, Riku and Kairi, bring his own world back, and save the universe from darkness and the evil witch Maleficent.

Frankly, I think most general audiences could at least buy into something like that. This is standard Hero’s Journey stuff. That of course is the bare bones premise of just the first game in the franchise, and explaining the identity of the true villain is where your head starts to spin. It involves an evil scientist of sorts who, in his pursuit to open the title “Kingdom Hearts” and unleash darkness on the entire universe, has himself transformed into a Heartless but also 13 empty shells of himself called Nobodies that each have their own consciousness, all of which dates back to an ancient war involving thousands of these Keyblades. And also Sora in the upcoming fourth game may technically be dead and living in a purgatory that looks like the real world where there are underwater astronauts fighting monsters in hulking, futuristic diving bell armor, and Donald and Goofy are now traveling to the Underworld to talk to Hades from “Hercules” to find out if Sora’s really dead and save him. Get all that?

I’m probably getting something wrong there or leaving out something important, but doesn’t that all sound like mass appeal 4-quadrant stuff good for Saturday morning cartoons with the kids?

Hollywood of course, until quite recently, had a notoriously bad track record of adapting video games, but we’ve seen how people who actually know and love the games are now the ones shaping adaptations and making them meaningful to the fans. My apprehension lies with the fact that “Kingdom Hearts” may be among the most ambitious challenges yet. I may sound like a fanboy, but what we don’t want is something that can irreparably damage the legacy of a franchise we love. This is a fanbase that waited over a dozen years between games 2 and 3 and now another seven years between 3 and 4. Who knows what a setback could do for the future of this brand?

But if playing the “Kingdom Hearts” games has taught me anything, it’s that cynicism and negativity only lead to darkness. Sora famously says, “my friends are my power,” and the announcements of the last weekend show he has a real lot of them.