Kingdom Hearts’s 25th anniversary is next year, and fans are getting more than just Kingdom Hearts IV. At the D23: Ultimate Disney Fan Event on August 14th, Disney also announced an upcoming Kingdom Hearts anime series in the works.
It’s an exciting announcement, but there’s so much mystery that makes it hard to actually know what to expect. There have been previous attempts at moving Kingdom Hearts from the video game screen to film and television, but they haven’t panned out. What makes this announcement different? With the direction that the franchise has gone in the last decade, what are we to even expect?
What Do We Know?
As of right now, we do not know a lot. Most of the news coming from Disney (Kingdom Hearts rights holder) and SQUARE ENIX (primary developer and publisher) has been centered around the release of Kingdom Hearts IV, which is slated for release in the latter half of 2027.
However, while there are not a lot of facts out there currently, we can still put the existing information together to create a calculated guess of what is to come.
The Facts
D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event took place from August 14th to August 16th this year, and looking past the Disney Park, Marvel, and Star Wars announcements, for one of the first times ever, Disney showed it remembers it owns the Kingdom Hearts franchise. After recently discussing the fact that Kingdom Hearts was one of its billion-dollar franchises, Disney announced that fans should be excited for more than just the new game.
Alongside other Disney+ animated series like Dragon Striker and Warrior Cats, Disney Kids & Family President Ayo Davis announced that a Kingdom Hearts anime was on the horizon for Disney Channel and Disney+, dropping the working title “Kingdom Hearts” and this graphic:
Ayo Davis also mentioned that series creator Tetsuya Nomura was working closely with the series’ creative team, as well as the whole creative team at SQUARE. While other SQUARE ENIX properties have earned some anime adaptations in the past with series like Final Fantasy: Unlimited (2001), Brotherhood: Final Fantasy XV (2016), and The World Ends with You: The Animation (2021), the creative input of creatives like Nomura has varied.
Regarding the new Kingdom Hearts anime, Nomura told fans to “let your imagination run wild.” He also mentioned the team’s been creating new character designs for the project, and that the key art released is a hint.
“Please let your imagination run wild as you await further updates.”
It is currently unclear to what extent SQUARE and Nomura will end up playing in the anime’s development, but at the moment, everything about this anime is unclear.
Previously Scrapped Projects
We may not know about what’s in store with this new anime, but we can take a look into the past to see what was planned for the previous Kingdom Hearts animation projects.
After the first game’s successful 2002 release, Disney Animation put together a team to develop a pilot animatic highlighting what an animated series adaptation of the game would look like. The animatic was apparently well received in the eyes of Disney, but SQUARE opted not to proceed. In addition to the planned series being a ”vastly different interpretation” of the game’s story, SQUARE wanted to shift more of its focus to producing more video game sequels.
18 years later, a year after the successful release of Kingdom Hearts III, insiders were discussing a new CGI-animated TV show adaptation that was in the works for Disney+, which was relatively new at the time. Disney was initially in talks to produce, but that responsibility shifted to SQUARE who produced an entire pilot episode in Unreal Engine. In 2024, Disney shifted the focus from a TV series to a film, but that may no longer be in the works now.
“Unmistakably Kingdom Hearts”
Okay, so we don’t have a release date for the anime, we don’t know who is actually animating the series and what qualifies it as an “anime,” and we don’t know anything about the characters or the plot. However, we can read a little further between the lines to see what direction this new series might be heading in.
Ayo Davis has said that the anime series will be “bringing [Kingdom Hearts] to life in a completely new way,” and that it “will be unmistakably Kingdom Hearts, while giving fans a whole new way to experience the world they love.”
From that quote alone, it really seems as if this new series won’t be an adaptation of Sora’s original adventures in the game, but rather a brand-new story with new characters or characters that maybe haven’t gotten their time to shine before.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Kingdom Hearts
The first 10 years of the Kingdom Hearts series had amazing highs in the obvious forms of Kingdom Hearts (2002) and Kingdom Hearts II (2005), but there were also some weird trends that began to emerge at this time, trends that would come to define the next 15 years.
A lot of what made the original games so great, like the cool character designs, music, and stellar gameplay, was not always present. Instead, fans got side-games with gimmicky ideas on a whole host of different consoles, and it was these side-games that hid some of the series’ most important story and lore revelations.
An already convoluted story was only becoming more labyrinthian, and it only got worse as SQUARE began Kingdom Hearts χ/Union χ/Dark Road, mobile and gacha games where players essentially had to pay to get bits of lore slow-fed to them.
Even worse, unfortunately, was that around this time more fans began noticing what exactly Kingdom Hearts truly was: a series of characters standing around and talking to each other about the history and lore of their worlds. At this point, there are 13 different Kingdom Hearts games exploring the binary between light and darkness, and it would be a little disappointing for the new anime series to be a retread of this idea.
I’ve seen comments on social media discussing the anime visual, with some saying it is Helgi or Vali, and the average Kingdom Hearts fan probably has no idea who either of those people are. One comment from user JayMagica says:
“I could see the Kingdom Hearts anime being an anthology that finally connects all of this [side-content] properly, rather than retelling the games, starting with the ancient/Scala era, moving through the Dandelions and KHUX, then KHDR, KHML, and eventually leading into the mainline/modern timeline and KHIV. It would be the perfect way to give all that side content the narrative weight it deserves!”
Based on what we know with Kingdom Hearts IV focusing on characters like Sigurd and Strelitzia from the Kingdom Hearts Union χ mobile game, it seems the direction the franchise is heading in is more lore and talking. While I’m not the arbiter of what makes a captivating story and what makes an anime good, I think the anime should go in a completely new and off-the-wall direction (but I don’t think it will).
For the anime series to work, it needs to be less focused on trying to make a basic theme of light vs. darkness more complicated, and instead focus on what Kingdom Hearts does right: exciting characters doing exciting things. The medium of animation is ripe for exciting keyblade choreography intersecting with Final Fantasy characters and Disney worlds, taken to their limits with beautiful music.
Even in the mainline Kingdom Hearts games, exciting gameplay and exploration are quickly bogged down by Sora looking for another missing friend and fighting back against the vague notion of darkness. Now, after almost 25 years, we can go in a new direction where the anime MC is active instead of reactive, driving the story forward instead of having others simply explicate the world’s lore at them.
Is this going to happen? It’s yet to be seen, but until then, we can hope this anime is novel and exciting rather than a navel-gazing retread of the same light vs. dark story that created Kingdom Hearts in the first place.
