For years, animation fans have clamored online for new, original works to fall in love with alongside cherished, already established IP. After this summer’s KPop Demon Hunters provided a successful (and ongoing) bit of originality, that momentum continues with Knights of Guinevere, whose pilot premiered this past weekend on YouTube.
Created by Dana Terrace, Zach Marcus, and John Bailey Owen, the creator and key writers on Disney’s The Owl House, Guinevere feels at once like its own distinct, freaky thing while also being informed by the trio’s previous (and truncated) collaboration. That’s made clear right away at the start, where a young girl named Olivia Park is working on an android in a dark room. When her father, Orville, beckons her over, Olivia brings Gwen behind her using cords coming out of the android’s stomach, which look like intestines and are slathered in blue goo.
When she’s of age, Olivia is to inherit the Park Planet run by her father, a vibrant, Disneyland-looking place that touts Gwen as its key mascot, primarily as a princess but in additional outfits. The girl is stone-faced while hearing this information, but after dragging her Gwen droid around, the droid suddenly decides to escape by jumping off the building and falling into the ocean below. She’s not found until years later by Frankie, a factory laborer and scavenger living in the city of M7 with her park engineer friend Andi. While unaware of the value of this specific Gwen droid, Frankie thinks fixing it could help her rise above her station and get a better Park Planet gig.
Not much information is explicitly doled out about Park Planet, to which we’re kept at a literal distance from in both the past and present, since it floats high above the planet, occasionally dumping its trash into the ocean below. Where the script tells us nothing, the visuals convey everything; a montage after Gwen’s escape chronicles the park’s rise to fame and glory, which is then contrasted with snarky fan comments about morphing Gwen into a girlboss heroine and other theme park controversies. The city below seems to have no love for the orbiting attraction or anyone associated with it and any real capacity, possibly owing to an illness some of its citizens seem to have.
Like The Owl House or Steven Universe, Knights of Guinevere uses wide shots and background details to convey a history the show is unable (or unwilling) to fully spell out at this juncture. Everything about Frankie and Andi’s world makes clear why they’d want to leave M7 by any means possible while still finding comfort in living with each other. As the first 2D animated series from Glitch Productions (late of The Amazing Digital Circus and The Gaslight District), the studio picked a great project to start with. There are shades of Owl House in the world and character designs while still feeling like its own thing, and it never feels out of place when the show switches from the cold, grungy real world to glimpses of a better, happier world that the Park Planet ads try to convey.
All three of the leading women are compelling in their own ways, but the star of the piece right now is Frankie. Michaela Laws and the character’s design imbue her with a lot of scrappy charm and she looks to be the heart of the show as everything else around her threatens to fall apart. The relationships she has with both Andi and the Gwen droid will drive the plot and seem very fascinating from what we get here, and both Laws and Andi’s actor, Zelda Khan Black, bounce off each other very well.
Since this is a pilot, the other characters get just enough material to make them interesting in later episodes, particularly Frankie’s dad, Sparky, and an older version of Olivia that’s become obsessed with “fixing” Gwen.
As for Gwen herself, the show lays enough breadcrumbs to become invested or concerned in whatever’s happened to her in the past and present. Vocally, Eden Riegel gives a great Disney Princess (and delivers a great scream out of nowhere), and with how the camera lingers on her decayed form and placid smile, it’s hard not to want answers for how she got to this state.
Knowing this creative team and Owl House’s affinity for body horror, it’s likely the revelations to her whole deal will be unpleasant without feeling unearned or feeling too out there for the premise. Despite being a prop desired by the other characters, she’s treated with a good amount of sympathy in every scene she’s in, and it’ll be interesting to see how the show further characterizes her through her fairy tale-like perspective.
Given the way things publicly shook out with Owl House and the very clear digs at how Disney runs the princess side of its business, it’d be easy for Knights of Guinevere to coast on those jabs while exploring the darker side of a massive corporation in a sci-fi setting. Present as that all is, it’s just a part of the show rather than the entire thing, and what’s here more than stands on its own. The metrics thus far have shown it’s a success, and count us invested to see where this all goes next.
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