Knights of Guinevere “Pilot” Review

On September 19th, Knights of Guinevere, an animated mature sci-fi psychological thriller, with body horror and macabre qualities, premiered. It dropped on the YouTube channel of Glitch Productions, an indie animation powerhouse. The pilot was co-created by Dana Terrace, John Bailey Owen, and Zach Marcus. All three worked on The Owl House. Terrace was the creator. Owen was a writer and Marcus was a director. I was intrigued when I heard about Knights of Guinevere after the teaser dropped on January 17th of this year. The pilot blew me out of the water. This review will analyze the pilot, the fan reaction, and the future of this indie animation. As a warning, this review will discuss trauma, abusive relationships, violence, blood, horror, and other mature topics.

The pilot touches on many themes. This includes trauma and abusive relationships. This is first exemplified by a little girl, Olivia Park (voiced by Lauren Kong), who somewhat resembles Rapunzel. She’s trapped in a tall castle tower, with machines running on blood and fear keeping her inside. As she plays games to bide the time, her overbearing father, Orville (voiced by SungWon Cho), gifts her a theme park, known as “Park Planet.” She accepts the gift, reluctantly, accepting her imprisonment. There’s no one to get her out of this terrible situation. She projects her anger onto an android named Guinevere “Gwen” (voiced by Eden Riegel). She wants to “fix” her and becomes her abuser. In one poignant scene, she pulls Gwen forward, like a slave. She uses Gwen’s intestines like a leash, while she bleeds blue blood. Even so, this android attempts to escape.

No one heeds the pleas of Gwen, nor Olivia, to be rescued. As time goes on, Gwen becomes a face of the park. She soon feels a connection, a warmth, from series protagonists Andi (voiced by Zelda Khan Black) and Frankie, then known as Andrea and Francesca. She met them as little kids, when they snuck into the park. Both tried, and failed, to get a Gwen doll from a vending machine. Frankie (voiced by Michaela Laws) specifically fixes her finger, earning her respect. This pilot is a dark twist on a Rapunzel story, which was adapted from a well-known German fairy tale recorded by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. That tale was developed from Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force’s 1698 French literary fairy tale, Persinette. The latter resembled Giambattista Basile’s 1634 Italian tale, Petrosinella, and Madame d’Aulnoy’s 1697 French tale “La Chatte Blanche” (The White Cat).

Olivia has games and “toys” she can experiment on (like Gwen). However, she has no chameleon friend like Pascal, like Rapunzel in Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure. Nor does she have a dashing rogue like Eugene Fitzherbert to rescue her. While Orville is not like Gothel, an despicable woman who only wanted to keep Rapunzel for her healing magical golden hair, he is controlling. By keeping her in the castle tower, he is clearly engaging in child abuse. Making matters worse, she has no way to escape the floating theme park. Gwen, a princess of sorts, is under an even worse circumstances. She is trapped in the castle. Without a doubt she is tortured by Olivia, which is directly shown and implied. Additionally, her memories are divided/shared among different androids, as can be inferred from the “official” Park Planet website.

Many years later, Olivia (voiced by Erin Nichole Lundquist) is bedridden, elderly, and cared for by attendants. It is then that the main series begins. Andi and Frankie are the “working dead,” in dead-end jobs, like the ones Sadie Miller once sang about in Steven Universe. Both of them live together in a shack in the industrial wasteland outside the town of M7. Andi works as an engineer on androids, a “crownie.” Frankie labors in a factory for inane hours and helps her presumed father Sparky (voiced by Kayleigh McKee) scavenge on a fishing boat. Both Andi and Frankie are overworked and tired from their jobs. They are being worked to the bone, with Frankie as a wage slave and Andi losing her mind. With this shift, Knights of Guinevere begins focusing more directly on corporate control and worker exploitation.

This ties into what some have called a “common theme.” Terrace had worked on Disney. She created The Owl House, storyboarded on multiple episodes of the three-season Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure and Gravity Falls, animated and directed DuckTales episodes, and helped with Amphibia. Fans and critics described the dystopian pilot as a satire/critique of Disney. For instance, Frankie is a sympathetic representative of those who idealize Disney. She reveres Gwen and retains her whimsical, childlike wonder.

In fact, Gwen herself acts like a Disney Princess. There’s the idea that although there’s value in what the mega-conglomerate (Disney) makes, it is reduced to “mush” by those who don’t put value in it. For example, Gwen’s insides are ripped out for profit. It’s also shown that the park is slowly killing people, who are slowly dying. By implication, the series is saying that Disney is poisoning/polluting people’s minds. This goes beyond any “digs” at Disney in the pilot, including jabs at hypercritical executives, remakes, and the vapid grifting around them.

More than that, the pilot makes clear how nostalgia factors into everything. Gwen’s hairstyle (and Andi’s hairstyle as a kid) echoes the ears of Mickey Mouse or even Princess Leia from the Star Wars franchise. Gwen is kind, caring, gentle, and magical. She detests the theme park and wants to be free from it. Like Mickey Mouse, she is blamed for the park’s failings, even though she hasn’t done anything wrong. More specifically, she is being exploited and abused by those who created her. She has multiple copies of herself, all with interconnected memories, and is effectively the monarch of the planet, but has no power. Nostalgia is also present in Frankie’s imagination. She is the equivalent of an “imagineer” with her hacking skills, or a “Disney Adult” as some fans termed her. She is as much of a “hopeless romantic” as Riegel once described herself many years ago.

The pilot further hints at Disney as a capitalist predator and evil empire, who grinds you down. This goes far beyond the classic 1993 film Addams Family Values. In that film, camp counselors torture Wednesday Addams, Pugsley, and Joel with Disney films, and other all-ages entertainment, to make them more “cheerful.” Again, Disney itself is not directly named in Knights of Guinevere as an immoral company. But it is abundantly obvious what is being criticized. While saying all of this, this pilot isn’t just raising a middle-finger to the mega-conglomerate. The latter has faced recent calls for a mass boycott following the recent indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show over some comments he made about the president’s supporters and a reactionary media personality.

The animation and visuals are flowing, beautiful, horrific, and haunting. They are made from passion, rather than greed, by a growing indie animation company. The class consciousness of this pilot shines through, especially considering the protagonist’s living conditions. Many residents have blue lung disease. It’s caused by pollution from the factories that people, like Frankie, work within. The voice acting is a bright spot of this pilot, along with everything else, and brings the characters alive. Some fans complained that some characters are voiced by the “wrong” people. I recall one person in particular who claimed that McKee was the “wrong” person to voice Sparky. That comment had a tinge of transphobia. McKee’s voice range shows her talent. The voice cast should be celebrated and applauded instead rather than sneered at.

Everything changes when Frankie finds a Gwen android, while salvaging through the polluted water. She wants to fix her. Her father, Sparky, discourages her, telling her to let it go. This goes not stop her. She pulls in Andi, who is angry at life, including having her creation pushed aside (she throws it in the trash), and being fired. Frankie’s father, and his friends (who seem like goons), demand to know why Frankie wants to take the android with her. They almost fight Andi in the process. Even so, they are able to pass. Andi makes a possibly Faustian agreement. She says she’ll hand over Gwen to him once they have “fixed” her. They travel to the park’s lower labs, where projects are said to rot.

While they are under surveillance from a force not yet known, a knight, speaking like an Arthurian knight, attacks them. He wants to seize Gwen. He critically injures Frankie and Andi. Somehow, Gwen defeats it, with blood seeping across the ground, even though her android body is damaged. Frankie sees her like a magical princess (see the image at the beginning of this review). In some ways, Gwen reminds me of the Diamonds, particularly White Diamond, in Steven Universe, although none of them are androids.

Andi and Frankie work together, bringing her to a repair station, called a “repair halo,” and she is rebooted. She remains in a fairytale fantasy world, trapped in this false reality. She recognizes Frankie and Andi, but only in their childhood forms. The series ends with an illustration which has a royal feel to it. It made me think a little of Revolutionary Girl Utena in some ways, or something you’d find inside a medieval castle.

Knights of Guinevere is more than a pilot which brings viewers to a floating planet-wide theme park and shows what goes on in the shadows below. As Terrace said in the above video, where Kevin Lerdwichagul, CEO of Glitch Productions, interviewed her, the pilot focuses on people trying to live their lives. They are caught up in a giant conspiracy in the process. The pilot plays to her love of horror and psychological thrillers. More significantly, this pilot is the first time she felt that she was making something genuine. The pilot’s aesthetics are also reflected in her artwork, which can be grotesque and macabre. In this pilot nothing is held back, whether blood, gore, or violence. It is much more “adult oriented with adult themes” in contrast to The Owl House. Kevin also called it, in one article, a “dark, psychological tale,” which is an accurate description.

In the above video, she mentioned Neon Genesis Evangelion as an influence. Others pointed out comparisons between Gwen and Snow White, or even Sleeping Beauty. This is definitely intentional. This spectacular pilot would not be allowed on Disney. Terrace clearly has more freedom working for Glitch, as do the rest of the show’s crew.The latter includes 2D line producer Allissoon Lockhart, who has her own pilot in the process, The Deathwish Tour (formerly known as Battle of the Bands).  It is valid to say that the series is “creepy,” due to the body horror, resembling what’s shown in series like Scavengers Reign, Pantheon, or Common Side Effects. The storytelling isn’t as heartfelt as The Owl House, but that’s okay. Knights of Guinevere can stand on its own. It will surely become a fan-favorite as much as the latter series, gaining its own fandom and blossoming as the days pass.

The fandom for Knights of Guinevere, also known as KOG, continues to grow. It’s already garnered two subreddits (KnightsOfGuinevere and KnightsGuinevere), plus subscribers on the official Glitch subreddit and followers of the official Bluesky account. This comprises tens of thousands of people. Additionally, the series has garnered fanart and responses not just on Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, and elsewhere. In fact, there are, presently, 50 fan fics. They have been written about the series and its characters, with more half published after the pilot’s release. Others have cosplayed the pilot’s characters. More specifically, the pilot itself, as of the writing of this review, has garnered over 8.3 million views on YouTube. There’s a clearly passionate fanbase.

It isn’t wrong to believe there may be more installments. But this has not been confirmed as of yet. In fact, creating additional episodes will be expensive. Glitch would have to make money from merchandise sales, and possible crowdfunding, as other indie animations have done. Currently, Glitch has posters, plushies, shirts, hoodies, hats, acrylic stands, pins, and keychains which people can purchase. The pilot may become a full series considering the buzz around it, especially if enough people purchase merchandise. As Mel Brooks jokingly said, as Yogurt in Spaceballs, “Merchandising! Merchandising! Where the real money from the movie is made.” The same logic applies to indie animation.

Prior to the pilot’s release, I predicted that it would have “some level of queer representation” in part because Terrace herself is bisexual. Additionally, the voice cast includes a trans woman (Kayleigh McKee), a mixed-race demiwoman (Michaela Laws), and two other queer women (Zelda Khan Black and Erin Nichole Lunquist). Further diversity in the cast, includes a Korean-American voice actor and YouTuber (SungWon Cho), and a part-Filipino and part-Chinese voice actress (Lauren King), along with acclaimed voice actress Eden Riegel.

The latter is known for playing Bianca Montgomery on the soap opera All of My Children. Bianca comes out as lesbian and enters into a romantic relationship with another woman. On her official website, Riegel praises the series, for which she earned a GLAAD award, for her character. She says that All of My Children had the “first on-screen same-gender kiss, the first transgender storyline, and the first same-sex wedding on Daytime TV.” 

Without a doubt, the pilot’s voice actors are a talented bunch. McKee voiced Scarab in season 1 of Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake and a trans woman named Kiku in One Piece. Cho voiced multiple characters in the streaming smash-hit KPop Demon Hunters, Senshi in Delicious in Dungeon, the terrible transphobe Cal in High Guardian Spice, and assorted other characters in Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, Adventure Time: Distant Lands, Pantheon, OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes, and Gen:Lock. Riegel voiced Boscha in The Owl House, and other characters in The Ghost and Molly McGee, Kiff, Hailey’s On It!, and Amphibia. This diversity of talent is undeniable.

Even so, this does not take away from the fact that Knights of Guinevere falls down in one place: queer representation. This may seem odd considering that queer talent which is part of the cast. Terrace’s last big production, The Owl House, was known for its queer representation. It featured a bisexual Afro-Latine protagonist, Luz Noceda, and with bisexual, asexual, or otherwise queer characters. However, the character’s queer identities in the pilot are not directly stated. Some fans speculated that Frankie is transgender, considering that her father shouts out a masculine name for her, at one point, and said her father was shouting Frankie’s dead name.

Others asserted that Frankie was intersex, genderqueer, or genderfluid. Additional fans described her as having a tough non-feminine physique and “gender swag.” Some called her, and Andi, disabled non-binary lesbians or sapphic best friends. The fact that people have so many headcanons for these two characters and the others, means that the pilot is queer in the sense that characters can be queer-coded, and is open to queer readings. This goes far beyond some anime which don’t “directly acknowledge any queer issues” within their narratives or narrative framings, but have queer themes.

While saying all of this, I hope that if Knights of Guinevere becomes a full-fledged series, it can add canon queer characters to the main cast. This could include developing the relationship or friendship between Andi and Frankie who live in a bit of a dump. Further episodes could answer what happened to Olivia’s abusive father (and mother), with Olivia’s possible “mommy issues.” Additional episodes could show Gwen fighting back against her programming, which keeps her trapped in the illusion, feature psychedelic drugs, have Frankie losing an eye, or Andi contracting blue lung disease. Perhaps even Frankie, Andi, and Gwen will end up in a throuple together. A distinct possibility, which some fans have hinted to, are tensions between Frankie and Andi boiling over. Both are expendable to the park, with Frankie’s teeth even pulled out as punishment (as Sparky implies).

Specifically, Andi and Frankie have different views of working at the park. The latter sees the despair and the former sees hope. The pilot hints at unequal labor distribution in their household. Furthermore, Andi possibly has guilt over the fact she got a job presumably thanks to Frankie. She may feel she doesn’t deserve her job because she has been “copying” Frankie. Since I just finished my rewatch of Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure, the division between these two friends reminds me of the tensions between Rapunzel “Raps”, the princess of the Kingdom of Corona, and her handmaiden Cassandra “Cass.” While they start out as friends, solving their issues by talking it out, she soon feels she is second-best. Ultimately, her resentment is exploited by a villain who manipulates her and Raps, driving them apart.

I’m not saying that Knights of Guinevere will have a villain like the witch Zhan Tiri will exploit both protagonists for her petty desires, as happens in Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure. Surely, Andi and Frankie are not like Raps and Cass. Even so, it is possible that something will pull them apart. After all, Frankie seems to put Andi up on a pedestal. I don’t know what it will be, or even if Frankie and Andi will become a couple, if the series does continue. No matter what, Knights of Guinevere will remain a horrifically thrilling, dark fantasy.

Gwen may continue to be the victimized princess, a sort of Rose Bride. She will leave the world of torment, while those causing her pain will remain trapped in their “comfortable little coffin[s],” like Akio/Dios in the end of Revolutionary Girl Utena. She will realize that she’s no longer the “damsel in distress,” and that princes don’t exist, but are only pretending to be princes. Perhaps she will internalize, if she hasn’t already, what Akio once declared, in Utena: “women who can’t be princesses have no choice but to become witches.” I hope that all of these themes, and others, can be expanded in a full-fledged Knights of Guinevere animated series.

There’s so many other symbols and aspects of this pilot I could dive into in this review. This includes Frankie as a plus-size character who likes to drink, amazing worldbuilding, mistreatment of employees, sickness from corporate pollution, Gwen being forced to smile, other Gwen androids trying to reach out to her, and the lifeless nature of Gwen’s grey skin. This contrasts with the glowing skin of the androids, the “Neans,” after they ingest “nectar,” as shown in the so-so anime Metallic Rouge.

Knights of Guinevere can be streamed on YouTube.