Knights of Guinevere’s Pilot Is a Beautifully Animated Hate Letter to Disney

By Autumn Wright | September 25, 2025 | 9:15am

Anime Features Knights of Guinevere

Knights of Guinevere’s Pilot Is a Beautifully Animated Hate Letter to Disney

A tale as old as time: The miasmal assembly lines of mass-produced merchandise; a graveyard of EPCOT balls; class warfare; scavenging through the trash of a gilded theme park for scrap; rundown worker housing; and an animatronic princess, entrails spilling out of its abdomen, throwing herself from the castle tower.

No one hates Disney like Dana Terrace. The animation director has concentrated her personal, professional, and maybe even existential frustration with the entertainment industry into the for-adults cyberpunk indie animation Knights of Guinevere. That its pilot premiered last week amid a mainstream backlash against the corporation is a moment of serendipity for a much more personal retribution years in the making.

Terrace is best known for The Owl House, a standout magical school series where witches forged found families and queer couplings, while fomenting rebellion against the raced and gendered norms that its (white, male) authority figures benefited from. Apparently, it didn’t fit Disney’s brand. According to Terrace, the show was canceled just three seasons in, despite its popularity, due to a single Disney exec’s whims, which many have interpreted as thinly veiled homophobia.

Now working with Australian indie publisher Glitch Productions, Knight of Guinevere is a webseries filled with everything animators can’t make for TV. It’s for adults, but it’s not about crude humor. It aims to tell a serialized story over several episodes (another knock against The Owl House’s ambition). And it’s got blood and (android) guts and pointed critiques about corporations—all thinly veiled mockery of Disney. Notice the silhouettes of its android princesses resemble Mickey’s ears.

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Why did Terrace make the show? What inspired the art direction? What’s it about? “Fuck Disney” could be the answer, though there’s much more here to stand on its own as a (potential) show for the ages.

Knights of Guinevere is set in the far future on the cyberpunky Park Planet, an extraterrestrial world created for the amusement of paid visitors. Beneath the theme park’s roller coasters, bright lights, castle, and android princesses (all named Guinevere) live the workers who make the machines and merchandise and do the upkeep. There’s clear resentment in the polluted underworld, with a division between those who serve up top and those who scrounge below.

Park Planet’s setting is brought to life by rich background art that tells its own story of decline, and each new screen invites the viewer to pause on a rewatch to notice all the details (and anime easter eggs, too). Moreover, voice direction and performances, sound design, and music all carry the production to a par with what fans of shows produced by monopolistic giants (e.g., Infinity Train, Dragon Prince, Scavengers Reign) would expect.

Its characters, too, are punching above their weight. Fueled by a childhood dream, roommates Franki and Andi scrape by as grunts in the park’s cogs. Franki, a subversive ingenue with a bodybuilder’s physique and empathetic way with tech, hasn’t grown disillusioned yet. She scavenges the refuse of the theme park and works the production line printing merch, a heavy-handed but entirely subtextual metaphor for how a theme park/entertainment conglomerate might exploit the passion of its workers and underutilize their creativity.

The show really kicks off when Franki sees her chance to prove herself. The corpse of a Guinevere washes up, and she wants to help it, not just sell the scrap. But the ghost in these machines is tortured. When Franki and Andi find what it’s running from, why an animatronic that isn’t programmed to yell could still scream, Park Place’s propagandized facade begins to unravel.

It’s a tantalizing end to the pilot, one that begs to reveal the dystopic setting all the way to the top of the castle. And I certainly hope it’s just the start of something as big as—and longer lived than—She-Ra and the Princess of Power or The Owl House.

Knights of Guinevere gives form to the wretches of childhood dreams and Black Rock-style mercenaries of fantasy today. And it proves that animation doesn’t need to grow up—but break free.

Autumn Wright is a critic of games and animation. Find their latest writing at @TheAutumnWright.