Knights of Guinevere Pilot Review
It’s official: Knights of Guinevere is here, and the Internet loves it!
Since the start of the 2020s, Glitch Studios has become an absolute powerhouse in the world of indie animation. It’s become a haven for creators who don’t want to be restricted by traditional companies like Disney, which seems to care more about their image these days than actual innovation. No one may know this better than Dana Terrace, the creator of the hit show The Owl House. Despite working for Disney for years and doing everything right, Disney still pulled the rug out from under her by cutting her show short. Thus, she left Disney in search of greener pastures, leading her to Glitch, where she and several old co-workers have given us Knights of Guinevere. And with the pilot having officially dropped, I can say that it is everything fans wanted to see when Dana was let off the leash.
Considering how 84,000 tuned in for the premiere, and how the pilot got millions of views in less than 24 hours, people liked what they saw.
Ready for Trauma?
The pilot begins with a flashback to the early days of Park Planet, a Disney-esque park spanning an entire planet serving as the series’ setting. From there, we are introduced to Orville Park, the Park’s founder and a clear expy of Walt Disney, and his daughter Olivia. Olivia went through some sort of traumatic event in her past that has left her a broken shell, and so Orville built the Park in an attempt to help her heal. As the flashback and moments in the present-day reveal, his efforts were in vain. As of this moment, we don’t know what it was that Olivia went through, but it leads her to take out her trauma onto Guinevere, a mysterious android that is repeatedly abused by Olivia in an effort to “fix” her. This, in turn, leads to Gwen repeatedly trying to escape, only to be tortured even further for it.
After watching the pilot and listening to what YouTubers like Cartoon Universe have to say, I can’t help but feel like Knights of Guinevere is meant to be Dana’s way of reflecting on her relationship with Disney. By that logic, it would be easy to think she has a lot of bad things to say about the company. After all, it forced her to suppress her creativity and didn’t appreciate what she gave them until it was too late. What’s more, the fact that her expy of Disney World encompasses an actual world might sound cool, but it isn’t.
Disney has been getting a lot of flak in recent years for becoming too powerful for anyone to compete against. A lack of competition means it can produce whatever it wants and still make a profit, perpetuating this cycle. The end result is that it pollutes the world around it by spewing out trash people quickly discard. At one point, we even see people on the surface recovering trash so it can be remade into more products. The Park is literally recycling its garbage. If that’s not a metaphor for garbage entertainment, I don’t know what is!
Meet our protagonists, Frankie and Andi
So, the show establishes that it’s taking shots at how Disney operates these days. Even if it had left things at that, people would still support Dana for doing so. As the pilot goes on to reveal, though, things are a bit more complicated than that, as exemplified by our main protagonists, Andi and Frankie.
Like many of us grew up loving Disney, Andi and Frankie grew up loving Guinevere. That inspired them to try to find work at Park Planet, with Andie working at the park itself while Andie does odd jobs down on the surface amongst the trash. Yet both of them are still miserable, each presumably reflecting a different aspect of Dana and her relationship with Disney. Andi is overworked and unappreciated for her talents by the higher-ups and bullied by others on the surface for working for the Park, despite doing it to make ends meet. Meanwhile, Frankie hates working on the surface and wants to work at the Park in the hopes of creating something meaningful, despite knowing what it’s really like. Both characters embody the love-hate relationship that Dana and fellow Owl House alumni have with Disney. They know that working for a soulless company won’t do them any favors, but at the same time, they can’t afford to abandon it altogether. So when Frankie finds the Gwen Android on the surface, both of them see it as a means to make something for themselves. And this is where things get interesting.
The Love-Hate Relationship with Disney
The interesting thing about companies like Disney is that while we can come to hate the business itself, it’s harder to hate the characters that represent them. Take Mickey Mouse, for example. While he’s the mascot for a company people are growing disillusioned with, many still love Mickey. The reason for that is that when we look at Mickey, we see the best aspects of Disney. We remember the days when Disney cared more about making something meaningful than profits, and we cannot bring ourselves to abandon it. Dana and her team seem to understand this, as Guinevere is meant to embody the good that can be found even in a place like Park Planet, best shown in her relationship with Andi and Frankie.
Having met Andi and Frankie when they were kids, Gwen was genuinely touched by the latter’s concern when she saw one of her fingers glitching. Fast-forward to the present-day, and the three are being hunted by one of Olivia’s robot guardians in an attempt to retrieve Gwen. When the Android regains lucidity for a brief period, she recognizes the two and feels obligated to help them. Not because she’s programmed that way, but because she’s that nice. The moment is undercut by the sounds of her ripping the giant to pieces out of sight, but it’s still wholesome. It’s the sort of thing that Mickey Mouse would do, minus the carnage, and it’s a reminder that there’s still good to be found at Disney. It just needs the chance to be let loose.
Knights of Guinevere is a Show Worth Watching
Ultimately, the pilot ends on a cliffhanger as Andi and Frankie succeed in getting Gwen someplace she can be repaired. Yet there is still so much about the plot that we have to learn about. What is it that Olivia has been trying to do to Gwen all these years? What exactly is Gwen, as it’s clear she’s more than a mere android. And what was the life-changing trauma that set all of these events in motion? Like The Owl House before it, Knights of Guinevere knows how to properly tease fans. It gives us hints that something greater is going on, but leaves enough ambiguity to encourage fans to start coming up with their own theories.
There are probably hundreds of Owl House fans already going back and rewatching the pilot to analyze every detail they can, which is what the show wants us to do. Pause the episode at 8:26, you’ll find a QR code. Scan that, and it will take you to pages of a Guinevere storybook that’s been written over, only heightening the sense of horror. In addition, Glitch has now dropped its first wave of Knights of Guinevere merch on its store. Glitch clearly wants this pilot to succeed, and I can already tell that it’s going to. I can’t wait to see more of what happens in the future and to support the talented people working on it. It’s great to have you back, Dana!
