The Disney Animated Canon: From Small beginnings to the House of Mouse: Fantasia

 

   Disney. No one name holds as much power over business and the world of Animation as much as Walter Elias Disney. Whether it was making the first animated motion picture in the English world, further revolutionizing the field of animation, or making one of the most powerful media companies in the world, Disney managed to become a titan of industry and media. Nowadays, we joke about the House of Mouse and its’ lasting impact in today’s world…but without Disney, much of the animated world today…well…wouldn’t be.

Fantasia: The Concert Feature

  For Disney’s third feature, he wanted to try something new. He decided to animate classical music. Unlike the other films, it told a bunch of stories instead of just one. They are:

•    Toccata and Fughe in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach: An introduction to the film and abstract art moving to the music.
• The Nutcracker Suite by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: No nutcrackers or mice here, just the changing of the seasons and flowers.
• The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Paul Dukas: This was the one that brought Mickey back to popularity. Mickey tries to practice Master Yen Sid’s magic and bring a broom to life. Things spiral out of control.
• The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky: Life evolves as single cells turn into Dinosaurs and they are then wiped out by what we thought was the cause (science has since moved on).
• The Pastoral Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven: A day in the Greco/Roman countryside, a Bacchanal, and a storm from Zeus occur in a short span of time as centaurs, satyrs, unicorns, pegasi and cherubs are caught in the middle.
• The Dance of Hours by Amilcare Ponchielli: Ostriches, hippos, elephants, and aligators dance high ballet, in a loose performance of La Gioconda.
• Night on Bald Mountain and Ave Maria by Modest Mussorgsky and Franz Shubert: Chernabog awakens on Walpergisnacht and plays with the dead for his own amusement before being silenced by church bells harking the coming dawn. We end with the sunrise.

It was bold, creative, groundbreaking, iconic…and it bombed. Badly. So badly that Walt thought it was his worst piece and decided he would never do artsy pieces ever again. Turns out, the opposite is true. Fantasia is considered Walt’s best piece he’s ever done. Nobody had ever truly adapted classical music to animation as Walt Disney had, and he managed to make one of the most awesome and scary villains ever without ever having him speak a single word: Chernabog.

Believe it or not, Walt wanted Fantasia to be a perpetual work in progress. More songs would be added, some old material might be used, however, the bombing of this piece shelved that idea until about 60 years later. On top of that, the only contemporary composer who actually saw the film, hated how his music was cut to fit the film (Igor Stravinsky was not a fan of the way his music was used). It also managed to be the longest Disney film at 2 hours and 4 minutes, and the first to use Surround sound.

It may have done a bit better if not for a little hiccup in the global market called WWII, which cut off the European Market from seeing it at launch, same with Pinocchio. However, it is still considered by many to be the best Disney movie. After all…Without Fantasia, we would have no Sorcerer Mickey, Yen Sid (Outright stated to be Disney put to ink), and no Chernabog (curiously called Satan in the original release…while Chernabog, or the Black God, isn’t a pleasant deity to run into in Slavic mythology, he’s nowhere near as evil as Satan/Lucifer). We have only to imagine what might…or might not have been if things had changed.

The Disney Animated Canon: From Small beginnings to the House of Mouse: Pinnochio

   Disney. No one name holds as much power over business and the world of Animation as much as Walter Elias Disney. Whether it was making the first animated motion picture in the English world, further revolutionizing the field of animation, or making one of the most powerful media companies in the world, Disney managed to become a titan of industry and media. Nowadays, we joke about the House of Mouse and its’ lasting impact in today’s world…but without Disney, much of the animated world today…well…wouldn’t be.

Pinnochio: When Disney-fication isn’t that bad.

  Pinnochio was released on February 7th, 1940. It was the second film in the Disney Animated canon and the first example of “Disney-fication”. It’s veeery loosely based on the book of the same name by Carlo Collodi…and honestly, that’s actually a pretty good thing. Hoo boy, that story is a doozy!

Summary: A woodworker named Geppetto dreams of having a son and creates a puppet that he names “Pinnocchio”. Before bed, he wishes that the puppet would come to life. While he is asleep, a Fairy brings the puppet to life. She then promises that if he is brave, truthful and unselfish…she’ll turn him the rest of the way into a real boy. She then assigns Jiminy Cricket to be his conscience. When Geppetto wakes up, he gets pretty excited that he now has a son.

Poor Pinnocchio, however, doesn’t have much of a concept of right and wrong, and on his first day of school, he gets waylaid by a Cat and Fox and talked into going into show business for Stromboli. It seems well and good…until Pinnocchio figures out his new benefactor is…more than a bit unstable and he runs home. This is sped up when the blue fairy finds him and we get the familiar picture of pinnocchio’s nose growing when he lies to her and he realizes he made a pretty poor choice. Geppetto…like any good parent…is worried sick about Pinnocchio and searches high and low for him.

Pinnocchio does his best to return home…and is waylaid again by the cat and the fox…who this time ship him off to pleasure island (and the biggest source of nightmare fuel in the movie…*shudders*). There, Jiminy gets fed up when Pinnocchio refuses to listen to him and go back home…until he finds out what happens to the kids who stay in Pleasure Island. Pinnocchio begins to realize this as well when he sees a fellow kid turn into a full donkey from roughhousing, drinking, smoking and…playing billiards (it had a different stigma in the 40s). Turns out, if you act like an Ass here…you get turned into one for real and shipped off to who knows where! And the coach driver was in on it the whole time.

Pinnocchio runs away, mid transformation…and finally makes it home. Problem is…Geppetto is gone, having been eaten by a whale while looking for Pinnocchio. Probably the biggest, scariest whale put into animated film: Monstro. Pinnocchio is eaten, finds Geppetto, gets the both of them out…and is turned into a real boy at the end.

Background: Pinnocchio didn’t quite do as well as Snow White when it came to being released. After all…it was still WWII. It left Walt pretty depressed and lost RKO pictures a ton of money. That said, it gave us “When You wish upon a Star” which is now pretty much the official song of the Disney Corporation and their Theme Parks. On top of that, this movie is one of two animated movies in Roger Ebert’s Great Movies list, with the other one being its’ predecessor. On top of that, this is the only Disney movie, as of now, to have a 100% on Rotton Tomatoes. Not too shabby for number 2!
By the way…notice how I use the term “Disney-fication” here…Get used to it appearing in many of Disney’s movies (Especially the Jungle Book). The original source material for Pinnocchio was pretty gruesome. Jiminy barely lasted his introductory chapter! Pinnocchio squashed him himself! And that’s without going on about Geppetto being more temperamental, Pinnocchio being a pretty scary brat…and the cat and fox being hung in the end! *shudders*. The movie more than makes up for the nightmare fuel with Pleasure Island, which is one of the scariest bits in Disney Animation…and we never find out what happens to those poor kids.

 

 

The Disney Animated Canon: From Small beginnings to the House of Mouse: Snow White

 

     Disney. No one name holds as much power over business and the world of Animation as much as Walter Elias Disney. Whether it was making the first animated motion picture in the English world, further revolutionizing the field of animation, or making one of the most powerful media companies in the world, Disney managed to become a titan of industry and media. Nowadays, we joke about the House of Mouse and its’ lasting impact in today’s world…but without Disney, much of the animated world today…well…wouldn’t be.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves:
The First one

Story: Snow White is a lonely princess living with her vain step-mother, the Queen (Officially named as Grimhilde, but never named in movie). Every day, the Queen asks her servant in a magic mirror who the fairest in all the land is. The mirror, who had always answered that the Queen was the fairest, now answered that Snow White was, despite the fact that the Queen forced her to work as a scullery maid due to worrying she would one day be more fair.
The Queen orders a huntsman to kill Snow White and put her heart in a jeweled box for her. The huntsman, finding the perfect opportunity to do so…can’t bring himself to go through with it and warns her of the Queen’s ill intentions, telling her to run and never look back.
Getting lost in the woods, Snow White befriends a bunch of woodland creatures (get ready to see a lot of that in the future films). They lead her to a cottage in the woods where she assumes that seven untidy children live…and decides to help clean it up.
In reality, it belongs to seven dwarves: Doc, Sneezy, Happy, Bashful, Sleepy, Grumpy, and Dopey. Upon returning home and finding the house suspiciously clean, they are about to toss the intruder out until they realize who she is and welcome her into their home (well…6 of them do. Grumpy objects, but is constantly vetoed).
Meanwhile, the Queen is outraged when she finds out she was deceived by the Huntsman. The Mirror informed her that the heart she held was that of a Pig, and the Queen decided to take matters into her own hand…by disguising herself as a hag and poisoning Snow herself. Finding that the curse can only be broken by “Love’s first kiss” The Queen/Hag shrugs it off, certain that she’d be buried alive before that happened.
The Queen/Hag makes her way to the cottage, fooling only Snow White…and none of the animals who scramble to warn the Dwarves. The Queen then fakes a heart attack to be let into the cottage and passes off the poisoned apple she prepared as a “wishing apple”.
Snow White takes her bite and succumbs to the poison, falling asleep. The Dwarves begin their charge and the Queen/Hag moves quickly up a mountain to roll a boulder over them…and is brought down by a lightning bolt destroying the foundation of her foothold on the mountain.
The Dwarves, finding Snow White in her poison induced sleep, can’t bring themselves to bury her, so they put her in a gold-trimmed, glass coffin and watch over her. A year later, a prince, who had met and fallen in love with Snow White (we met him earlier in the film) finds her and, saddened by her death, kisses her. She wakes, everyone celebrates and the prince takes her to his castle. The End.

Background: It all started with Snow White. Before 1934, Disney had made a bunch of money with his short cartoons involving Mickey and the Three Little Pigs. However, Disney realized that if he broke into film, he could make much more than the small fees he got for cartoons and in the process, progress the medium further than anyone had: In short, it was a win-win.

The only problem, was that animation in the 1930s was still pretty crude and nobody had done an animated feature that imitated life as closely as Snow White would have (at the time).  They couldn’t run it as one of their usual comedies. They had to get the focus to be the personalities in the context of the original story.

They didn’t have the funds, nor did they even have the staff to make something of this size! An even bigger obstacle? Nobody thought it could be done. Walt’s brothers and wife tried to get him to call it off. He even ran out of money midway and had to get a loan from a bank to finance it. Many in production called it “Disney’s Folley”. Everyone was blown away, however, when it debuted in 1938. It was the first film that showed, in the English speaking world, that animation could compete with live action film.
It still shows. After all, it’s on the American Film Institute’s list of top 100 movies at a solid 34, #10 villain in the Queen, #19 song for Someday my Prince will come, and is still the number 1 animated film.
…And you know you’ve done something right when a Fascist Dictator and  Communist propagandist say your film is the best. On the Communist Propogandist side, we have Sergei Eisenstein, the man who wrote Battleship Potempkin (a movie considered one of the best made by film critics). On the Fascist Dictator side we have…Adolf Hitler, of all people. Even bought a copy of it for himself. Make of that how you will.

Kingdom Hearts: A celebration of Disney, Square Enix…and one confusing storyline. Part 3

   When we last left off, we had just finished some backstory in Kingdom Hearts regarding Organization 13…as well as figuring out just who the heck Xion was. Some of the questions have been answered…and a whole lot more are gonna be asked with this next game as we go through the “way back machine”.

Birth By Sleep
Saddest places in the multiverse

Birth By sleep is where everything was set into motion. It has a relatively novel concept for the series thus far: Multiple main characters, each with a different playstyle, order they experience things…and the only thing they share is the fact that none of them get a happy ending. Also, no heartless this time. Instead, they fight beings called Unversed, who are manifestations of negative energy (think Persona shadows but a bit cuddlier).
So…Where do we begin? Well, A young keyblade master named Ventus is introduced to a new home called the Land of Departures where he studies how to become a keyblade master with his fellow apprentices, Terra and Aqua under their master, Master Eraqus (voiced by Mark Hamill).

The following day is the mark of Mastery exam for Terra and Aqua, an exam that will determine who can be a true keyblade master, and is also overseen by Eraqus close friend, Master Xehanort (voiced by Leonard Nimoy)…who could not be more evil looking if he tried. The exam goes wrong and despite salvaging things, Aqua gets the mastery and Terra doesn’t because Terra showed signs of Darkness (…if the parallels between Star Wars and this game seem a bit…close, believe me, we’re just getting started here.)

From here, the story diverges depending on who you play as.

Terra is given another shot at the Mark of Mastery if he can track down what’s going on with Master Xehanort…and he struggles with the darkness in him. This struggle is exploited by Xehanort and a bunch of other Disney villains as Terra begins to come to terms with it. Unfortunately, Terra is pretty gullible and falls for Xehanort’s penultimate exploitation: getting Terra to strike down Eraqus while defending Ven. Revealing himself as exploiting the darkness and light to maintain a sort of “balance of sorts” Xehanort challenges Terra to meet him at the Keyblade graveyard where they can settle things. He takes a detour to some familiar islands and passes his keyblade onto a familiar…white haired boy before making his way there. Terra faces the dark master in a duel and wins…at least until Xehanort reveals he deliberately held back to assess if Terra was strong enough to be his new body…and ultimately uploads his heart into Terra’s body. Xehanort now looks preeeeetty familiar and gets a last ditch challenge by a familiar super boss from Kingdom Hearts 2: The Lingering Will AKA: Terra’s abandoned armor.
Ven is rather understandably worried about Aqua and Terra…however, as he is not experienced yet with keyblade matters, he is asked to stay put in the land of departure. He’s perfectly content to do so until a refugee from Kamen Rider named Vanitas appears and makes some cryptic threats here and there about Terra, making Ven decide to disregard Master Eraqus and do his best to help. Along the way, he begins to remember more about his past and remembers he used to be Xehanort’s “Apprentice”. I use the term loosely, because Xehanort wanted to use his heart to make a legendary keyblade that could summon Kingdom Hearts called the X-blade (it’s a greek letter for Ki). Realizing that his heart has been pretty well fractured, he returns to Eraqus for advice…only for Eraqus to turn on him to eradicate the darkness surrounding him…and being struck down by Terra. Making his way to the keyblade graveyard, Vanitas possesses Ventus and is then overcome at the cost of Ventus heart having to seek a new vessel to recover. One willingly takes him up…a familiar spiky haired boy named Sora. Ventus’ body, however, is left in a coma.

Aqua is tasked with visiting Master Yen Sid to figure out what is going on with the Unversed…and also asked to spy on Terra to make sure he’s doing his job. Aqua reluctantly complies and begins to expose the flaws in Eraqus teachings. Much like the jedi from the prequels, Eraqus believes that darkness has no place in the heart of a keyblade warrior. At least we’d like to think it’s a flaw. With all the darkness obsessed villains in Kingdom hearts, and the confusion between whether to follow things on eastern philosophy (Dark and light can be equally good and evil) or western philosophy (dark is evil, light is good)…it’s a bit hard to follow. Nevertheless, Aqua is forced to see the friendship between herself, Terra, and Aqua destroyed as she reconfigures the Land of Departure into….Castle Oblivion as a sanctuary for Ven’s comatose body, and saves Terra’s body from the dark at the cost of herself falling to the dark.

In short, Xehanort wins, Our main characters lose…and the series gets a lot darker.

Dream Drop Distance
Light at the end of the tunnel

And then they made this to pull it all together before 3. We last left off where Sora and Riku were pulled in front of Yen Sid to decide their Mark of Mastery exams. Both would be put through dreaming worlds to find the source of it and ease the worlds back awake. All well and good…except for a mysterious boy in a familiar black coat stalking them. Worse still, he looks like a younger version of Xehanort.
Sora is rather oblivious of this and heads through things in a rather gung-ho manner, while Riku is the one to notice something is wrong with things. Complicating matters are the rebirth of Organization 13…except now they’re somebodies. They all go by their original names and remember their deeds…and are overall pretty sorry about it…well…some of them are. Sora finds out the hard way that some of them were converted into vessels for Xehanort…heck, even the versions of him they defeated came back…and Sora nearly gets converted himself as well! Young Xehanort then begins to explain everything with his older self: Everything had been set up as a stable time loop so that Master Xehanort could go forward with his original plan: Make 13 versions of himself to clash with 7 hearts of light to make the X blade and see what would happen with a keyblade war. Everything had gone as Xehanort had planned and now he was inches away from his goal.
Mickey, Goofy, Donald, Kairi, and Lea (somebody form of Axel) save the day and the Mark of Mastery is concluded. Riku gets to be a Keyblade master because of his recognizing that darkness can be a part of someone without making them inherently evil. Sora walks out having been drained of power and having to ask himself some questions about what went wrong…before Yen Sid gives him a helpful suggestion to find a certain Hero of the Greek Gods to ask and sending him on his way.

I could go over Fragmentary passage and Kingdom Hearts X, but honestly, Fragmentary passage covers the 10 years Aqua was in the dark…aaaand that’s about it, and X is about the golden age of keyblade warriors as a mobile phone game. Not necessary to play, but if you want to enrich your experience, decent games overall. I won’t spoil Kingdom Hearts 3. After all…we’ve been waiting long enough for it. Instead I leave this gameart for the end of the Seekers of the Darkness…and the end of the beginning of the Saga.

Kingdom Hearts: A celebration of Disney, Square Enix…and one confusing storyline. Part 2

   When we last left off, we were introduced to Kingdom Hearts, the universe where Disney and Final Fantasy come together in one blended multiverse centered around the balance of the heart. An everyguy named Sora had his world destroyed, was chosen by a weapon called a “Keyblade” and was introduced to the multitude of Disney worlds around him…at the cost of possibly never seeing his friend Kairi again and being forcibly separated from his friend Riku, who fell to the darkness.

Shortly afterwards, Sora was targeted by a mysterious organization who tried to brainwash him into a pawn for their nefarious deeds and was put into a coma so his memories could be restored. Riku managed to find his way out of the Dark world and begin his path to atonement and keeping the darkness in himself under control.

I hear you muttering to yourself “Hey! Where’s this confusing plotline of yours? It all makes sense to me!”

Well, you’re right…up until now. Here’s where things begin to get complex.

Kingdom Hearts 2
Wait. Who the heck is this guy?

When we last left off, Sora had gone into a deep sleep to restore his memories after his ordeal in Castle Oblivion. Fast forward about a year and we now play as…Some blonde guy who kinda looks like Sora…I guess? What? Where’d this guy come from?

Needless to say, Roxas, our new main character, is having somewhat of an off week. Despite planning for a tournament called “the Struggle”…things are beginning to get weird. There’s these weird white-robed shells seeking him out and a red haired guy who somehow knows him…and his memories have been about some brown haired spiky guy that only the player knows about. And somehow during all that…he gets chosen for the Keyblade…huh?

Feeling as befuddled as the player is, Roxas heads to the mansion at the outskirts of Twilight Town and finds out a pretty harsh truth. Everything he’s been experiencing? All a program. His past? Not real. Roxas wasn’t a normal kid by any means…and a rumble with the redhead, known to us as Axel, proves it. He eventually remembers wearing the same black coat as Axel before his memories of deserting whatever this Organization was surface as well.

Roxas then comes face to face with a figure we met last game, DiZ…who has the compelling voice of Christopher Lee, thus automatically making him pretty neat and pretty ominous. DiZ informs him of a harsh truth: Roxas is a Nobody (Ouch…that’s harsh even for you). And he’s been living on borrowed time. Roxas takes it like you’d expect…not well. He trashes the computer equipment before proclaiming “I’m me! Nobody else!”

This surge of rage is short lived as the pod with Sora finally opens and Roxas accepts his fate, vanishing as Sora wakes up and somehow….everyone begins to remember Sora again. Getting his bearings back, Sora follows a tip from the King and visits an old master of magic…A wizard best remembered from Fantasia, Master Yen Sid. Oh, and they also run into a new villain, Peg Leg Pete.

Yen Sid drops a few information bombs for us to follow: Despite our best tries, the heartless are still out there…and now there’s a new faction at work as well. These are called Nobodies. They are essentially what happens to the body after the heart is taken. Furthermore, if you have a particularly strong heart…your nobody will look almost exactly like you. 13 of these particularly strong Nobodies decided to band together and create Organization 13, the guys who tried to brainwash Sora.

With that out of the way, Sora does what he does best and makes his way across the Disney worlds to see what has changed in his absence…and do his best to make sense out of this heartless and nobody business. Throughout the journey, he runs into many of the Organization and they keep calling him the same thing…Roxas.

It takes a large influx of heartless and Axel deciding to kidnap Kairi for Sora to begin realizing everything he’s been doing has been part of one gigantic plan…one that even involved Maleficent and went back all the way to an experiment many years ago regarding…Ansem the Wise. Even weirder, upon finding out the chessmaster’s name, Xemnas…and rearranging the letters…turns out they’re the same guy. Xemnas’ plan is a little different though: instead of making use of the heartless to find Kingdom Hearts…he decided “why not use the heartless to make my own instead?” Each heartless defeated would make it more and more complete.

Sora eventually makes it to the Nobody homeworld, the ominous World that Never Was, and begins to deal with the remnants of Organization 13. Each blow comes with more new knowledge. That Ansem guy Sora fought? That actually wasn’t him. Turns out…DiZ was actually Ansem the wise all along. Both the guys Sora has fought against were really Ansem’s apprentice who conducted those experiments behind his back and stole Ansem’s name for himself. That Roxas guy everyone keeps calling Sora? Surprise, surprise! Roxas was Sora’s nobody! After all…Sora did become a heartless for about 10 minutes before Kairi turned him back. And that guy in the black coat with the familiar looking Souleater weapon? Sure, he looks different, but he’s still brooding, edgy Riku.

Oh. And that plan about using Kingdom Hearts to give all Nobodies their hearts? Xemnas was lying through his teeth. He just wanted it to remake the world in his image. One giant explosion, Riku getting his form back, and one epic 5 part boss fight, and Xemnas is toast…although things hardly feel over. Say…what’s this mysterious new message in the journal of Jiminy Cricket? And who the heck are those armored guys with the sweet capes with the creepy old guy who summoned Kingdom Hearts with just a swish of his hand?

What the heck is going on here?!

Kingdom Hearts coded
More questions.

  Bet you thought 3 would automatically come into play here, huh?

Nope. We got a loooooong ways to go before 3 comes into play.

We last left off with a mysterious message appearing in Jiminy Cricket’s journal. He’s been the one documenting our adventure since day one (Sora’s Day 1, that is) and he’s quite disturbed at a message he never wrote down.

“Their hurting will be mended when you come to end it”

Nobody can make sense of this, so Mickey decides the best thing to do is digitize the information and see if that makes sense of things…and it does…kinda. It also shows there’s a ton of bugs in the journal (computer bugs, not more clones of Jiminy). What to do for this? Why, make a digital Sora to clear them out! What could happen? If you think the game sounds a bit off…you’re not to far off. Nomura did admit he came up with the idea while he was drunk.

One dip back in the Kingdom Hearts worlds (Except for Lost Jungle…Disney got in trouble with the estate of Edgar Rice Borroughs for using Tarzan without their permission in Kingdom Hearts and lost the rights to use it in further games), tangling with Sora’s heartless and…another trip through Castle Oblivion and we meet the source of the message: Data Namine. She apologizes for the inconvenience, but reveals who we need to save: Roxas, Xion, Ventus, Axel, Namine, Terra and Aqua.

   Well…we know 3 of them at least…but who’re the other guys?

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days

Once more. With Feeling!

  Backwards plot jumping time! This time, we take a step back and see what Roxas was doing during his time in the Organization 13. Roxas goes through his first few days coming to terms with his existence and learning the ins and outs of the group before about half of them are called away to Castle Oblivion for something special. It wouldn’t be that much of a big deal, but by that time, Roxas and Axel had become friends and eventually, they met a new member of organization 13…Xion who is…the 14th member…huh?

Following her inclusion, Roxas begins experiencing many ups and downs with his keyblade abilities and he begins to suspect he’s not being told important things. Turns out…he’s more right than he knows. Xion isn’t a real nobody. She’s a puppet made of Sora’s memories meant to replace him if he becomes more trouble than he’s worth. With this in mind, Roxas decides he’s had enough of being left in the dark and treated as a disposable…and does what nobody has ever done before: Abandon Organization 13.

Meanwhile, Xion finds out her role, courtesy of Riku…and she takes her existence a bit better than most. She attempts to abandon Organization 13 as well…and is less successful. Fully aware of what Xemnas would make her do, and that as long as she is alive, Sora would never wake up…she feigns insanity and attacks Roxas…to just end things. This has the added effect of making everyone who ever knew her forget she ever existed…and leads to Roxas’ most badass feat: Dual wielding Oblivion and Oathkeeper keyblades and taking on many heartless at the same time…and giving Riku a very hard battle before Riku voluntarily gives into the darkness to save Sora from endless sleep…and setting up our tutorial in Kingdom Hearts 2.
Well…that’s one part of things taken care of…but we still don’t have answers for who Terra, Ventus and Aqua are. And things are getting a lot darker.

We’re at least 2/3 of the way through this saga…and we go even deeper into the past with the next one!