Screenshot from Knights of Guinevere
(GLITCH)

Hell yes, the creator of The Owl House announced an indie cartoon

Disney XD comes up with an absolute banger of a series every year or so. First, it was Gravity Falls. Then, it was Star vs. the Forces of Evil. Most recently, it was Dana Terrace’s The Owl House, which ran from 2020 to 2023. The show was beloved not just for its thrilling story, but for its very loving LGBTQ+ representation, which still seems eons ahead of other Disney media.

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Quite infuriatingly, Disney cut The Owl House‘s third and final season short because some suits decided, in Terrace’s own words, that the show “didn’t fit into [Disney’s] ‘brand’.” Fortunately, we just learned that Terrace didn’t stay inactive for long. Terrace just announced a new series, Knights of Guinevere, which she co-created with Owl House writers John Bailey Owen and Zach Marcus.

But here’s the really interesting bit: Knights of Guinevere is produced by an independent animation studio, GLITCH. As such, it will be airing on YouTube—not on one of the major streamers. You might know GLITCH from the other YouTube animation series they have produced, like Digital Circus or Murder Drones. Knights of Guinevere will be GLITCH’s first 2D animated series.

It’s excellent news for all of us—and for Terrace. Is it kind of wild that one of the best showrunners in animation in the last five years has to go indie to be greenlit? … Yeah.

Three cheers for indie animation

The teaser for Knights of Guinevere is immediately intriguing, moving deftly between a Snow White-adjacent scene of a maiden in a forest and the same woman, now with a tentacle arm, writhing in a grimy laboratory. However, you might be wondering: “Dana Terrace made a series for Disney. Disney! Why did she move on to indie animation?”

Well, America’s animation industry isn’t very heathy right now. Animators have been facing waves of layoffs while major streamers, like Max, show increasingly little interest in green-lighting animated projects. And that doesn’t even account for the many projects which have gotten canceled midway through development. For example, one of the reasons we haven’t heard from Gravity Falls showrunner Alex Hirsch is that he’s been stuck under an NDA since 2018 developing something (or somethings) for Netflix. For seven years. (There were ample rumors that Hirsch was working on the Gorillaz film Netflix canceled.)

So the fact that Terrace is announcing a new project less than two years after The Owl House‘s finale is highly atypical for the industry right now. It’s the kind of miracle which can only be possible if you go indie. Plus, GLITCH likely gave Terrace and her co-creators more freedom than Disney ever would.

We’re seeing a similar shift in gaming, too, albeit for slightly different reasons. AAA game budgets are so bloated, and their development so long, that indie games made by smaller teams and with shorter playtimes have really begun to shine.

Knights of Guinevere looks spectacular. GLITCH describes it as a “sci-fi psychological thriller,” which means it likely skews adult. The teaser says the series will be “coming sometime this year (hopefully). I say, let them cook.


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Image of Kirsten Carey
Kirsten Carey
Kirsten (she/her) is a contributing writer at the Mary Sue specializing in anime and gaming. In the last decade, she's also written for Channel Frederator (and its offshoots), Screen Rant, and more. In the other half of her professional life, she's also a musician, which includes leading a very weird rock band named Throwaway. When not talking about One Piece or The Legend of Zelda, she's talking about her cats, Momo and Jimbei.