Earlier this month, animator Seth Kearsley shared long-lost footage of a proposed Kingdom Hearts animated pilot that was ultimately cancelled 20 years ago – giving fans their closest look at the doomed project to date. Sadly however, it looks like a certain big mouse in the entertainment industry is not keen on letting this rare piece of history stay public.

As of the writing of this story, Kearsley has taken down the animated pilot from YouTube – meaning that the video is no longer available for viewing via the streaming website. He then elaborated further that he had to do this because an “old friend” from Disney had “politely” requested him to do so:

As some of you have already seen. The #kingdomhearts animatic is taken down. I got the call from an old friend at Disney who was politely asked to politely ask me to take it down.

— Seth Kearsley (@SethKearsley) October 14, 2022

While this is unfortunate, the internet has already made swift work on archiving the treasured footage since then. One such place where you can still find the long-lost animatic is the Internet Archive – which strives to catalogue such snippets of digital history:

Disney has not officially commented on its request to take down the footage – although it’s pretty reasonable to assume that the media giant simply doesn’t want such an obscure oddity of Kingdom Hearts‘ history in the wild.

We’ll report back if this situation develops further in the history. Stay tuned.