Tetsuyta Nomura Insisted on Using Pixar and Toy Story for Kingdom Hearts III - News

by William D'Angelo , posted on 06 January 2019 / 1,940 Views

Kingdom Hearts III director Tetsuyta Nomura in a recent interview with EDGE magazine explained he wasn't willing to develop Kingdom Hearts III without Pixar and Toy Story.

"After we were done with Kingdom Hearts II and were starting to consider III, we started talks with Disney, I remember saying, 'If we can’t use Pixar, then we can’t have a third game,'" said Nomura. "It’s that important to the game series. The whole world loves Toy Story – everybody feels the appeal of that story and those characters. So yeah, at the very beginning I directly said to them, 'If we can’t get this, I don’t want to do it.'"

"I wrote a general outline of the story and I submitted it to Pixar, It took them several years to okay the story and the character designs," he added. "Previous to Kingdom Hearts III, I think these companies kind of saw it more as like, secondary rights permissions. They saw it more as a product like you would a branded toy or something.

"This time, it was creator to creator. It was somebody who had made this animation, and somebody who was making this game. We were communicating with each other, myself and these people, so that added an extra level of complexity because each creator has their own desires, ideas, and concepts."

Kingdom Hearts III will launch for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on January 25, 2019 in Japan and Asia, and January 29 in North America and Europe.

Thanks GamingBolt.

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.

5 Comments

DonFerrari (on 07 January 2019)

I do approve of the movies they decided to use.

RenCutypoison (on 07 January 2019)

"Tetsuyta Nomura"

AngryLittleAlchemist (on 07 January 2019)

There's an entire generation which predominantly grew up on Pixar being the main selling point of Disney, so it's not surprising. Disney creating computer animated films as big as Pixars is a pretty recent thing all things considered.