Title: Kingdom Hearts Volume(s): 4 Creator(s): Shiro Amano Format: Unflipped; Left-to-Right Publisher: Tokyopop MSRP: $5.99 Genre(s): Fantasy Rated: All Ages

What an insane idea. Not an original one, but an insane one: a Disney crossover that threatens the existence of all the characters you love. Crossovers aren’t the most original ideas for a story. Go to fanfiction.net and you’ll find tons of crossovers like Harry Potter with “Card Captor Sakura”, “Yugioh” with “Sailor Moon”, and then Artemis Fowl with Harry Potter with “Yugioh”. (No, I am not kidding.) That doesn’t mean they’re all bad; some are well written and clever. With official crossovers, however, most either aren’t famous or look really bad. Disney’s “House of Mouse” is a good example. It does not work because it requires all the Disney characters to actually leave their own world and set aside their differences. DC Comics only work because all the characters live in the same universe. There are numerous inconsistencies that an occasional Crisis series had to solve. If you’ve ever seen Kim Possible with Lilo and Stitch or Hercules with Aladdin, then you get the idea. “Kingdom Hearts” blows most of those doubts away. I’ll get to why not all of my doubts disappear later.

Sora, Kairi and Riku live on an island together. They have to rely on themselves for survival and seek to leave the island one day to explore other worlds. They know other worlds exist because Kairi is from one of them. On the day they plan to set out on a raft, dark things attack and Sora ends up in another world. Big surprise, you’re thinking. In this other world, Donald Duck and Goofy are lieges to King Mickey, who has just disappeared and has left only a letter behind. Donald and Goofy need to find a person with a key to help fight the Heartless, which are dark shadows with no hearts, and Sora just happens to have a key appear when he appears. So what happens is that Sora, Donald, Goofy, Jiminy Cricket, and Chip and Dale (who are ship mechanics) must ride in a ship to other worlds and seal the keyholes to save each world’s existence. But while they’re doing that, the Heartless are capturing seven “princesses” like Alice and Princess Jasmine in order to open an ultimate door. Leading them is Maleficent, the villain from “Sleeping Beauty”, even scarier than before. There are twists, betrayals, love triangles, and about six Disney movies involved with the Heartless skewering their plotlines.

I’ll get to the plotline skewering later. For now I simply want to talk about what I REALLY liked in the series: the art. Although the books would’ve been better in color (and this is coming from someone who’s never played the video game), the art was well done in blending Japanese anime characters like Sora and Leon with Donald Duck, Peter Pan, Alice, and the others that show up. When the character designs did not blend, I was pleased because the art created a pleasant contrast. I am slightly suspicious that Amano-sensei may have used the same method that Disney has used over the years in their movie picture books, but at least he does it well. All the Disney characters look like they’re supposed to. As for the Japanese art- okay, let me be frank: Kairi looks like a typical girl from a shounen manga, but Sora looks like a typical spiky-haired protagonist drawn in a different way. I can’t explain it, but it feels like someone tried to make Sora look original. Maybe it’s that the artist makes his expressions more detailed; whatever it is, I’m not completely disappointed. The second thing was the sheer dark tone of this manga. Amano-sensei tried to cover it by having Goofy going “Keep smiling”, but it’s a thin façade. Believe me when I say “Kingdom Hearts” as a manga adds another meaning to the word “dark”. That doesn’t mean that everything good and evil have a fine line in between them. It's quite the contrary. Although Maleficent reminds me of the White Witch from “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”, there are other villains and even people who are caught in between good and evil to balance the black and white. I think, however, that parents should let their kids read this to show that there is no fine line between right and wrong. It’s a scary theme, but I wish I’d known it when I was growing up. I’m having trouble in history class trying to see issues from different perspectives, including the people who are the oppressors. I’m not blaming Disney for that entirely, as most movies for kids have definitions for what good is and what evil is. I actually admire them for having the guts to admit that you can’t judge a person by their initial actions.

We move on to the bad stuff. First of all, when a world’s story is “skewered”, it means that the original story has been modified to fit the series. Usually the trouble is due to Disney villains working with Maleficent and the Heartless; exceptions include the Queen of Hearts. What I don’t like about this is that Sora, Donald and Goofy replace the strong protagonists of these movies. They fight Jafar with strength when Aladdin did so with wits; they spar against a henchman for Hades when Hercules should be kicking butt. Ariel reconciles with her father but remains a mermaid and can’t really explore other worlds. These protagonists become side characters, more or less. Even more annoying was that these characters could not join the trio in their quest against the Heartless, even when they desperately wanted to. There was lost potential for having Aladdin meet Ariel and all of their ideas clashing with Donald and Goofy’s. I find it an interesting contradiction that Donald, Goofy and Sora could go over to other worlds whenever they wanted to and then not allow the other Disney characters to. Secondly, the series has a lot on unanswered question. Why are Donald, Goofy and Sora allowed to travel and everyone else is not? Why is Alice considered a princess if Wendy is not? It doesn’t make sense since both are young girls who dream of better things and have no royal connections. (Also Katherine Beaumont did the voice acting for both of them.)

When did the Heartless get the other princesses? Why isn’t Ariel considered a princess when her father is the sea king? In fact, why are there no strong women in this series? Normally I would understand if this was all they had to choose from, but there’s Mulan and Nala from “the Lion King”.I mean, Disney had a long list to choose from and they chose girls who only function as damsels-in-distress? A good question is how Wonderland can exist; anyone who’s seen the movie knows that in the end Alice was dreaming about the whole thing. Okay, now I’m going over the line. The bottom line is that Disney and Squaresoft did not favor women in this manga. In the game I know that you go to Halloween Town from “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and you have Sally, who is feminist. I don’t know who opted to make a four-book short manga series of the game, as the books are much shorter than Tokyopop’s usual fare. I think that it would’ve helped if the manga had been of normal length and if it had been allowed to visit all of the worlds that were in the game. I might play the “Kingdom Hearts” video game, but I don’t know. I have plenty of other hobbies and not enough time to do them all. Although there are plenty of lacking qualities in the series, there is also a strong storyline and the greatest character development you’ve ever seen. I kind of wish that the story wasn’t left on a cliffhanger; I started reading “Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories” as soon as I had finished the first series. It’s not standing in front of a screen with your fingers on a joystick or a pad, but it’s probably just as fun. I do hope they make an anime; can you imagine Katherine Beaumont as Wendy again? Or can you imagine if Robin Williams comes back as the Genie? Disney sets in nostalgia through its movies and has tried to milk money off it in other television series and sequels; however, they’d have a hard time ruining this story without a hundred fans breathing down their necks. Read the series, but with a grain of salt. Girls, I recommend reading it, but for role models look to other graphic novels.

- -Review By Jaya Lakshmi - -