Something I haven’t really seen talked about with the Knights of Guinevere pilot is the frames at the beginning. It’s both a callback to traditional fairytales, and a neat way to establish a few things about our story.
Usually, when you put something in a frame in animation, it’s because you want the audience to pay attention to it: introducing a character, a big reveal, it can even be used as a misdirect that gets explained later.
Starting at the beginning of the Pilot, let’s look at each character framed:
Our first character framed is Olivia, and it’s a really fun frame to talk about: When this frame pops up, the narration is talking about a Princess “locked away [by] machines that run on blood and fear.” Of course, seeing Olivia framed while that’s being monologued, one would assume Olivia is the Princess…however, the next few scenes seem to poke holes in that: we see a shot from Gwen’s perspective on the bed, then Olivia tries to “fix” her. Everything seems…off.
Of course, we then get the scene of Orville calling for Olivia and showing her the park, but that sense of wrongness stays, until…
We’ve already seen Gwen’s face in the pilot…but the narrative wants us to focus specifically on her gored out body. The viewer realizes that she’s the princess, and the Parks are the machines that run on blood and fear.
(Also, as a fun lil foreshadowing, Orville never gets a frame for himself. He isn’t a main character.)
The frame pans up to guinevere’s face, but the image of her organs spilling out of her body sticks with the viewer.
Also, before I forget: Gwen is the only framed character looking directly at the viewer: Olivia, Frankie, and Andi are in profile in all of their frames, but Gwen looks at the viewer.
This looks like something you’d see in a book of fairytales, even despite the gore. I love how the background is a warm, almost inviting glow, but the foreground is in silhouette, the only color coming from the characters being the blue stuff from inside Gwen. Again, the narrative is telling us to pay attention to this: Gwen is trapped by these people, literally being almost killed by them. It doesn’t matter how beautiful and inviting the park looks, the pain and suffering Gwen has to go through stands out starkly. It’s terrifying, in a very visceral way.
The final frame is of our main characters as kids, Andi and Frankie. It’s a fun frame for 2 reasons: for one, we’ve only gotten one frame up until now, so getting two framed characters in the same shot means that these two are connected. Indeed, Andi’s frame has a line that transfers right into Frankie’s, showing that they are indeed, connected. It’s the narrative again telling us information subconsciously before anything is shown.
These are all of the frames I found, so idk how to end this, aside from the fact that I think it’s cool that they combine sci-fi iconography into fantasy iconography with the ornamentation, that’s pretty cool.
I hope they use more frames in the future, and that we get to see more of KoG
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