Sky: The Two Embers is Struggling to Find a Home Without Boobs, Guts, and Blood

Chen says that he reached out to thatgamecompany’s former animation director, who’s worked on trailers for games like League of Legends, who connected Chen to professional 3D animation studios. The team worked on a trailer for the Nintendo Switch release of the game, and then the PlayStation and PC trailers, which all acted as mini episodes, expanding the lore out.

“I wanted to tell a story, even if it’s a commercial,” Chen says. “I guess my standard for how deeply the story has to touch people started to affect the commercial, and then the story had to become bigger and bigger. And eventually the team was like ‘Hey, maybe you want to build a series, there’s enough story here [for] a whole season.’”

Chen and the team started working through the story, shaping the series into ten episodes with a three act structure. They settled on a story with no dialogue, and no violence, making it accessible to just about everybody, and then started shopping the concept around to streaming networks. Unfortunately, nobody was interested.

“To my surprise, they said ‘Hey, this is for family, right?’” Chen says of conversations with streaming networks, “I said there’s no violence here, and they say [they’ll] review it. They were like ‘Why isn’t there any dialogue? Kids are not doing well with no dialogue, so we don’t think this is going to work. You should probably talk to the Love, Death & Robots people.’

“They looked at our thing, and said ‘We don’t see any edge here, there’s no sex or violence. They just think you’re trying to please everybody but you end up pleasing nobody.’ So we haven’t had any success there.”

Chen’s noticeably a bit frustrated by this, and I can’t blame him one bit. He makes the comparison to films from Pixar and Studio Ghibli, where he says there’s no violence, no sex, and in some cases like Pixar’s Wall-E, very little dialogue. They were still successful, he says, so why couldn’t Sky be the same?

“What’s wrong with me trying to do things that don’t use boobs and guts and blood, right? Can’t beauty still be something popular?”

It’s a frustrating situation, because having seen a few minutes of the show, I’m absolutely convinced it could be absolutely massive with the right support behind it. Despite the lack of dialogue, Sky: The Two Embers tugged at my heartstrings like very little else I’ve watched in my life, immediately making me care about the characters and their struggles. Even though the main character is masked, every movement is packed with emotion, care, worry, and upset. It’s a masterclass in movement and expressive animation, and it’s bound to resonate with just about anyone who watches it.

Despite setbacks with trying to partner up with big streaming networks, thatgamecompany has committed to a 2025 release date for the series. At this stage it’s not clear where, exactly, it’s going to end up — the streaming networks might change their minds and pick it up after all, or thatgamecompany could drop the series on YouTube or its own streaming solution. Whatever the case, when it does come I’ll be there on day one, ready to cry my biggest tears for the most touching animated story I’ve ever seen.