The Owl House is a beautifully vibrant show that captured the hearts of many across the U.S. by showing a relatable story about finding yourself through the lens of a teen girl in another world who wants nothing more than to become a witch. Its first episode was released on January 10, 2020, and it was officially canceled in October of 2021. The series finale was able to premiere on April 8, 2023.
According to a Reddit post by Dana Terrace, creator of The Owl House, the show was canceled because “At the end of the day, there are a few business people who oversee what fits into the Disney brand and one day one of those guys decided [The Owl House] didn’t fit that ‘brand.’”
While Terrace’s Reddit post declared that the reason for its cancellation was that “the story is serialized, our audience skews older, and that just didn’t fit this one guy’s tastes,” many fans believe that the real reason it was canceled was due to its depictions of LGBTQ+ characters.
The show follows the story of Luz Noceda, a high school student who is obsessed with fantasy and struggles to fit in at her school, as she falls into a mystical world known as The Boiling Isles. As she sees the magical land around her, she can’t help but be reminded of the fantasy novels she grew up with. At first, she’s excited, until she realizes that this world is not what she expected. Rather than a world of whimsy and wonder, she finds herself in a twisted world where something as simple as rain could melt your skin and rainbows can turn you inside out.
Instead of being discouraged by this, she falls in love with the horrifying world of The Boiling Isles. She finds herself at home in this place, more than she ever did in her world where she was seen as weird. This culminates in the finale where she realizes that what she truly wants is to be understood by those around her. In the end, The Owl House is a love-letter to all the kids out there who imagined themselves on a fantastical adventure in another world, and to the grown ups who still have that kid buried somewhere inside of them.
This show combines childlike wonder with humor for both the kids and the adults in order to tell a beautiful story that monopolizes your attention and keeps your eyes glued to the screen. Its scenes are caked with subtle nods to 80’s and 90’s humor and the most minute details that only serve to amplify the story and keep you guessing. Its veneer of a children’s show hides a carefully laid out show with subtle anti-colonialist themes and an intense magic system. All of this is contained in only three seasons which never fail to astound and mystify.
Luz is a Dominican girl who struggles with being neurodivergent and is bisexual. She’s also one of Disney’s first queer main characters. Her mentor, Eda the Owl Lady, was a witch with a curse that represented having a disability whose love interest identified as nonbinary. The show also has a diverse cast of supporting characters with body types, sexualities, and skin colors of all sorts. This diversity allowed it to take the world by storm as people who didn’t originally tune in were surprised and drawn in by articles about the Disney channel’s first same-sex couple.
The show’s diverse representation is supplemented by the fact that all of this representation isn’t the focus of the show. Rather than focusing on the fact that Luz is bisexual or that she’s Dominican, these details about her are just that, details. The traits that make the show’s characters diverse aren’t their focus, instead that’s just how the characters are. Representation in this manner goes a long way to normalize these traits.
The show also has an amazing art style that remains simple throughout the story until a big moment happens. During big moments, the art style seems to become far more detailed and fluid. This visual contrast makes important scenes more memorable and dynamic, and it causes fights to become visually striking in comparison to other parts of the show. By combining this art style with the colorful land of the Boiling Isles, you get a show that captures the audience and transports them to a beautiful world of magic and fantasy.
Luz’s journey from a teen struggling to make friends and stay out of trouble to someone who has truly found herself and gotten the support she needs is a truly beautiful one. Watching her struggle to learn she can’t do things alone and seeing her grow and change as she learns new lessons about herself is not only inspiring but thoughtful in a way that leaves the viewer changed with her.
Disney quickly realized its mistake in canceling The Owl House after the show’s finale had a combined live viewership of over 500,000 people on the Disney and Disney XD Channels. Meanwhile, the YouTube video version of The Owl House’s finale gained 2.5 million views in the first 24 hours of its release and topped out at 12.8 billion views, making it the single most watched video on the disney channel youtube channel. Since then, Disney has continued to use the characters of The Owl House in their show Chibi Tiny Tales.
In the year after the show’s end, the fans have worked to keep the show alive through fan projects and petitions to bring the show back. While Disney has made no response to these petitions, the fan projects have built up a startling number of supporters. One fan has gained great renown among his peers for his comics that have a striking story that both continues on the story of the show and expands on the dynamics and arcs between characters who never got a chance to shine in the show’s short run. The Owl House and the love it received are a testament to what fans can do and how people can make change in the face of powerful organizations like Disney.
