In Mickey Stepanskiy’s charming and colourful short film Knights on a Quest for Love, two knights set off on a journey to rescue a princess—only to discover love of their own hiding in plain sight. At the 2026 edition of Brussels’ flagship animation festival Anima, we sat down with the filmmaker to discuss his film, which screened during the festival’s iconic Animated Film Night, bringing together high-energy films and music for an exciting hours-long event into the early morning.
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Purple Hour: I’d love if you could start by introducing yourself and talking a bit about your background as an artist and animator.
Mickey Stepanskiy: I started drawing at a young age, and I got into animation around 10 years ago. I don’t know if you know the website called Scratch, but it’s a kids programming platform. I joined when I was like 12 years old, but I’m still on it a decade later, a little bit past my prime. That’s where I learned animation. That was a lot of fun, and it brought me into the digital side of art. From there, I moved to Adobe Animate, where I just experimented a bit, and that gave me a little bit of confidence that I wanted to pursue animation. I went to a bunch of small private schools, but there was no animation programme—there’s barely an art programme. I applied to the School of Visual Arts [(SVA) in New York City] when I was in high school and got in, which is amazing. I didn’t think that was going to happen. I was finally in a place where I had a bunch of artist friends for the first time, and that’s definitely where I grew the most.
I made three films in my time at SVA, for my sophomore, junior, and senior years. Each one, I tried to make as different as possible. This is kind of a theme—same thing on Scratch and my YouTube channel. I just try to make everything as different from the previous thing. It’s some sort of comedy or like light-heartedness. I never take it too seriously. I just like being goofy with my innovations. If I can make someone laugh, that would be great. Knights on a Quest for Love was my senior thesis for SVA, and I feel like it’s probably the most “me” film I’ve made so far.
What was the first concept or seed of an idea for the film, and how did it transform over time?
Initially, it was supposed to be a Western film. I was trying to take more of a serious approach, where I didn’t make as many jokes. It was a complete 180 from what it turned out to be in the end. It started with this outlaw and a sheriff who were in a duel. I thought it would be fun to find a cliché and turn it on its head. There was a central cliché, the whole, “This town ain’t big enough for the two of us” trope. Eventually, the sheriff gets shot in the duel, and the film transitions to this purgatory place. He was going through this big open void, dealing with these devil minions, navigating and learning lessons about himself. He was in denial that his biggest flaw was his pride, and he had to learn to deal with that. He comes to terms with this at the end of the animation. It was a darker film, and there wasn’t anything funny about it. However, I was two months into the storyboarding phase, and I realised I wasn’t going to have a lot of fun. I was going to get burnt out if I continued it. So I had to quickly scramble to come up with a new idea, and that ended up being what I did now. I realised that everything about this was just not me. The Knights film is very colourful, as opposed to the white purgatory place, and it was full of jokes. I had a lot of fun making it.
The film ends up as a bit of a “surprise” queer story, in a very light-hearted and casual way. Were you thinking about this story in the framework of a queer narrative at all?
I made this animation not intending to make a “queer film”. Full disclosure, I am straight, and I wasn’t thinking about that while I made it. However, I am really happy with how it turned out. I think that the knights being gay at the end and falling in love with each other—subverting the expectations from both saving the princess and falling in love with her at the same time—I think that was a really interesting change. I was trying to take this cliché idea of these knights saving a princess and flipping on its head, making it so it doesn’t follow the typical trope, because it’s been done a million times before. Part of the intention was just to surprise people, but at the same time, I wanted to be natural. I thought someone would have done this idea before, but I didn’t find anything.
The film used to be seven minutes long, and now it’s five minutes and 30 seconds, with 30 seconds of credits. The seven-minute film was a lot different—the knights were more of jerks than they are now, which is already a subversion of the “brave knight” trope. They were assholes. Not only did they talk over and ignore the princess, but there was this third character that didn’t really exist in the final product of the animation. His name was the Mule, and they just kind of belittled him. He was like a little servant to them. It portrayed them in a negative light, which I was okay with, but I wanted them to also be likable by the audience, that we could root for them at the end, especially when they didn’t save the princess, and they didn’t fall in love with her. I realised that at the end, when the knights were with the princess, they were also kind of being rude to her, definitely, but when they realised their love was with each other, they became a lot more tender. I think that was also kind of sweet.
You voice the Blue Knight in the film. Could you talk a bit about the dialogue, which is really conversational?
I was the voice of the Blue Knight, and my best friend was the voice of the Red Knight. I think that a lot of the improv, which was most of the conversational aspects of the animation, is akin to how I talk with my friend. There are some parts—when the king was speaking in the beginning, the monologue and the wizard’s speech before he exploded, and the knight having an epiphany of self-discovery and his sexuality—those were all scripted. But I wanted the dynamic of the knights to feel natural and like they really had a relationship there. My friend and I sat in a recording booth for an hour and a half, and we had talking points, but we also just went off script. I cut that down to maybe two minutes to put in the film, and that was the highlight of our recording session.
Are there any new projects you’re working on now, and what do you hope to work on more in the future?
I have been doing freelance animation, and that includes making some assets for video games, working on a trailer for another video game as well, and doing some other animations for a podcast and stuff like that. That’s been a lot of fun, although I don’t have as much creative liberty over what I make, and it’s not as nice being told what to do. I have also had good experiences doing that, but I do really enjoy making short films. I like having some creative freedom.
Scratch invited me to do a livestream to co-host with Bobby Podesta, who’s a Pixar animator. That was a collaboration between Scratch and Story Xperiential, which teaches animation and storytelling to kids and adults. That was a lot of fun and a big honor to be there. For personal projects, I like doing all aspects. I want to start my next short film and am currently brainstorming what that might be. Currently, the working idea is that it takes place a billion years in the future, where raccoons have evolved to be the next human race. They fill the role of humans after humans have become extinct, and they’re using the history of humanity as their religion. The working title is “Raccoonoscene”, as a play on the word “Anthropocene”. It’s basically raccoons, but all communism.
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Watch Knights on a Quest for Love here:
