There has never been a series like this Arcaneand it may never be again. Based on League of Legendsthe most successful video game and sports giant with a familiar name imaginable, Arcane: League of Legends the most expensive animated series ever produced at $250 million. The nine-episode first season took six years to make; the second, three more. In appearance, its only peer is the Sony Spider-Verse films. Surprisingly, its only peer Game of Thrones. And, unfortunately, it's too good to stay.
Arcane a fictional drama set in a country divided between the poor and the have-nots. Sisters Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) and Jinx (Ella Purnell) find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict between the glittering technological city of Piltover and the impoverished and chaotic city of Zaul. While this may sound like the setup for a simple class warfare parable, Arcane it gives both the sisters and the world the complexity of the novelist. Vi is an emotionally wounded hero who wants to do what's right but is driven almost entirely by guilt and self-loathing. Abandoned by her older sister at a young age, Jinx was taken in by a gang leader and mastered violence and destruction as a way to play and as a way to gain her mentor's approval and ease the pain of her childhood abandonment. They hurt the other deeply and bring ruin to the other's life. If these two can't make peace, what hope does the world around them have?
In the short run of its first nine 40-minute episodes, Arcane a growing collection of soldiers, criminals, politicians, scientists and mysterious minds has been created, each with their own agenda, loyalties and complex web of relationships. This web grows more complex in season two, albeit at the cost of clarity. Where the first season took disparate groups of characters and brought them together in the same, tragic environment, the second one blasts them apart again, perhaps in too many places. Keeping up with multiple seasonal articles is a challenge, especially since each one seems to progress at a different pace and some are pushed back for long periods of time. There's a huge amount of story packed into the six critically acclaimed episodes (out of nine total), with enough story ideas to fill it twice. It's hectic but never boring, and the most important characters still get time to develop organically.
This compression of the story may be the result of Riot Games reducing its initial order of five seasons to two, due to the volume of its price. Tencent Media is paying Riot $5 million per episode to stream the show in China while Netflix is paying another $5 million per episode to stream it everywhere else, and that still leaves Riot with about $70 million in the hole. Regardless of the effect the popularity and fame of this game may have League of Legends' microtransaction economy, that is not sustainable, especially given the current free fall of the gaming industry.
But if Riot's choice was to cut the length of the show or the production values, they undoubtedly made the right call. Arcane it keeps getting better frame by frame. Every part of the product shows evidence of extraordinary attention and care. Character designs, adapted from League of Legendsthey are distinct and identifiable as they change over the course of the story, and each is brought to life with flexibility and clarity. It's not just the frenzied and thought-provoking battle sequences that are impressive – the attention that goes into faces during dialogue is often just as impressive. The backdrops and digital sets, even those used in one scene, are lovingly rendered with digital paint, and every prop is painstakingly over-designed to fit the show's steampunk idiom. To call this animation “feature quality” is an understatement. Most Western animated features don't look this good.
Directors Pascale Charrue and Arnaud Delord signature “touch Fortiche” The art style uses the best qualities of 2D and 3D computer animation in an aesthetic that simultaneously evokes anime, American comics, and the fantasy art of fantasy novels and Magic: Encounter cards. This is unique enough on its own, but each episode strays from this model at least once, usually a mash-up of music video style that relies on one influence or another. A montage set to raucous punk rock mimics the understated humor, while an emotional ballad underpins the faux-watercolor flashback. Many of these beauty choices (and everything music) sound like they were made by a Hot Topic customer growing up in 2006, but they work so well that even viewers who scoff at this kind of black nail polish and integrity will probably forgive it. And despite these extended stylistic deviations, Charrue and Delord throw in new tricks so that the audience never loses their sense of how amazing it is. Arcane it seems, every minute.
Perhaps this is part of why Riot Games doesn't see the positives in continuing Arcane past in these 18 episodes. As someone who knew nothing League of Legends before watching and dating him ArcaneI'm still not interested League of Legendsa strategy game where all this complex narrative is just background. On the other hand, I am now in the bag for whatever Studio Fortiche works on next, be it another series or a feature film. I would like to see what runners Christian Linke and Alex Yee, who had never written professionally before that. Arcaneget up to the next one. Intellectual property is not part of the show, and that's good for the audience but not necessarily for the funders. But, sad as a summary of Arcane it may be, it's a miracle of our modern entertainment economy that it exists at all. The video game company invested an incredible amount of time and money into what could be framed as a long form advertisement, and ended up with one of the best animated series ever made. That, apparently, is the stuff of fairy tales.
