Arcane is coming to a close, with the final three episodes releasing today, and showrunner Christian Linke tells us the animators are always looking for ways to challenge themselves.
Regardless of your feelings on the source material, League of Legends, you have to admit the quality of Arcane’s animation is top tier. At a rumored $250 million for 18 episodes, you can really see where the budget went.
What also helps is the creativity of the staff working on the show. In a recent interview with Linke, he tells us “you have a studio full of artists and animators who are just like ‘oh, we can do something different, that challenges us, that explores a different style?’ I think there’s always a desire to do that, they’re always hunting for those.”
What amazes me the most with Arcane’s style is how tangible its camera feels. Something I had to wrap my head around for modern, computerized animation is that there is no camera, it’s all virtual. But Arcane’s scenes shake and lose focus for a second as though there’s an actual crew filming everything.
As for some of the show’s deliberately less realistic moments, Linke explains, “whenever there’s a moment that takes place in someone’s head, you have an opportunity to really use their perspective, to really color and change the depiction of something. It doesn’t need to be as realistic.”
These are the moments the team loves because, “It doesn’t need to be as grounded. It can be abstract. It can be impressionistic. So I think that’s where that usually comes from. Usually when we have some sort of internal dialog or depiction of someone’s internal experience, I think we tend to gravitate towards some sort of different interpretation, different stylization, to really exaggerate what they’re feeling about something.”
Arcane has only been on air for three years, but the team have spent “nine years” on the characters, so it must be nice for them to be able to stretch their creative legs and not be confined to just one style for the entire run of the show.
As for what’s to come, will there be an Arcane season 3?