When Arcane’s co-creators Christian Linke and Alex Yee were still conceiving their League of Legends adaptation over a decade ago, the relationship between the multiplayer online battle arena’s publisher Riot Games and Fortiche Production was still relatively new.
So despite the wild success of a few franchise-shifting collaborations between both companies — that includes Riot’s first music video to support a new character launch (2013’s “Get Jinxed”) and another visual in 2014 involving Imagine Dragons, the band behind Arcane’s title theme “Enemy” — the French studio wasn’t a shoo-in for the game developer when it was looking to usher its popular title to the screen.
“There were other studios that had higher fidelity, that in the cinematic space were more polished, but Fortiche had this style, and a lot of it was the human imperfections,” Linke, who is also Riot’s Head of Animation, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “The first view, the camera [wasn’t] perfect. There would be scratches on the lens, and dust particles that made things a bit blurry, but it felt real because it’s imperfect.”
From its earliest days to its final episode, Arcane has embraced not just the refined skills and distinct stylings of its team of artists, but the potential crudeness within their work. The result is a series with a visual palette that might easily inspire copycat attempts by way of generative AI. But Arcane’s team says their envy-inducing success is an effort only possible thanks to the Netflix series’ very human crew, which reached almost 500 people at the peak of season two, according to Bart Maunoury, Fortiche’s creative director and Arcane’s co-director.
“It was people bringing a piece of themselves to the project who need to tell art for their soul and putting that into the show, into every frame or a part of the character, or a look or a feeling,” explains Amanda Overton, co-EP and screenwriter. “AI can’t do that. AI can only mimic what other people have done for that.”
“At the end of the day. It’s just tools,” adds Linke of AI. “And tools become easier to access, but wowing a large body of humans and connecting with them — there are many people, no matter what tools you give them, who won’t be able to do it.”
Riot and Fortiche have been able to do it across two seasons in part through a cohesive approach to writing and animation, both fueled by emotional instinct and contrast. “I think when you try to build a story, so often the conversation in the room is, ‘That’s not logical.’ But when do people do logical things? It’s easy to get lost in structure and not respect that the most interesting characters tend to do things that take you by surprise,” Linke says of the show’s writing process. “Jinx, that’s her thing. No matter what you predict she will do, she will likely do the opposite or something that you didn’t even consider. And that’s important for making things interesting because people do wild things, and we need to find that so that it all feels real.”
“The more different you can be in a medium and with a character in a world, the more you can build bridges between those differences and find those similarities,” adds Overtone.
That translates into the show’s visual approach — which layers 2D and 3D animation techniques — helping the series deliver what Maunoury calls special sequences. These moments in each Arcane episode see the writing and animation coalesce around a single development, arc, or character and surprise audiences and challenge their expectations around the show’s visual universe.
A charcoal sketched funeral (one of the show’s only real, non-digital drawings courtesy of director Julien Georgel), Vi’s (Hailee Steinfeld) boxing matches unfurling like a moving comic book panel a la Sin City, and the backstory of Vi and Jinx’s (Ella Purnell) family painted in watercolors were all among season two’s more striking sequences. All were created through a series of deliberate and spontaneous choices that amplify the spectrum of human experience and emotion.
“The watercolor one worked so well because it felt like the impermanence of memory, like how sometimes we look back and it’s just an impression or a feeling. It’s intangible, and that’s what I felt watching that,” says Overton.
“We didn’t plan on doing that [watercolor] sequence visually special, but the storyboard somehow had this watercolor aspect. We felt we should use that technique to embrace the storytelling, so we invited an artist outside of Fortiche to do that work,” says Maunoury. “Every time we do this we do it for the sake of the writing. It shouldn’t be for free or just for fun.”
A similar experience while making the series finale resulted in a sequence between Viktor (Harry Lloyd) and Jayce (Kevin Alejandro), which took place inside Viktor’s mind — an environment half organic and half digital after Viktor’s body is taken over by dark, magical tech. “This 2D look we went for arrived at the very last moment if I’m being honest with you. But we liked so much [of] what the storyboard artist did on that sequence, we just said ‘Let’s just draw the in-between of that and make it in color. We don’t have to do that in 3D,’” Maunoury recalls.
It was a moment that was possible, in part, because of how the team had already tested creative boundaries in season one. “When we got to the last episode of season one, there’s the red sky with the rocket shot. That moment was like, ‘Whoa, here we are really breaking physics, if you will, and embracing artistry and pushing it further than I felt before,’” Linke recalls. “It felt really good, so there was something coming out of that to say it would be cool to embrace more of that.”
Linke says they’ll continue to embrace the diversity, spontaneity, and imperfection that inspired the Netflix series as the team considers other potential entries in the universe. “We have so many different characters and they’re at home in so many different tonalities and genres. It comes down to who we would go with, and that’s the fun about League as an IP. It’s so eclectic. If you go with a Tryndamere, an Ashe, a Teemo, or a Malzahar, it’s gonna be very, very, very different,” he explains. “It’s really helpful that Arcane is very eclectic. The lessons of what the extremes can look like are going to inspire what we’ll do for the next stories.”
For now, Arcane’s run ends after just two seasons, an experience Maunoury says he wouldn’t change for anything — not even the proposed “efficiency” of AI. “What makes [Arcane] so, so unique, is that there are a million [things] I would have corrected to make it better. But at the end of the day, we are all still very proud,” he notes. “Working with that team was the best part of this adventure. To almost get to work individually with all of them — this interaction and this amount of energy put into every single frame was so inspiring. I wouldn’t change it for any AI.”
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.