Netflix’s ‘Arcane’ Creative Team In Conversation With Cartoon Brew (Exclusive Video)

Cartoon Brew and Netflix recently hosted a special screening in Hollywood celebrating the second season of the trailblazing series Arcane, followed by a conversation with executive producer/showrunner Christian Linke, co-director Barthelemy Maunoury, and screenwriter/co-executive producer Amanda Overton.

The half-hour conversation, moderated by Cartoon Brew editor-in-chief Amid Amidi, focuses on the complexity of the Vi and Jinx’s relationship, the building of the series from the ground up, the creative process across Riot and Fortiche, and where they plan to go next. Both seasons of Arcane are available to stream on Netflix.

The Q&A is available below to readers:

We opened by asking Linke and Overton about the long-planned arc between sisters Vi and Jinx, and the steps they took to get to the bittersweet ending in “The Dirt Under Your Nails.” Linke said, “One of the first few conversations we had even in the [writers’] room was this question of, can they be sisters again, and that’s the question until the very end.”

He said both characters made consequential choices that impacted one another and the writers were always questioning how they move them forward in the wake of these life changing events. “For us, there was a sense of closure. There was not a version where Jinx just steps back into this twin city and we’ll all forgive you for all that murdering of hundreds and thousands of people. That was always something that we knew was on the horizon. At the end of the day, especially Caitlyn and Jinx, have this very, very charged relationship. There is a learning, especially for Caitlyn, to see what happens when you lose your parents because of the other side. So much of her judgment is based on that, and so she experiences that, and also has to understand that happened to Jinx. In this very strange way, Caitlyn and Jinx are kind of a mirror reflection of each other and so I think there’s an understanding. There is a certain respect, but too much has happened on a personal level, also, just between these two societies.”

Overton added that in season two, they got to put Jinx in Vi’s shoes as a big sister. “For once, she got to understand where her sister was coming from, and then she got to, in that final moment with Vi, take back the agency that she never had as a child because she had that tragic accident that then dictated the course of her entire life. She saw Isha take agency in her life and make a decision for her. And then she saw the opportunity where she could do that as well. And so that was giving her that moment to come full circle there and reclaim that final moment with her and Vi was really kind of the culmination of her arc there.”

Overton added that Jinx taking that into her own hands when she chose to seemingly sacrifice herself — though there’s a heavy implication she got away in the airship — gave her back the agency she lost when she was a child.

Asked about the creative process between the episode directors and the various creative teams, Maunoury explained it was a long, ongoing conversation until animation lock. First, he would speak with Fortiche co-founders/supervising directors Pascal Charrue and Arnaud Delord to brainstorm every sequence, find reference materials specific to each episode, and then return to the writers for their input. “Then we move to the storyboard,” he continued. “And then there is another pass with the team, just to make sure it’s hitting the goals of the script, if it’s hitting the right emotion. The rest of the production is maybe a little bit more straightforward.”

As for the complex array of fight sequences that are a hallmark of the series, and Riot’s League of Legends multiplayer online battle arena video game, Maunoury said they evolved from their extended “trial and error” period where so much came together in the editing process. “Part of making every, every fight scene unique was a solution to make it more understandable and readable as a whole piece, or it doesn’t make any sense,” he said of keeping emotions and pacing individual in each fight scene across the series.

Overton was responsible for writing “Killing Is a Cycle,” which finally reunites Vi and Caitlyn, and gave the pair a path to the finale which cemented their relationship and “happy” ending. While the end intention was to always have them back together by that finale, Overton said that meant they needed to earn that journey, to make their path full of challenges and obstacles that would build the love between them. “I wanted a story that was different, that was something that my 16-year-old self felt like she never got to see,” she explained. “It was tremendously important to all of us, really.”

Linke said they were very fortunate that Riot supported their ambitions across a 10-year odyssey to take some of the video game’s most popular characters and create a serialized, animated series and ultimately have Arcane as the end result. So much of the process was learning as they went, he said, and learning from their partners at Fortiche to discover what parts of the process could be changed for the better, while accepting the things that didn’t need to be reinvented.

He said one of the best humbling examples of learning from exploration was how much change could happen during their scratch voice-over recordings. Those with experience warned that heavy iteration would create an impossibly large volume of material, and that proved to be true. He said they eventually came to decide they would only record the voice-over when the dialogue was locked in, and they could get some ADR for the previous episode, but that was their cutoff. “You will not be able to have these big pivots that the animated features will often get, so sometimes that was difficult.” He said they were inventing a pipeline for Arcane that didn’t previously exist so making the series was an experiment in trying new methods and ultimately relying on some tried-and-true methods.

Arcane’s ambitious music video within an episodic structure was also addressed. As a musician, Linke had wanted to get artists he admired to create original compositions within six months to match their production schedule. He said many labels saw the series and Fortiche as “unproven” so they didn’t want their acts to participate. So, he pivoted and had the songs written in-house by Alexander Temple and Alex Seaver, and then offered those songs to artists of note like Sting. “That was difficult, but we knew it was in our DNA. We started the relationship [with Fortiche] making these music videos and cinematics. So, it just happened pretty naturally. But it was always scary because you have to make good songs. It’s always hard, especially when there’s a key scene, and this better be good.”

Asked if there will be more animated projects on the near horizon, Linke said, “We’re only getting started. This was the first thing that we’ve made, and so there’s a lot more we want to do.” He confirmed they have other clusters of characters from League of Legends that they’ve sent out to select groups for exploratory development. But at the end of the day, the next thing has to be as good or better than Arcane.

“We want to do things that you wouldn’t expect, based on what you’ve just seen from us,” Linke said. “We can do anything with animation which is very enabling, but also very scary because if you make something that is everything, it is nothing. I think we’re just really eager, just to stretch out our feelers in every direction, and get more stylized and more realistic. Let’s just see where we find something that just strikes us as something new that we haven’t seen.”