So there is this weird thing where a lot of fans of the game League of Legends are saying "the cartoon Arcane on Netflix is good and you should watch it." The reasons they give are:
1. You don't need to know League of Legends to enjoy it.
2. The animation is sooooo good.
And if they're really specific:
3. One character is soooo cool. (Probably "Silco.")
This is not a very convincing recommendation. You don't lead with why something is really good by trying to reassure about a problem. And "animation quality" only goes so far.
Part of the problem though, is that they are right. This is about the best animated show since the first Avatar. They just don't have the words to articulate why it's setting off alarms of "this is great" in their mind. In an ideal world all it would take is sufficient trust in the person's taste to say "if they say it's 10/10 must watch, then I will" but sadly we live in a fallen world.
(I don't know any League stuff, and did not read any information about the show before watching it. So I did not know how it would end, which most other people did. I feel lucky that way.)
So let's try to recommend it properly.
1. The show has an incredible amount of intention and effort put into it and it shows. The soundtrack is wholly original, including songs from Sting and Imagine Dragons. The animation studio took six years to make it. The voice actors include big name character actors (like Hailee Stanfield and my favorite Shohreh Aghdashloo.) Even the episode titles show thought and thematic understanding.
You know all those movies where you think "wow they paid all this for special effects and big name stars, couldn't they spend a little on the script?" Well this one, they put the effort into the writing.
2. It's not about the plot. It's about the little things. It's about the characterization. The world and its politics and even half its cast are pretty flat and typical for the fantasy genre. But given these set-pieces, the creators wanted to do the best possible example of that world and those characters and it worked. It's about taking a family melodrama and paying it real respect and getting into every scene intensely. It's about making the fight scenes both a) an excuse to show off great animation and b) a catharsis for the emotions between those two characters. The fight scene at the end of Episode 7 raises the bar for fights like the first Matrix did.
IMO, the plot and characters start out slow. The first three episodes are more like backstory you would get in a paragraph of exposition from one series (like "everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked".) Which make them a little bit grating, but once you get to the current time, all these characters have a richness because you have seen where they came from. And once you finish and understand everything, you want to rewatch the beginning so you can actually appreciate all the details this time.
3. That sort of fractal complexity. Remember the thing about "whether you need to know League of Legends to get this?" At first no, but the show is filled with small easter eggs to please those who know more about the world. But that's only a subset of the show is filled with easter eggs for once you can see all the thematic connections. It rewards intensive viewing and understanding.
Which believe me, you really can't believe watching the opening scenes.
4. A comparison in method (though not in scale) is Shakespeare. The plots of Shakespearean plays are pretty basic. But you take a well known plotline, and give serious attention to every character and every bit of dialogue, and it makes a work of art. For some reason this works even better for tragedies, which is what Arcane is. A tragedy where you keep hoping they'll work things out and they're so close, but they were cursed to always fail.
This is really aided by being animation instead of live-action. The attention to character details includes how they are drawn, how they move and flow, and their background music.
5. So yes, some of the characters are very good. Silco, as mentioned above. Jinx and Ekko and Vi and Caitlyn. Unfortunately that doesn't sell a neophyte anymore than saying "Zuko is funny and has a good redemption arc" could sell somehow on Avatar. But well... the good ones are really, really good.
6. It has moral nuance. On the top level this just means "there are two sides fighting each other, but neither is the good side or the bad side." There's the rich side and the poor side, but also the rich side is full of idealists and the poor side is full of cynical criminals. We might root for one character or another, but they're all full humans with understandable goals.
But actually mean there are characters who do genuinely terrible things that hurt and mess up other people. And there are characters who are hurt and only wanted to be loved. And those are the same people. A desire for acceptance or the ability to grant it, is not, in this world, the same thing as being good or having a good effect on the people around you. Which is very realistic, and wholly lacking from television let alone animated stuff.
(I think some of this is an accident. That the creators wanted to make some characters more one-dimensional, and kinda just failed and gave us complicated flawed characters instead.)
***
Anyway, see it. Part of me wants to say "because we won't see it's like again for a while." It's lightning in a bottle and even season 2 will probably fall short.
But another part of me hopes that studios see the reaction to this and realize "the bar has been raised." You can just take years writing and drawing an simple story that's expertly crafted, and audiences will love you for it.
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