Arcane: Bridging the Rift documentary series
If like me, the Netflix series Arcane left you extremely excited and surprised, you probably got hooked and immediately started looking for “behind the scenes” footage and of the process of creation of this original and incredible animated series.
When the series was released, there wasn’t much BTS material except for the vast universe of League of Legends, the videogame in which the origin of this story is based and now brought to television in a format of several episodes that could be a movie each.
Before I discovered the series I had no idea or even a notion of what the LoL universe was about. I knew the game existed but it’s not really my kind of videogame, and in my mind, it was an IP that I probably never would have paid attention to. Now, I’m envious of the ones that actually are invested in the game.
The entertainment community, and in this case, the video game community, knows from experience that bringing a video game to the big screen, or small screen, is an almost impossible task, and it is not a matter of the size of the production or the story, but of factors that could be related more to the attachment we have with all those characters and stories we have interacted with in games that when we see them in a format we cannot control seem to be too alien and somehow having lost a connection with us. I’m not saying that this is the only reason, surely there are many factors that have caused our beloved games to fail to translate successfully into a movie or a series format.
But this is not the case with Arcane, no sir.
Arcane is a series that just by seeing the thumbnail on my Netflix screen blew my mind. What is this beauty? Who are these characters? ¿What is the story behind it all?
There are moments in the history of animation that I consider to be great stepping stones in the evolution of this wonderful art. We all know for a fact that the first Toy Story movie is one of them. Some might argue that Avatar would be another. I was never really a fan. But another one that I think is definitely a turning point was Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse. Just a few years later, Arcane is the next one.
For all of this, the news of the Arcane series is a thing of the past. It definitely broke the internet when it was released in 2021. People who had never played League of Legends, and will never play it, were forever trapped by the world and characters of this story. I was one of them. I don’t think I will ever play LoL, but I will watch everything Arcane-related in a tv series or movie format. I really hope to see an art book or comic series soon.
For the time being! A YouTube series of the behind-the-scenes of this amazing series is now released. An incredible documentary where we see the faces and the geniuses (Riot Games and Fortiche Production) behind what left us amazed and that takes us into the studios, the teams, the problems, and the processes that exist to achieve a masterpiece like Arcane. As of today, I have seen the first chapter and it is one of those moments when that strange entity called “inspiration” flies higher.
I highly recommend (and blindly, because I’ve only seen the first episode) this documentary series that you’ll be able to find on the official League of Legends YouTube channel. And if you haven’t seen Arcane, please change the course of your life for 2 days and finish this work of art that has definitely changed the landscape of the animation industry.
