[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for Arcane season 2 Act 2.]
For eagle-eyed League of Legends fans, the reveal of Warwick in Act 2 of Arcane season 2 was a heartbreak we saw coming; too many things lined up just right between the disappearance of Powder and Vi’s father figure and the creation of the horrifying werewolf creature to be a coincidence. What we might not have seen coming, however, is just how incredibly Warwick’s perspective would come across on screen. Then again, excellent animation in Arcane probably shouldn’t come as a surprise anymore. Fortiche has been delivering impressive visuals from the very beginning, and Warwick is a great example of how the studio gets inside its characters’ heads.
Showing how terrifying Warwick is would be one thing, but what makes Fortiche’s presentation of the character so effective is the way it shows us the world through his eyes. Whenever we see him chasing down his prey, the show shifts into a highly stylized vision of the world. It’s played at a lower frame rate than normal, giving the whole thing a stilted, hazy, slow-motion effect, and the entire screen is tinted with a red glow that makes everything read like bloodied prey.
It beautifully transports us inside the head of Warwick, a drug-fueled, mutated hunter in constant search of blood, but it’s also a tremendous way to show the pieces of Vander that are still left over. When Warwick spots Jinx or Vi, Vander’s softness comes back; the world loses its red hue and for a moment, and he’s a loving father again. We understand it perfectly because we’re seeing it through his eyes, a passenger to the perspective of the character.
This idea of letting the audience inside a character’s head is something that Fortiche has proven itself to be particularly adept at. In Arcane, the studio is constantly swapping in new and unique animation styles to communicate that it’s taking us out of the world of the show and into the world of a character. In the first season, this mostly crops up when Jinx starts hearing voices, with the faces of the friends she killed popping up behind her with sketches over their faces. All of this lets Fortiche flex its animation muscles, all while giving the audience a more intimate look at the characters’ interior lives than we could ever get from simple dialogue. It’s a beautiful testament to the power of animation, and an incredible storytelling technique. But leave it to Fortiche to have been working toward something even more clever on top of the clearly beautiful art.
In the second season, the studio ramps these ideas up even more, with moments like the first episode’s black charcoal segment to show Cait’s grief. By the time we reach the conclusion of season 2’s second act, Fortiche starts using its motif of unique animation as a way inside characters’ heads to show us how the characters’ entire perception of the world might be changing. Take Mel, for example. When we see her locked inside the Black Rose’s thorny prison, it’s clearly an unreal space. We’re seeing her mind wrapped up in the horrifying psychological prison the organization is enveloping her in.
Even more important is how Fortiche uses unique animation for Viktor. Plenty of movies and TV shows, both in live action and animation, have depicted characters ascending past regular humanity and growing disconnected from it, but few have given us the kind of perspective Arcane does on Viktor’s glorious evolution. It’s easy to see the ways that Viktor is starting to disassociate from humanity — but once we see how he perceives things now, it’s easy to see why. The brilliant bright lights, the constant presence of Skye in his ear and at his side, the way he sees straight through the appearance of people and creatures and machines and directly into their heart and head are equally beautiful and disorienting. Suddenly it becomes easy to see why someone who experiences the world like this enveloping cosmos might subtly lose his grasp on moment-to-moment human concerns.
Each of these examples (just to name a few from the show so far) feels like a perfect display of the incredible way that Fortiche approaches animation with Arcane. Sure, animation as a medium allows Arcane to have a neat visual style, and provides a vehicle for excellent fight scenes. But it also lets the series pull viewers deeper into the emotional lives of its characters, exploring complicated points of view in a way that’s more elegant than dialogue. Whether it’s a person ascending to machine-infused godhood or a werewolf on the hunt, Fortiche has proven that it can find the perfect animation style to let us into the head of any of its characters, and even more impressively, the studio manages to make every single one of these unique art styles fit within Arcane’s beautiful world.
