In the Flesh: Arcane Season 2, First Arc

Brought to life by French animation studio Fortiche, Arcane remains in its second season easily the most beautiful animated show on the air. Hand-painted cells applied to an underlying scaffold of computer animation smooth away the latter medium’s tendency toward the stiff and the janky while enabling the animators to lay out action scenes on a scale and with a depth of detail unseen outside of the major animated films of the 1980s and 90s. It has a budget to match, and the long production schedule gives some idea of the arduous and time-consuming nature of the work involved, but the final result is breathtaking. If I’d been fifteen when this came out it would be all I talked or cared about, visually breathtaking queer YA fiction respectful of its audience and unafraid of depicting violence, sexuality, and complex, multi-faceted characters. It’s earnest without delving into the saccharine or willfully ignorant, hopeful without eliding the brutality and paranoia inherent to civilization.

There are parts of this first arc of three episodes that feel a little rushed, congested with expository montages pulled off in a variety of visual styles to greater and lesser effect, but if the season overall is operating under time constraints, there’s little sign of it outside these moments of clumsy storytelling. The sheer breadth of stuff happening is delightful, from urban resistance to technological and industrial folly to imperialist brutality and the seductive pull of the establishment with its defined roles and clear, straightforward stakes. The meat of the story goes to Katie Leung’s Caitlyn Kiramman, a once-idealistic beat cop whose personal losses push her further and further into the murky waters of bigotry and genocidal rage. Watching a still basically likable person transform in real time into someone willing to risk murdering a child to put a bullet in her enemy has a terrible resonance in the current world climate, and her love interest Vi’s (Hailee Steinfeld, ironically herself a militant Zionist) attempts to comprehend the changes in Caitlyn is poignant and complex.

Aside from Caitlyn, the other big new player here is Noxian warlord Ambessa Medarda (Ellen Thomas), mother to Piltover councilwoman Mel Medarda (Toks Olagundoye). From a memorable but minor part in season 1, Ambessa quickly becomes the driving force of season 2 as we discover she’s been dethroned back home and is on the run after tangling with a coven of witches. Desperation, as Mel puts it, only makes her more dangerous, and you can hear the edge of it in every silky, richly charismatic line Thomas delivers. The big twist in this initial run — that it was Ambessa who orchestrated the Zaunite attack on a Piltoverian memorial service in the season premiere, thus pushing the richer and more powerful city further toward open war — feels like something out of Game of Thrones, and the scene in which Ambessa uses a deftly executed piece of dirt-simple nationalist cheerleading to finally start the war in earnest is chilling in its clarity and import. It’s not often you get beautiful animation here in America, and even less often that it’s in service of truly fantastic storytelling. Arcane pulls it off with aplomb.