Trollhunters: Tales of Arcadia — A Solid, Ambitious Series That Kept a Lost Performance

Guillermo del Toro built Trollhunters: Tales of Arcadia around a familiar idea: an ordinary kid picks up a strange object and inherits a war. Netflix released the first season on December 23, 2016, after premiering the first two episodes at New York Comic Con on October 8, 2016. Two more seasons followed, the last on May 25, 2018. Fifty-two episodes in all.

The show is based on the 2015 novel Trollhunters by del Toro and Daniel Kraus. It follows James “Jim” Lake Jr., a teenage boy who finds a mysterious amulet and stumbles into a secret realm of trolls and other magical creatures. He and his friends are then given the job of protecting the world from monsters that lurk in the shadows of their small suburban town.

Trailer, via Netflix Family.

Jim Lake Jr. and the Amulet

The premise is the show’s steadiest asset and its clearest limit. A secret realm under a suburb gives the writers two worlds to cut between, and the series uses both. The amulet does the work a chosen-one story always needs: it makes an average teen the center of a conflict he did not ask for. That is sturdy ground for family animation, and Trollhunters walks it without stumbling.

What lifts the material is the production behind it. DreamWorks Animation Television and Double Dare You Productions made the series for Netflix, and del Toro’s hand shows in the creature design and the ambition of the thing. This is not a cheap Saturday-morning order. It is a show that treats its audience as capable of following a long arc across three seasons.

The cast does quiet, specific work. Charlie Saxton voices Toby Domzalski, Jim’s friend. Lexi Medrano voices Claire Nuñez. Fred Tatasciore voices AAARRRGGHH!!! and additional voices. None of these are the names a studio puts on a poster. They are the names that make a show hold together over 52 episodes.

A Performance Kept in the Recording Booth

The most affecting fact about Trollhunters is not on screen. One of the show’s cast members recorded most of his character’s dialogue before his death shortly afterward. Del Toro refused to replace those recordings, a decision he called a challenge for the show’s recording engineers.

Of that choice, del Toro said the actor “was proud of what he did, and we were so proud of how he did it.” He added that his own experience as a father and the actor’s young age were also factors.

That is a rare thing in animation, where recasting is routine and invisible. Keeping a performance because it belongs to someone who is gone turns a technical problem into a statement. The show carries it.

Casting elsewhere was just as deliberate. In one of del Toro’s earliest notebooks, the character Blinky was drawn with Kelsey Grammer’s name beside it. Grammer took the role when the series was greenlit. Some parts, in other words, were written for the actors who eventually played them.

Nine Emmys and a Shelf of Awards

The awards record backs up the ambition. Trollhunters was nominated for nine Daytime Emmy Awards in 2017 and won more than any other animated or live-action television program that year. Across its first three seasons it also received or was nominated for a BAFTA Award, several Annie Awards, Kidscreen Awards, Golden Reel Awards, and a Saturn Award.

The show moved beyond television too. It spawned several original children’s books and was adapted into a series of graphic novels by Marc Guggenheim and Richard Hamilton, released by Dark Horse Comics.

What the 69 Out of 100 Actually Says

The 69 out of 100 is a Metacritic score, not this paper’s rating. On its own it is just a number, and Metacritic publishes no verdict with it.

Read against the rest of the record, though, it is a strange score to hang on a show with this resume. That reading is ours, not the source’s. Nine Emmy nominations and a dominant win in 2017 sit oddly beside a number in the high sixties.

Our view is that the show is genuinely ambitious for its format, and that its chosen-one bones will feel familiar to anyone who has seen one before. The craft is high. The bones are familiar. A high-sixties score is roughly what those two facts produce when they refuse to cancel out.

The decision to keep that performance is the part that will outlast the plot. Recasting a voice is easy and nobody outside the credits would ever know. Del Toro chose the harder path and said why, plainly, without dressing it up. That is the detail worth remembering here, more than any amulet.

Trollhunters: Tales of Arcadia is a solid, well-made series. It is worth the 52 episodes. Whether it deserved the attention that followed is a question the Emmys answered one way and Metacritic answered another.

Daytime Emmys · DreamWorks Animation · Guillermo del Toro · Netflix animation · Tales of Arcadia · Trollhunters