It’s no secret that I am an infinite fan of Netflix’s animated sequence The Dragon Prince. When the first season dropped throughout the tail end of 2018, I gave numerous good the reason why folks ought to offer it a attempt. Perhaps the biggest issue The Dragon Prince has going for it’s doubtless one of many showrunners — Aaron Ehasz — helped create Avatar: The Remaining Airbender for Nickelodeon. For these nonetheless on the fence, that is the official description from Netflix’s The Dragon Prince official site:
Followers of Avatar: The Final Airbender will acknowledge among the many narrative devices utilized in The Dragon Prince. It takes place on a continent torn asunder by battle the place each faction attracts magical vitality from a definite issue. The heroes and villains mustn’t as cut-and-dry as they first appear. And, in reality, there’s a ton of freakishly lovable animals created by mashing collectively fully completely different Earth animals. Nevertheless these are ground similarities. The meat of the story is far more morally grey than A:TLA.
Ehasz’s experience is important to The Dragon Prince’s extreme fantasy world. Making new cultures out of thin air is not any small feat, notably in a method that persistently locations out tales with lore books dense adequate to interrupt down matter. The reality that The Dragon Prince gives with deep themes on the character of battle, sacrifice, and family in family-friendly 26-minute chunks might be spectacular for any animated current. That it is doing so whereas laboring beneath Netflix’s arduous pointers about season dimension is rattling near a Peak TV miracle, one which I’m uncertain The Dragon Prince can maintain.
The Dragon Prince’s second season — which dropped on Netflix in February — displays the strain of a lore-dense current working beneath false time constraints. There are so many transferring objects that it feels identical to the viewers wouldn’t get adequate time with anybody plot. The first three episodes of Season 2 actually really feel well-paced, balancing plot with character development, nonetheless by the fourth episode, it’s as if the current abruptly realized it solely has a handful of episodes left to cram within the the rest of the narrative, and so the sprint begins. That cool fight between Fundamental Amaya and the Sunfire elf? No time to extend, gotta go fast. Actually really feel like Ezran (Sasha Rojen) wished additional time to course of his grief? No time, gotta go fast! Weirded out by how briskly that paralysis subplot acquired resolved? No time … you get the aim.
Let me be clear: I do not blame the creators of The Dragon Prince for this Yakety-Sax tempo. I blame Netflix. Once more in ye olden days, animated displays for youngsters have been ordered in bulk. Optimistic, this gave us quite a few low-cost cartoons with recycled animation and filler episodes, however it moreover gave writers an enormous canvas upon which to do one factor deep and fulfilling. For example, Avatar: The Remaining Airbender seasons each ran for 20-21 episodes a bit. That’s larger than double the amount The Dragon Prince has to work with, which explains why the latter wouldn’t have the time to decide to one thing that’s not driving the plot forward.
Completely different Netflix displays have suffered from uneven story pacing whereas attempting to clock in on time for a 10-episode season, nonetheless for some trigger the cracks in Netflix’s system are additional pronounced this time. Perhaps it’s because of The Dragon Prince inexplicably solely obtained 9-episode orders per season. Maybe it’s because of the episodes are principally half-hour chunks in its place of a full hour. Or it might have one factor to do with how dense the world of The Dragon Prince is. Really? It’s the whole above.
Netflix’s logic makes even a lot much less sense everytime you perceive the strain this form of turnaround locations on creators. Animation is labor intensive, with a single episode usually taking between one and three months to complete. And that doesn’t rely storyboarding, script-writing, or voice performing. You don’t announce the second season of a cartoon one month after the first turns into successful after which drop talked about second season 4 months later besides you want your creators to burn out. Which they will. Ehasz talked about as rather a lot to Inverse:
As a substitute of forcing every story proper right into a contained 9 or ten episode discipline, Netflix might stand to be additional versatile, notably as they proceed to division out into the world of animation. Youngsters’s programming does not should replicate the busy schedules of adults who may crave fast and precisely packaged tales set at breakneck intervals. Children will watch the equivalent episodes of their favorite current time and again and over, to the detriment of the psychological effectively being of folks everywhere. If any facet of the Netflix empire might keep up beneath an prolonged episode order, it’s the fare aimed towards youngsters.