Guillermo del Toro Announces TROLLHUNTERS Season 2 with Anton Yelchin

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If you haven't watched Guillermo del Toro's animated series Trollhunters on Netflix yet, you should check it out because it's a great series with quality animation. I'm happy to report that there will be a second season and that it will bring back Anton Yelchin as the voice of the Trollhunter Jim Lake Jr. 

Yes, Yelchin was tragically killed last year in a freak car accident, but before that happened he had already completed a lot of his voice work for season two. As a fan of Yelchin's work, this news was a pleasant and unexpected surprise. When talking to EW about the series, he revealed:

From the get-go, even in the first season, we knew we wanted to preserve as much of the performance of Anton as possible, both from an artistic and a human point of view, and also simply because I think it’s a tribute to what we think he brings to the role of Jim. From the beginning when we planned the writers’ room, we set out a map of 52 episodes, and created arcs that break every 13, and those were planned four years ago. So we have been recording Kelsey Grammer, Anton, Ron Perlman, Clancy Brown, everybody involved in the series for years and years. And there was a break in the arc in the right episode that allows us to preserve all the work that Anton did that was phenomenal. At the end of recording sessions, Anton did one of the most complex episodes and then he looked at the pilot, complete, and there was a great moment in which he was able to see the work and do a really complicated episode in which he did multiple voices and we were all so proud and so close when we lost him. And now I can tell you, we’re not only going to second season, but we’re going to be able to preserve a really large part of it with Anton’s voice."

He went on to say:

“We’ve been working on a second season for a while now because we knew that if everything went right, we could proceed. We’re going to go ahead and now continue, rather than start, because we’ve been doing it for more than a year. The reality and the beauty of this is that we can continue not only the storyline and the characters, but we have a huge swath of work from Anton that allows us to continue Anton through more than half the season."

If you're not familiar with the story, it follows a teenager-turned-warrior named Jim who is called upon by an underground civilization of trolls to defend their way of life from both humans and evil trolls alike. As the story continues, Jim's adventures will take him deeper into the Troll world where he will battle the leader of the Darklands. Del Toro talked about Jim’s journey into the Darklands, saying:

"The Darklands are quite an ordeal in themselves. They are not a light walk in the park. [Laughs] They are not a one-action sequence and we go away. There’s a good [amount] in the Darklands. We have character recalls that were introduced in the first season that you didn’t know how they’d pay off, or you thought you’d knew how they pay off, and you reencounter them and go, 'Oh, so this is who the mysterious lady that gives supernatural powers to Angor Rot is,' for example. She becomes quite a character in the second season. You reencounter a character I love — I won’t tell you who — but we reencounter that character now in the Darklands. We resolve a lot more of the backstory of Blinky and AAARRRGGHH!!!, for example. And of course, the Mexican dentist comes back."

If you don't know what he's talking about, go watch the series! I'm happy that we will get to see this story continue, and the fact that Yelchin's voice will be used in season two is so cool.