Netflix’s The Dragon Prince Season 2 pushes the envelope in children’s fantasy

The Dragon Prince season 2 is coming to Netflix on Feb. 15. Is it as good as the first season?

Season 1 was the promise, season 2 is the payoff. Wonderstorm’s debut animated series The Dragon Prince remains one of the most challenging fantasies of children’s animation, with its spiritual predecessor in Avatar: The Last Airbender.  The new batch of nine episodes unravels multiple intrigues.

“Book 2: Sky” unfurls a succession of arcs: Prince Callum seeks the magic — finding the “arcane” — he craves while undergoing a grieving process, Claudia and Soren come to terms with the dark nature of their mission, and the team edge closer to the magical world we have yet to see. Young Prince Ezran’s arc is the most downplayed. He affirms a simple motive: teaching the dragon prince to fly. His words are surface-level, but burrows the expectations of his impending kinghood, even if he doesn’t have the language quite yet.

The first episodes open with a vibe not unlike The Empire Strikes Back, about a youth seeking to channel mystical skills with a kooky mentor speaking in riddles and maxims. Even its serious archetypes always have a goofy edge. The Moon Mage, a traditional mentor character, knows her knowledge falls short and can’t help playing a cool grandma to unwind the tension.

What makes the show twinkle as a high fantasy are its playful curbs, a trait carried over from the Avatar series. Dragon Prince never sugars a dire situation but drizzles humor and quips, content to rib at its tropes. Some of the most serious scenarios can implode into comedy. In a fantasy series where rhetoric is key for royal characters, the dialogue has been amped up. In the words of a young regent introduced, her rhetoric is impeccably formal before she drops, “I hardly call, “we’ll do what everyone else does“ a decision.”

With animated ingenuity, The Dragon Prince utilizes its magic to push the envelope for its visual. The combat choreography is sweeping, but I remember the introspective moments the most. For instance, the mage Lord Viren fixates on a magical mirror. When the mage receives an image in the mirror, what transpires is a drawn-out surveillance of patience and pantomime, teasing mystery.

Also, Callum and an elven mage tour through the wisps of history and later Viren throws a magical hologram image in a council room to provoke the war he so desires. One execution of magic celebrates history; the other instance serves as a tool to arouse fear. On another note, there had been complaints about the jerky animation in season one (which I forgave due to the quality of the story), and here they are less of a quibble.

Above all else, the show embraces its all-compassing idiosyncrasies from the epic to the personal. The Dragon Prince never shirks on the burden of responsibility placed on its child characters and the toughness on adulthood and parenthood.

Tiny moments accentuate human contradictions, such as when Claudia, a dark magic practitioner, cuddles with a critter and she explains her dark magic involves sacrificing critters. With a fantastical score by Frederik Wiedmann, The Dragon Prince nails down the personal. Through the epic stakes of the conflict, yearnings and frailties bleed from the characters.

The Dragon Prince intensely reflects on processing life and death to children, interrogates the constructs of institutions, explores intergenerational conflicts, the acknowledges the (in)feasibility of idealism in a tough world. For a dark-ridden world, The Dragon Prince never loses sight of its optimism. It is all dark and wholesome at once.