Trollhunters Season 2 Announced, Anton Yelchin Returns

Netflix has announced that Guillermo Del Toro's Trollhunters will be renewed for a second season, which will bring back the late and great Anton Yelchin as the titular Trollhunter Jim Lake Jr. You might be wondering how that's possible, full details on Trollhunters season 2 after the jump.

Guillermo Del Toro's Trollhunters is one of the best animated series now on television. I've been slowly making my way through the first season and have been very impressed by the world building, the serialized storytelling and the quality of animation. The pilot episode is almost to the level of quality as some of the earlier DreamWorks features. I'm very excited that the show will continue, but was shocked to learn that Anton Yelchin wold return to voice to lead character.

As you probably know, Yelchin died in June at age 27 in a vehicular accident. The first two episodes of Trollhunters, which premiered six months later, were dedicated to the actor. As it turns out, Yelchin not only recorded all of his work for the first season before his passing, but also recorded a large part of his role in the sequel, which has apparently been in the works for some time.

"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," Del Toro told EW.

The filmmaker and producer says that when they started working on Trollhunters four years ago they mapped out a series of 52 episodes, broken into arcs of 13 episodes, which allowed them to work far in advance on the upcoming seasons.

"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. ... 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."

As for how they will explain the change in voice casting when it comes to that moment, del Toro admits that coincidentally the story has "an event in the last episode Anton did which allows us to sort of change his voice slightly, so the character stays — but we didn't plan this." But he insists that other than that, the story arc that was planned will remain intact.

The first season of Trollhunters premiered on December 23rd, 2016 and consisted of 26 episodes. The second season run will be released later in 2017, and will feature 13 new episodes. The story will follow Jim as he adventures deeper into the Troll world to battle the leader of the Darklands, while his team tries to keep order in the human world.

Del toro reveals Jim's journey into the Darklands will be "quite an ordeal in themselves" and will feature "character recalls that were introduced in the first season that you didn't know how they'd pay off." He also teases that Toby's dentist, an ex-Mexican wrestler voiced by del Toro, will also make a return.