Welcome to the latest installment of my latest occasional series, Show and Tell, where I dive into the world of WarhammerTV’s suite of video programming.
For reasons that are both generally obvious and probably too lengthy to get into here, Age of Sigmar remains the suffering sister of the Warhammer properties. Just in the Black Library alone AoS releases account for no more than a third of all books published, and deluxe editions are increasingly elusive offerings.
And so when, during the Big Autumn Preview Show last September Arkanaut was announced, I was delighted to see it despite my interest in Dwarfs being somewhat between ambivalent and Gav Thorpe.
With WarhammerTV being one of the areas where Age of Sigmar still does a credible job holding its own in the attention space, from Sigmar’s Toll to Blacktalon and beyond there are a lot of great stories here. How would Arkanaut hold up?
Turns out, the Dwarfs did us proud.
The Story
In some of the tightest, most economical storytelling I’ve seen in Warhammer animations to date (I’ll get to that in a bit), the Warhammer Storyforge used every available second of allotted screen time to pack in a three-part tale of increasing peril and raised stakes.
Captain Orra Ironhelm leads the crew of the Therodoson, an Arkanaut frigate whose plight is familiar to many’s the seafaring yarn: a fishing or whaling expedition who’s poured all of its time and treasure into a final, desperate payday and finds itself on the precipice of wealth and ruin. Do they press on, hoping against hope to find that one score that will make it all worthwhile before running out of fuel, or play it safe and return to harbor as beggars.
Since nobody ever writes stories about the latter, you get no points for guessing which direction Ironhelm and her gang go, though the process is surprisingly democratic. While she may be the captain, Arkanaut sees her putting the decision to a crew vote- who, overwhelmingly- opt to press their luck.
Pressing on after shaking themselves free of some opportunistic skaven, they stumble upon a prize they’d never expected: the trapped soul of a Stormcast Eternal, caught inside an unnatural storm. Capturing the soul would let them sell it back to the Stormcasts for a premium, but first they’ll have to capture it.
And then, the real challenge: they’ll have to hold on to it.
The Talent
Games Workshop contracted again with The Damn Good Group for voice talent sourcing for the production, and in a post on their Instagram they four members of the voice cast: Laurie Duncan, Natalie Winter, Scott Joseph, and Joe Rooke.
Duncan is perhaps best known for his extended run on the soap opera Hollyoaks, where he played high school student Callum Kane for 140 episodes. He also voiced the character Noah Augustine in the gacha mobile game Silver and Blood, and this appears to be his first turn in a Warhammer production.
Next we’ve got Natalie Winter, whose video game resume is extensive. She’s lent her talents to games from Baldur’s Gate III to The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga to Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, and a host of others. Beyond that, she’s also voiced Jean Grey in 24 episodes of X-Men: The Audio Drama and Catwoman in Batman: The Long Halloween.
When it comes to Warhammer, you’ll also have heard her as Akbani in Mechanicus II, Valantha in WarhammerTV’s Blacktalon series, and some supporting work for Space Marine II.
Scott Joseph crossed paths with Winter a couple of times, from Baldur’s Gate III where he voiced The Emperor to Space Marine II as Varellus. Other notable gaming roles for Joseph include 007: First Light, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, and Silent Hill: Townfall.
In addition to Space Marine II, he also played the role of Ragtoof in the WarhammerTV animation Adepta Sororitas: Penitence.
Finally, Joe Rook’s had an interesting career. While she’s not as recognizable for her acting work as some of the others, she nevertheless has lent her talents to some high-profile gigs. She’s been the spokeswoman for Omaze UK, a company that helps raise money for charities though prize draws and other high-engagement events. For a decade she’s been a presenter for CarFest, and commentated the 2016 Olympics and Paralympics.
Interestingly, not all of Arkanaut’s talent came through The Damn Good Group, as voice actor Richard Reed was also part of the cast. Playing the arch-villain of the third episode, he thanked the Voicefox Voiceover Agency in his Instagram announcement celebrating the role.
Like his peers, Reed has amassed a respectable body of work in video games, and his resume there is impressive: Warframe, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Diablo IV, and Star Wars: Galactic Racer, just to name a few. Then there are the Warhammer ones: Space Marine II, Rogue Trader, Darktide, Chaosbane, Age of Sigmar: Realm War, and Total War: Warhammer II and III.
And if those aren’t enough bona fides, he also has done a number of Black Library audiobooks, such as Robert Rath’s The Infinite and the Divine and The Wicked and the Warped, Chem Dog by Calum Davis, and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Starseer’s Ruin.
Still more? Let’s ice the cake with roles in WarhammerTV animations, appearing in two episodes of Hammer and Bolter and playing Techmarine Hadrael in 2021’s Angels of Death.
Reed is as steeped in the property as you’re likely to find, and rounds out a superb cast of voice talent for this latest round of episodes.
Notes & Impressions (Spoilers Ahead)
This one was a family affair, as three of my kiddos (aged 9, 13, and 13) joined me to watch. I note this because while it’s listed as being recommended for ages 15+, I didn’t really note any objectionable content1.
I was very impressed with the work of the writers here. Arkanaut is packed with incredibly tight, economical storytelling that didn’t leave a single moment wasted. Remember, this isn’t like a book where you have some fungibility on word and page count; you have three, thirteen-minute episodes to tell your story, and that’s all there is.
While I’m no showrunner, it seems logical to assume that it’s easier to extend runtime a little more easily than to compress it. You can always pad out a few scenes, but cut too much and your production’s pacing risks feeling hurried and unsatisfying. Arkanaut goes from facing skaven to nighthaunt to Chaos Dwarfs in as many episodes, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t work.
The animation was very good overall, though a lot of it seemed a bit muted, even murky. One thing I noted with the last M2 Productions feature I watched, Aeronautica Imperialis (review), is that there’s a bit of unevenness in the quality. It’s not that the animation is bad- far from it. But there was a sort of submerged murkiness to a lot of the content, with many scenes being washed out by steam, fog, or smoke.
I’m no animator, but it feels like a way to get more from a scene without having to employ detailed animation, a kind of animatic sleight-of-hand that allows the suggestion of a thing to stand in for the actual thing itself.
Now, I’m fully prepared for the possibility that someone who’s an expert on the craft tells me that I’ve got it completely wrong, that doing it this way is actually more technically challenging than clarity. But while the opacity present in nearly every frame to some degree never compromised my ability to enjoy it, it was something I noticed almost right away.
It’s a great example of the narrative tightness that one of the third episode’s biggest emotional payoffs- the rescue of the arkanauts by materializing Stormcast Eternals- is only moments long. By the time you’ve finished your first cheer, the scene has already moved on. But the beat landed hard, and we loved it. Two of my kids watching knew almost nothing of Age of Sigmar, but they were all in on the Eternals.
That brings me to another point, that the amount of ‘lore foreknowledge’ you need to enjoy this series is almost zero. In other words, it’s a great onramp to the setting for those who have never experienced it before. Anything they need to know is largely explained either directly or by context.
Overall, I definitely recommend Arkanaut. I had a blast watching it, and the story was terrific. It even had a suitably grimdarkish ending, nowhere near The Mist but definitely not a happy, tidy bow either. Worth the watch.
That’s it for Arkanaut. While we await proof of life on the next animation, The Butcher’s Nails, there’s plenty more in the archives to enjoy!
I have a social compact with my kids that states, “I’ll allow you to watch some (non-sexual) adult content, provided you understand it is just entertainment and not behavior to be modeled. If your actions show me you can’t do that, the privilege will be revoked.” So it may be that something flew under my radar, but I usually have a solid eye for that.