The success of Guillermo del Toro’s Netflix Trollhunters adaptation has only made more bittersweet the passing of star Anton Yelchin, who’d largely completed work on the series prior to his death. Now, del Toro reveal that not only will Season 2 move forward, but that Yelchin still has a great deal of recording completed.

Entertainment Weekly broke word that the DreamWorks-animated series would be back for a 13-episode Season 2 later this year, as production lead time has a great deal of the series mapped out. According to del Toro, they’d plotted around 52 episodes overall, while Yelchin’s completed work even included an event at the end of Season 2 that would enable a change in voice for Season 3:

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 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.

Does his passing change anything in your initial plan, or are you sticking to it?

Actually, coincidentally, we have 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. It was pure serendipity that we had that in the works. The beats of the second season have been set for years, and as of now, we have not altered or needed to alter a single beat.

The series’ voice-cast includes Ron Perlman, Jonathan Hyde, Lexi Madrano, Amy Landecker, Fred Tatasciore, and Steven Yeun, while the synopsis reads:

The show follows 15-year-old Jim (Anton Yelchin), who is transformed into the Trollhunter, defender of the good trolls, after stumbling upon a magical amulet. While fighting alongside his best friend Toby (Charlie Saxton) and the wise four-armed troll Blinky (Kelsey Grammer), he also must juggle play rehearsal and homework.

The property itself was first optioned back in 2010 for a 3D animated feature film, but the resulting stall saw del Toro release Trollhunters as an illustrated novel with Daniel Kraus.

We’ll have more as we move through 2017, but will Trollhunters Season 2 craft a meaningful goodbye to Anton Yelchin?

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