Guillermo del Toro streamlines ‘Trollhunters’ for an animated Netflix series with brio and wit

Guillermo del Toro, the horror art-movie director, has created a cartoon series, “Trollhunters,” based on the 2015 young adult novel of the same name he wrote with Daniel Kraus (“The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch”).

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Produced by DreamWorks Animation and premiering Friday on Netflix (home also to the DreamWorks series “Voltron: Legendary Defender”) it’s more streamlined and less explicitly gruesome than the book, and at the same time busier — more of a TV series. The setting has moved from San Bernardino to the fictional everytown of Arcadia.  Characters have been invented, lost or altered. Jokes have been punched up; the action, of which there is much, has the visceral advantage of being staged rather than described.

Our hero is Jim (voiced by the late Anton Yelchin), a human teenager. Neither the least nor the most tortured kid in his class, he cooks expertly for his busy doctor mother — it’s a single-parent situation, as it so often is — moons over classmate Claire (Lexi Medrano), and distractedly dreams of a more exciting life than the one he’s got, with no particular sense of what that might be. Read more…