Mage portals and cats don’t mix in the latest short from The Remarkable Life of Ibelin’s animator

On our adventures through Azeroth, we sometimes get so focused on becoming increasingly powerful and saving the world that we don’t take the time to slow down and appreciate the finer points of the journey itself. We simply give a handful of gold to an archmage in Dornogal when we arrive with our fresh Mage alt, and ten seconds later we can open a portal to the Earthen capital at will.

The newest animated short from Rasmus Tukia (animator of The Remarkable Life of Ibelin) and his team explores the process of mastering spellwork in a more realistic way. Lessons in Magic: Portology sees the return of Resania, an aspiring Blood Elf Mage who has been training on some of the more basic features of the arcane arts in previous installments. This time she’s back and working on honing her portals, but her Siamese cat, Baggins, can’t resist some interdimensional mischief.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is an award-winning documentary streaming on Netflix. It tells the story of Mats Steen, a Norwegian gamer whose life was tragically cut short by a degenerative muscle disease. As his condition worsened, he spent more and more of his time logged onto World of Warcraft. His parents thought that Mats was simply playing a video game, but after receiving countless messages from his guildmates and other players after his death they come to realize the true impact that Mats had on the lives of others.

The documentary was shortlisted for an Academy Award for Best Documentary, meaning that it was still in the running for an Oscar once the qualifying list of 169 films was narrowed down to just 15. Even though it did not make the final list of five nominees, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is definitely worth a watch for anyone who has forged meaningful relationships in Azeroth or any other online community.

Tukia has been working in the field of 3D animations for a decade, and has created previous machinima set in Azeroth using the actual game assets as a starting point. You can read more about how he connected with the film’s director and went about telling Mats’ story in our interview article from the film’s release.

Note that it takes a village to learn the Portal spell and to create animated shorts, and so Tukia was part of a small team that created Lessons in Magic: Portology. This is the first new animated short that Tukia has posted in several years, so perhaps with the documentary finished we’ll see more animated content from the team in the near future.