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Neighborhood Spirits First-time showrunner Elizabeth Ito shares her creative process and the inspiration behind her new Netflix series City of Ghosts.
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f you’ve been looking for a beautifully imagined, smart and thoughtful new animated children’s show, your prayers have been answered in the form of Elizabeth Ito’s City of Ghosts, which premieres this month on Netflix. The new offering is a clever, documentary-style hybrid animation series in which a group of kids discover stories around their city by communicating directly with the ghosts who inhabit it. Ito, an Emmy-winning director and writer on Adventure Time and creator of the short Welcome to My Life who has also worked on Phineas and Ferb, Hotel Transylvania, Bee Movie, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, was kind enough to answer a few of our questions about her new project: Animag: Congrats on your fantastic new show. Can you tell us a little bit about how it all came to be? Elizabeth Ito: It feels like it was a lifetime ago. A couple of years ago, when I was brought into Netflix, I thought we were going to make my 2014 short Welcome to My Life into something bigger, but that property was tied up with Cartoon Network. So, they asked me to come up with an-
other idea that I would be as interested in. I was thinking about how many neighborhoods in Los Angeles are changing and noticing how things are disappearing, whitewashed and gentrified. I also have two small kids, and wanted to create a calmer show — something for more introverted, quieter people! That’s how I came up with the idea for City of Ghosts, which explores the history that exists in L.A. from the perspective of these intuitive kids. My mandate was to come up with something I couldn’t do anywhere else. So it was both exciting and scary! Have your own kids seen the show? Yes; they are four and six years old. They’ve seen all the episodes and know different lines from the show. For me, the best part is that they like it! Not only does the show look quite different from other children’s shows, its writing process is quite original, too. Can you tell us a little bit about that? When I first started, I wanted to explore how to write something that was a mix of fiction and non-fiction, but we don’t do that often in chil-
Elizabeth Ito
dren’s animation. So I wanted to get somebody who came from the documentary side. Joanne Shen is a friend of mine from CalArts who is married to a documentary producer-writer, so I called her on a whim. I had to find out how to incorporate that into the show, and build a team and build a template that would work. She was one of the first people that came onboard. Then we had to figure out our pipeline and the schedule for what we were doing. The next person I contacted was Jenny Yang, who is a comedy writer who worked for The Daily Show. I reached out to her because she knows a lot about issues that are going on in the city. That’s when I found out that she has a background in urban planning and policy and studied it at UCLA. We worked with her on a couple of sessions where we discussed the overall issues in the city. We tried to stay away from really volatile issues. I wanted the stories to focus on appreciating different cultures. We didn’t want parents not to watch it. We also wanted to veer towards something that kids would want to watch, and we wanted to be informed enough to discuss the particular subjects in each episode.
www.animationmagazine.net 20
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april 21
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