Neighborhood Spirits

First-time showrunner Elizabeth Ito shares her creative process and the inspiration behind her new Netflix series City of Ghosts.

Elizabeth Ito

If 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 another 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 children’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.

You were one of the first projects launched at the then-new Netflix Animation studio in Hollywood, right?

At first, we were set up on the space on Sunset Boulevard, down the street from big studio offices. It was a great learning experience for me. We had to set up this office for all these creators. Nothing was built yet, and little by little Netflix started to grow. I actually prefer working in a smaller space with a smaller crew. It made me learn a lot about what I thrive on and how to build a crew that works well with me. We were one of the smallest teams. I could count all the board artists and directors on my two hands. It helped us work very efficiently. Of course, we only had six episodes to produce.

Which other animation studios did you work with on the show?

I worked very closely with my husband’s [Kevin Dart] studio Chromosphere and the French animation studio TeamTO (Mighty Mike, PJ Masks), which I worked with on Welcome to My Life. I had a great experience with them and they’re stylistically parallel to how I like to work. For the overall look of the show, we knew we wanted to have live-action backgrounds. It was fun to come up with this new process with Chromosphere. We would meet with people that we’d want to interview in different neighborhoods … Leimert Park, Boyle Heights, Venice, Santa Monica, Koreatown, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Highland Park, Echo Park. Some were real places, and some were made up or composites.

Can you tell us about the various animation tools you used to create the visuals?

We explored different tools; there’s so much out there. When I was at Sony, they were using new technology that helped plan the lighting for a 3D character in a real place. It would be great to know that there is the possibility that we can do this. But we had to strike a balance between what would be cool versus how much we could afford. We looked at modeling things in Quill in the VR space, but we didn’t do it in the end because they were too technical or cost too much to do. The nice thing was that Chromosphere figured out a pipeline which allowed us to do compositing after we were done. We used Maya and After Effects and some proprietary tools.

An Urban Homage: Elizabeth Ito and her team used real-life locations around Los Angeles to capture the authentic feel of the city’s various neighborhoods and diverse communities.

How did the production deal with the city’s COVID-19 restrictions?

We were lucky because all of the stuff that needed in-person interactions like the photo shoots and records were finished on the last week before people were told to stay home. The timing was just like Indiana Jones grabbing his hat from under a shutting door in the very last moment! Of course, the post process was tricky, too. Normally you can just go over the material and ask them to adjust certain things. If you haven’t met with them or worked with them before, it’s not easy when your first interaction is giving written notes or doing it over the phone. I’m really glad that we weren’t figuring out the story notions, tweaking the animatics or writing the show remotely, because it’s easy to miscommunicate

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