Ito chalks that up, at least partially, to the influence of the short film Creature Comforts, in which real English people talk about the pluses and minuses of their houses, animated into zoo animals talking about their enclosures. She did similar work on the cartoon Adventure Time, getting people’s real voices instead of their supposedly funnier cartoon ones. “It felt like, that’s what’s making that character funny,” Ito says. “It makes it feel really real in a way that people gravitate toward.”
That idea was the hallmark of Ito’s professional calling card, an animated short called Welcome to My Life, about a teenaged kaiju dealing with racism among human kids in a Southern California high school. Her brother Eric voiced the main character, their parents played his parents, and Ito herself was the unseen documentarist narrator. The animation made it maybe less real, but more true.
When she was spinning up City of Ghosts, Ito brought in Shen to figure out how to up-rez those approaches for a bigger story. Ito and her team made a chart with LA neighborhoods they might want to focus on across the top, and added index cards with the kinds of stories they could tell about them—skate culture in Venice, gentrification in Leimert Park, the spirits of the Tongva along the Los Angeles River. Shen brought back research packets and sometimes recordings of phone calls. “For me, it was just processing all of that and putting an outline together that would be a possible way this story could go, with the particular people where I thought, these are probably our voices,” Ito says. “A lot of it was going out to meet people, making sure they knew who I was, what we were planning to do. I never wanted somebody to get into it and then hear, ‘Oh, you’re playing a ghost, by the way.’ I didn’t want anyone to be like, ‘You made me dead? That sucks!’”
Those real stories get interleaved with real kids voicing the Ghost Club, asking interview questions and furthering the plot. The stories are true; the stories are made-up. It’s the best way to remember Los Angeles I can imagine, and I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t even know what to call it. So I ask Ito. “The closest word that people use is ‘mockumentary,’ which is a difficult thing for me, because there’s the word ‘mock’ in it, and it sounds like you’re making fun,” she says. “It was really hard for me to describe this show, or even my short, to people. Like, ‘Oh it’s a mockumentary about my brother’? But I’m not making fun of my brother. I just want to get people to care about my brother.”
I think that’s how City of Ghosts’ specificity also feels so much bigger. It doesn’t stop at the political borders of LA County. “In this case I want people to care about these communities,” Ito says. “Maybe like ‘fantasy documentary’? I don’t know. There isn’t an exact term.”
The show’s slightly otherworldly backdrops actually help the vibe, which has the soft ease of 1970s Sesame Street. It’s snuggly. That’s what’ll make City of Ghosts break big, if anything will. “It was difficult to find things that wouldn’t make my son cry or have nightmares later. And I think it was partially writing stuff for him, and trying to think about how I felt when I was a kid,” Ito says. “I think I felt I would really like stuff where the dialog is what’s real and funny about the people around me. For me, there was a desire to celebrate that kids are funny and they say things adults would never say.” Those things turn out to be a made-up celebration of a real city, all its flaws and memories intact, with an eye on the future—even if the vision is a little blurry, from the crying.
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