Echo Wu was round 5 or 6 years previous when she instructed her mother and father she needed to be a cartoonist.
On the time, she’d meant it within the extra classical sense of cartooning, like these in magazines or comedian books. However she additionally cherished animation, mentioning Pixar movies, anime like “Sailor Moon” and even a sequence about Solar Wukong, the Monkey King, as among the many issues she watched whereas rising up.
“It was something that I could watch with my parents, who, at the time, did not speak English very well,” says Wu throughout a latest video name. “It was storytelling without a language barrier in our family. You could watch ‘Tom and Jerry’ and it doesn’t matter if there’s subtitles because you get the story all the way through.”
So it’s becoming that Wu’s first sequence, “Jentry Chau vs. the Underworld,” is one which the creator and showrunner describes as “a love letter to my childhood.” Now streaming on Netflix, the animated present follows the eponymous Jentry (voiced by Ali Wong, who additionally serves as an government producer), a highschool pupil who learns on her sixteenth birthday that the demon king of the underworld is after her for the supernatural powers she has struggled to suppress since she was a younger youngster.
An encounter with one of many demon king’s goons results in Jentry being taken again to her Texas hometown by Gugu (Lori Tan Chinn), her demon-hunting great-aunt, the place she has to juggle typical teenage issues like navigating highschool, and deeper ones like studying to regulate her powers, battling demons and processing surprising household secrets and techniques.
Echo Wu says “Jentry Chau vs. the Underworld” is a love letter to her childhood.
(Nick Lennon)
“I wanted to try and make a show that had a lot of different interests of mine combined into one,” Wu says. “There’s horror elements and there’s action, but there’s also teen YA romance.”
For an adolescent like Jentry, possessing superpowers that allow her battle off demons just isn’t fairly one thing to rejoice. Highschool and the thought of not becoming in is rather more terrifying for her than any supernatural monster.
The present is about “in high school because high school is a place where you’re always scared,” sWu says. “You’re scared of your emotions, you’re scared of doing the wrong thing and getting embarrassed … Talking to a boy, for Jentry, is scarier than having to defeat the mogwai king of the underworld.”
A lot of Jentry, Wu explains, is predicated on her expertise and her personal character — a lot that there have been occasions that it was exhausting to not take studio notes concerning the character personally. (“I can’t help but to fight for her,” Wu says.)
And the monuments and neighborhoods of Jentry’s hometown additionally resemble that of Wu’s, who was born and raised within the Dallas suburb of Carrollton, Texas. Even a number of the furnishings in Gugu’s home is predicated on items that had been in Wu’s mother and father’ house.
Jentry would quite slot in at college than have superpowers.
(Netflix)
“Jentry” arrives as Hollywood studios and streamers have pulled again on animation, notably exhibits based mostly on unique concepts, after scaling up through the peak of the streaming wars. Quite a few animated exhibits in varied phases of growth have been scrapped and even faraway from streaming platforms as firms attempt to minimize prices. This risk-averse panorama has additionally seen studios lean extra into current properties for reboots and revivals.
“The goal of the show has always been to feel original and to feel like it’s a new take on things,” Wu says. ”I hope it sparks extra unique concepts to [make it] by the ringer and the thunderdome that’s growth and the manufacturing course of.”
Though Wu studied animation in class, incomes a level in pc animation, “Jentry Chau vs. the Underworld” marks her first Hollywood venture. She says that spearheading her first present with out having prior expertise on different sequence — which might have included a glimpse of what it was wish to see one thing she labored on launched into the world — was “scary.”
“It was very trial-and-error on this very first show,” Wu says. “It feels like I grabbed a bunch of cheat codes in this game and then started at level 20 and kind of ran with it. It’s such a vulnerable feeling right now [because] it’s so close to my own childhood experience and … you’re watching comments on the trailers drop and people don’t realize this is a thing that other human beings worked on.”
Wu began pitching the present in 2020, however she will hint a number of the concepts that ultimately developed into “Jentry” again to when she moved to Los Angeles in 2017.
“I was taking a walk one day and I [thought] ‘I really want to make something about a jiangshi,’ a Chinese hopping vampire,” Wu says. “They are such a cool monster that are kind of utilized in pop culture but not enough.”
Jentry, left, Ed and Gugu in “Jentry Chau vs. the Underworld.”
(Netflix)
That concept, ultimately, led to the conception of Ed (Bowen Yang), a jiangshi who worms his manner into Jentry’s life to grow to be her supernatural sidekick and bestie. Among the many issues Wu labored by earlier than the character grew to become the aspiring social media star audiences meet within the sequence was how a jiangshi would get to Texas within the first place and why.
“The idea was that this jiangshi shipped himself from the Chinese underworld to America to pursue this big American dream of being a scary monster,” Wu says. And though parts just like the story’s tone and magnificence developed as Wu labored by totally different iterations of the script, she says “that comedy in Ed never strayed from the original idea.”
In its earliest phases, “Jentry” was conceived as extra like an animated household comedy, Wu explains. However over the course of the pandemic, she grew to become extra enthusiastic about participating with the heavier themes the sequence tackles, which embody intergenerational trauma and scuffling with familial expectations.
In consequence, many parts of Jentry’s coming-of-age story options added nuance. The present’s love triangle isn’t just about Jentry selecting a boy but in addition about how she views her supernatural powers and her connection to them. The present’s villains are usually not simply the demons from the underworld Jentry faces in battle however the folks closest to her and the way the alternatives they’ve made have affected her.
“Having to grapple with a complicated relationship with your family members and a complicated relationship with yourself and your identity, that’s always been the thing that I thought was most appealing about ‘Jentry,’” Wu says.