The creative team behind Netflix‘s Ghostbusters animated series want their show to “feel like our characters could walk off the television, onto a movie screen and interact with the pre-existing characters.”
Launching next year and titled Ghostbusters: Night Shift, the latest in the franchise is one of Netflix’s splashiest upcoming animated series. EP Amie Karp told Deadline she was “struck by the question” posed to her by the team, which was: “Can we make an animated series that is in canon?”
Above all else, co-showrunner Elliott Kalan, who said Ghostbusters runs through his “internal DNA,” made this his aim. The show is set in New York in 1994. Five years after the Ghostbusters took the Statue of Liberty for a walk, a new wave of supernatural terror hits the Big Apple.
“It was about trying to capture the tone of the original movies and newer movies so it feels like our characters could walk off the television, onto a movie screen and interact with the pre-existing characters if they wanted to,” said Kalan. “The Ghosbusters movies are miracles. They have a very specific tone and they care about the characters, who are so charismatic to be around. We wanted to try to capture that tone in all aspects.”
The show, which debuted first footage to an Annecy crowd at the animation festival yesterday, comes from those behind Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.
“We said that if Ghostbusters is going to step back into animation, it had to be as funny as anything you’ve ever seen in Ghostbusters, and as scary as anything you’ve ever seen in Ghostbusters,” said EP Jason Reitman.
Ghostbusters legend Dan Aykroyd is EPing Night Shift. Kalan was left speechless by Reitman during our interview when Reitman said he is “one of the only people I’ve ever met who can write like Dan Aykroyd.”
Having Aykroyd’s buy-in on the project was a “dream,” Kalan added, which was “hugely powerful” to the adaptation.
While sticking rigidly to canon, Kalan said the team was encouraged by Netflix and Sony Pictures Animation to “go weirder, go weirder.”
“Remember the amount of drugs the originators were on when they created this,” joked Reitman, who is the son of the late Ivan Reitman, the original Ghostbusters director.
Horror “under utilized” in animation
The team also wanted to “bring supernatural comedy and paranormal action back to animation,” per the show’s initial logline. EP Gil Kenan said this could be done through horror, an of-the-moment genre that is “under utilized” in the world of animation.
“Animation is a perfect medium for horror,” he added. “You control every pixel on screen. That’s ultimate horror. In the hands of these artists there was an opportunity to capture that pure spark of horror that we haven’t gotten in animation in a while.”
Having spent plenty time watching the original animated shows from the mid-1980s, Reitman said there was a “freedom” to the way the creators approached Ghostbusters back then that his crew wanted to rediscover.
“They were highly inventive, they were strange and they felt this freedom to be odder, funnier and scarier in many ways than the ghosts in the actual films,” he added. “[Co-showrunner] Ben’s [Hibon] first iterations of the concept of the ghosts showed how scary it can be when you use the wilder side of imagination that we don’t see in live action.”
Hibon said “the prerogative was never dumbing down the design” of the ghosts, as he took an “inventive, fleshy and ethereal” approach that “leans into body horror.”
With footage having debuted during a Next on Netflix event at Annecy yesterday, Reitman is coy on whether there could be more shows in the canon to come – “that’s really a question for Netflix,” he said – but Kenan noted “there are as many stories to tell as there are ghosts in the world.”
The streamer is out in force at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival this year.
