Like many people who end up in the animation industry, Elizabeth Ito used drawing as an outlet for her feelings growing up. “When I was really little, I drew a lot of mice in little clothes living in little houses,” she says with a laugh.
Ito grew up in L.A.’s Crenshaw District to third-generation Japanese American parents. Between her junior and senior years in high school, she attended the California State Summer School for the Arts. “I loved art,” she recalls, “but I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it. Going [to this program] made me realize, [animation] is an art form that combines all of the things that I have a really deep interest in like music and film and drawing.”
She decided to study animation at California Institute of the Arts “because I knew it was the best place to learn the technique of it.” After graduating in 2004, she was hired as a trainee at DreamWorks Animation. She wasn’t sure yet what job she wanted to do in the industry. “I just knew I wanted to do something where I could still draw.”
As a woman of color, Ito had to overcome certain challenges to be taken seriously. After pitching ideas, she would sometimes receive responses that made her realize those reading the ideas were seeing them through a lens that was uniquely white. “It’s a lot of coming up against other people’s insecurities,” she reflects. “Like you might pitch an idea and occasionally it feels like that’s threatening to some people for some reason.” Instead of being discouraged, Ito took a patient if not persistent approach, taking the time to educate and explain how her life experience was different. “It’s just more difficult in that regard, sort of having to convince people, ‘No, this is a valid point of view. It’s literally how we feel.’”
These obstacles didn’t stop Ito’s steady rise, though. Over 15 years in the industry, she has worked as a storyboard artist on feature films like Hotel Transylvania, Astro Boy and The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, as well as Cartoon Network’s hit TV series Adventure Time, first as a storyboard artist and later as a supervising director. In 2017 she took home an Emmy for directing the “Islands Part 4: Imaginary Resources” episode of the show.
“The Emmy was wild because that episode had been such a collaboration that I wasn’t even sure if I was named [as director],” she says. “But it was really exciting. It’s sweet to have an Emmy in my house, and it’s a weird thing. I like to put it in the background of my Zoom calls and see how long it takes the person on the call to see it or if they notice it at all.”
While working on Adventure Time, Ito created a short film called Welcome to My Life, based on a student film she’d made her senior year at CalArts. It generated buzz, and not long after she left Cartoon Network, she was hired by Netflix to develop her own show.
Originally, she hoped the appointment would involve developing Welcome to My Life into a series. Instead, she created a different show, “but with the same kind of feeling and storytelling.” A hybrid documentary/animation series about a group of kids who learn about their city’s past through its diverse ghost population, City of Ghosts is inspired by Ito’s experience growing up and “hearing people describe L.A. in this way that wasn’t recognizing the culture here, and wanting to be like, ‘No, it’s awesome! You just have to dig in a little bit.’”
City of Ghosts also touches on the city’s rapid changes. “I wanted to document what’s behind [gentrification] and what existed in these places [that has] people riled up about them changing into these slightly homogenized neighborhoods.” She also hoped to show “how different neighborhoods, specifically Boyle Heights, have dealt with gentrification, and what it’s like when a community pushes back.”
As a mother of two young children, Ito created the show with a specific audience in mind. “I wanted something for my kids because they are kind of sensitive when it comes to movies and TV, especially my son,” she explains. “I felt like there wasn’t really a ton of gentle, sensitive storytelling for somebody like him. That’s how I was too as a kid. I was easily scared over random things.”
In this way, Ito’s career has brought her full circle, but now, instead of drawing mice in little houses as a way to express her own feelings, she draws the environment she grew up in, helping children like the one she used to be feel more comfortable in the world around them.
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