Head Writers From DreamWorks’ ‘Abominable And The Invisible City’ Talk Season Two, Chinese Mythology And Authenticity

Abominable and the Invisible City returned for a second season on Peacock and Hulu on March 29, expanding the universe from the 2019 DreamWorks animated film. Its debut season won the Best Animated Television for Children’s Audience prize at the Annie Awards earlier this year. The series boasts a majority Asian-American cast with Chloe Bennet (Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), Michelle Wong (Star Trek: Lower Decks), Ethan Loh, Karen Huie and Tenzing Norgay Trainor (Boo, Bitch).

Going into a brainstorming meeting with DreamWorks, Tiffany Lo and Ethel Lung thought they were going to be offered freelance writing contracts for a show. Instead, DreamWorks invited Lo and Lung to become story editors and co-head writers of the television series spin-off of Abominable (2019). The film had grossed a total of US$188.6 million at the box office (domestically and internationally).

“Jim Schumann, one of our executive producers had said that this was really therapeutic because we were in a moment where the world was so weird,” shared Lo, about working on the series throughout the pandemic. “We had our little bubble of Abominable and we feel very grateful to have been part of this.” Lung and Lo have worked together as writers on other shows like Disney’s Crash and Bernstein, Nickelodeon’s See Dad Run, Cartoon Network’s Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, and CBS’ Blood and Treasure.

Abominable and the Invisible City follows a teenage girl Yi, a Yeti named Everest, as well as Yi’s friends Jin and Peng. Together they continue to go on adventures, finding a magical world teeming with creatures, great and small.

Most of the creatures featured in Abominable and the Invisible City are inspired by Chinese mythology and folklore. For Lung, selecting creatures from Chinese mythology to include in the show was a particularly personal journey, as she had read many of these stories with her grandmother while growing up in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Lung shared that they were able to use more obscure mythological creatures in season two, which gave them more creative freedom in imagining how these creatures would fit into the series. “There are lots of stories to tell and we have so many creatures in Chinese mythological books,” Lung said. “It’s an endless well that we can draw from.”

“With the mythological creatures we grew up hearing about, we were putting a modern twist on them and messaging through it, because [these creatures] are always about a life lesson or some kind of emotional journey,” Lo said. “The best part was modernizing a lot of the stories. Even down to the character design, we could reimagine what they would look like.”

“With these mythological stories, there’s a common message of acceptance in a lot of them,” Lung added. “I think the big inspiration was doing the show during the pandemic when there was a lot of divide and anti-AAPI hate crimes in the United States. We wanted to convey a message of acceptance.”

“The real challenge was keeping it to the time because there’s so much to do. There’s so much character development and humor that you want to fit in,” said Lo, about the writing process. “We’re expecting co-watching among parents and their kids, so providing comedy for the adults and also for the kids was challenging.”

Besides making sure that casting felt authentic to the stories that they wanted to tell, Lo and Lung paid special attention to achieving the right intonation of the Mandarin language spoken in the series. “Tiffany and I grew up watching certain shows and when we hear botched Chinese, we are like, ‘just get a Chinese coach!’”

Lung also went through the designs of fictional signboards and books in the series to make sure that the Chinese script used was accurate — like whether it should be read right to left or written in simplified or traditional characters, depending on the location of the story. “When you watch a show, if you know authentically what it should be, whether it’s pronunciation or something, you’re in it and that takes you out of it. We have an opportunity to make things right,” Lung said.