January 8th, 2020 
Jackson Murphy 
Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts is a new DreamWorks Animation series debuting January 14th on Netflix. Creator Radford Sechrist and Executive Producer Bill Wolkoff discuss the fantastical series, which they can’t wait for viewers to explore:
Jackson Murphy: Rad, is it true that you wanted to do something along the lines of “Game of Thrones” and “The Walking Dead”, and you ended up with giant, funny, fantastical animals?
Radford Sechrist: That is true. I almost set out to do something dark and gritty, but my natural sensibilities sort of came through. I was watching those shows and all the cool stuff that was happening in television, and I knew I wanted to do some post-apocalypse type of a show. When I started drawing the images – the way I draw and my sensibilities started coming out that way. A lot of times, I’d go for a walk in the morning in Los Feliz (CA) and be taking photographs of the city and imagining what they would look like with giant, overgrown, mutated plant life on top of it. And that’s where it kind of sprung from.
JM: And in developing this for television, how did you decide to go 200 years into the future and have this be a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles?
Bill Wolkoff: We love the city. It’s such a beautiful landscape to tell a story in. Rad brought this amazing and wonderful and beautiful fantastic epic to it. Set that 200 years later: let mutant vegetation grow up over everything – and we can create an apocalypse that’s not bleak but more like a wonderland. I love to describe the show… as “Walking Dead” meets “Alice in Wonderland”.
JM: The look of the series is very anime stylistic. With all the wondrous creatures and the heroic themes, you gotta be inspired by Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.
RS: Oh, for sure. I’m a huge anime fan. It definitely has that influence on my work.
JM: And I really like the detail that there are five fingers on the human hands. How did you settle on five fingers?
RS: It’s interesting because usually the three-finger thing always goes with a certain style of art. It’s more of a kind of classic, “SpongeBob”… God I hate to use the word “cartoony”. A lot of the anime stuff… is gonna be more of the five finger influences.
BW: The hands did not mutate yet, so there’s still the traditional five human fingers on them.
JM: “The Burrow” represents the underground society and “The Surface” represents the Earth above. How did you come up with those terms?
BW: We had a lot of conversations as we were developing this. The amazing thing about doing this show was getting to create our own mythology – and build out our own mythology. And it came from us tapping into the playful side of our personalities and finding something that made sense. We threw a lot of things out there, and then when a term like “Burrow” or calling our version of Los Angeles “Las Vistas”… when we found something that worked, you just knew it. We also brought in a great writing staff, and everybody would be a part of those decisions. There’s a power to a writer’s room when you’re working together and you’re pitching something, and you’re coming up a new language – and somebody pitches something, and everybody knows that’s the thing. And then that’s what sticks.
JM: Kipo is such a free-spirited main character. And I like the fact that the music matches that nature and her personality.
RS: When me and Bill were making the Pilot, because that’s where we first started putting in music with the editor, we kind of just put in music that we really enjoyed or that we liked. In my mind, I kind of thought DreamWorks would go, “Oh, you can’t put that music in.” But they were all bopping their head and were really into it. We had Kier Lehman and James Cartwright, who helped us find our needle-drop, and they had a similar musical taste. They found us really great stuff that we were able to put in – along with our composer, Daniel Rojas, who would create music, too, with a similar type of a vibe.
JM: Emmy winning “This is Us” star Sterling K. Brown has done a lot of voice work lately, with roles in “Frozen II” and “The Angry Birds Movie 2”. He voices Kipo’s dad here on this series. How was it working with him?
BW: THE BEST! We loved him. The first day that he came in to record, and it may have been the first time he did animation at that point, Rad and I said, “We gotta be there early. We should be there when Sterling gets there.” So we showed-up earlier than we normally would, and Sterling was already there in the booth going over his lines – going over the character – getting himself ready. He was that professional and is also a wonderful human being.
JM: I’m glad. The first episode of “Kipo” allows us to get to know Kipo and Wolf really well. Their friendship slowly grows. What can we expect in terms of their dynamic as the season progresses?
RS: We definitely wanted to start them off as the odd couple where. Wolf is the seasoned surface survivor. She’s a little bit like Mad Max – kind of hardened to the surface life. Kipo grew-up in an underground city. Her life was pretty much like our life. She went to school. She was gonna get a job. Other than the fact that she was underground, it was a pretty cushy life. You’re throwing these two people together… and starting them at odds, like people you’d think weren’t gonna get along – it’s fun to watch them become sisters.
JM: So basically this show is “Mad Max” for kids?
BW: I would second that. Kipo is so relentlessly positive and is in a world that is full of wonder, but also has danger lurking around every corner – much like the area Beyond Thunderdome.
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