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Why Netflix’s Jentry Chau vs the Underworld is ‘love letter’ to its creator’s childhood
Echo Wu, creator of coming-of-age story set in Texas that borrows from Chinese folk tales, says it is ‘close to my own childhood experience’
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Echo Wu was around five or six years old when she told her parents she wanted to be a cartoonist.
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At the time, she had meant it in the more classical sense of cartooning, like those in magazines or comic books. But she also loved animation, mentioning Pixar films, anime like Sailor Moon and even a series about Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, as among the things she watched while growing up.
“It was something that I could watch with my parents, who, at the time, did not speak English very well,” says Wu during a recent video call.
“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 is fitting that Wu’s first series, Jentry Chau vs the Underworld, is one that the creator and producer describes as “a love letter to my childhood”.
Now streaming on Netflix, the animated show follows the eponymous Jentry – voiced by Ali Wong, who also serves as an executive producer – who is a school student and learns on her 16th birthday that the demon king of the underworld is after her for the supernatural powers she has struggled to suppress since she was a young child.
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