Picture courtesy of Annecy Festival and Netflix
The legacy of the Ghostbusters in animation goes back to the late ’80s, but has been dormant for around 30 years. The Real Ghostbusters was a quintessential Saturday morning cartoon of the time, taking on a case-of-the-week format and light tone. Ghostbusters: Night Shift is different. Not only does Sony Pictures Animation provide the visuals, but the show looks to root itself more firmly in the realm of horror than even the recent live-action installments, Afterlife and Frozen Empire.
During this year’s Annecy Festival, we caught up with showrunners Ben Hibon and Elliot Kalan, as well as producers Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan, about finding the right tone for the show, working with SPA, and choosing CG over 2D.
What made an animated show the right next step for the franchise?
Reitman: It started with a mystery. When Gil and I sat down for Afterlife and Frozen Empire, we were propelled by the mystery of who this girl was. Why did she find a proton pack in a barn? Who is she? Why is she being set forth on this adventure? Of course, that left a bigger question: what about these decades in between? We got really excited about that and we started talking to Amie [Karp] about animation, because Ghostbusters has a deep history in animation. There’s a generation of people who came to Ghostbusters through the ’80s animated show, and it felt like the perfect opportunity to explore what happened to the Ghostbusters firehouse in the ’90s, who might have found it, and who might have been sent out on an adventure of their own. It was Amie who found Ben and Elliot and cast the identity of the show, both for Elliot’s words and Ben’s visual ingenuity.
What made Netflix the perfect partner?
Kenan: We had an instinct from the beginning that we wanted this series to push the concept of what a Ghostbusters animated series could be. We knew from our earliest conversations that this thing should be properly frightening. We wanted to bring the ghosts back to Ghostbusters. In our conversations with Netflix from the beginning, we met Ghostbusters fans who were excited about going with us in the same direction. What we’ve been making is a series that builds on the exciting world-building opportunities of the original animated series from the ’80s, but takes in the tone, the visual language, and the grounded storytelling of the films, and makes a Ghostbusters for a new generation.
Was there any temptation to emulate the look and feel of an ’80s cartoon rather than go for the CG look of the show?
Hibon: The show is set in the ’90s, but it’s made now. We’re telling a story of that time and we’re not trying to emulate it. We love The Real Ghostbusters and it has its place, but we’re canon to the movies and we exist in that same texture and tangible, grounded reality where the rules and the logic are the same. It felt important that we wouldn’t lose the language of cameras and lighting to emulate horror and tension. CG allows us to play around with a lot of these same tools.
I like that the show doesn’t try to be overly saturated; there’s a heavy amount of shadow.
Kenan: We talked about the fact that in 1984, Jason’s father hired László Kovács to film it, and it surprised everyone because it’s a grittier, more cinematic way to tell what otherwise would have been a comedy. Ben picked up the baton in terms of pushing for tone and suspense through cinema.
Ghostbusters: Night Shift – Visual Development Art. Cr: Sony Pictures Animation ©2026
What did Sony Pictures Animation bring to the table?
Hibon: They have an appetite and a know-how for innovative design techniques.
Kalan: One of the most exciting things about the collaboration with Sony and the collaboration with Netflix is that neither of them has been telling us to pull back. Every now and then we go a little too far with something, but that’s the nature of the game. But they’ve been very collaborative with us in terms of pushing the scares as far as we can, pushing the comedy as far as we can, so that it feels like it’s of a piece with the movies and doesn’t feel like it is set apart. We want to capture that tone so well, and we want to really surprise and impress people, and Netflix and Sony have been very eager to help us in doing that.
Reitman: You can feel how confident they are right now, coming off of their success with things like K-Pop: Demon Hunters and Spider-Verse. You can just tell when you’re playing with someone who’s playing like they have the lead.
Was it difficult to take a CG pipeline and apply it to a TV show?
Reitman: There are CG pipelines for serialized TV shows, but the waterfall production system is where it’s difficult because there’s so much volume and you have to produce it very fast. We’re trying so many different things; that’s what’s so exciting about the show. Visually, thematically, narratively, we have a lot of ghosts, a lot of sets, a lot of places. New York is a very extensive place. Those are the potential challenges, but animation is smoke and mirrors, and you always find that those are parts of the challenge that are so fun.
Kenan: But as we showed yesterday, it’s big-screen storytelling. That excited us from the beginning. When Ben started to bring in images, they didn’t feel like television images; they felt like they were swinging for the fences. Even the walk cycles of the billowing trash were exciting.
How do you find the balance between pushing the scares and retaining the lighter feel of Ghostbusters?
Reitman: If you go back to ’84, audiences showed up thinking they were going to watch a broad comedy with actors from Saturday Night Live, and instead they got this science-fiction fantasy, and if they were young, it was maybe the scariest movie they’d ever seen. I think this is the balance that we’re always trying to hold. Elliot has identified the language and voice of Ghostbusters and nailed it. When you read it, it feels like it was written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis; it’s just brilliantly funny and has that Lovecraftian weirdness that defines the original. And then when you look at the ghosts, the jump scares, and the rhythm of the animation, Ben has identified that exact balance of how it can be dangerously funny and truly scary.
Kalan: We actually benefit a little bit because comedy needs to be bouncing off of something. So a ghost in a silly world is not particularly scary, and it’s not particularly funny, either. But the scarier we make the world, the funnier it is. The farther we push the scares, the farther we can push the comedy, too.
Ghostbusters: Night Shift – Cr: Sony Pictures Animation ©2026
Do you envision this as an entry point to horror for younger audiences?
Kalan: All of us have had experiences where we watched things before we were technically allowed to, and those became thrilling gateway experiences. You can’t control who comes up to the fence to peek over at something they just can’t look away from. We’re telling this story with the widest audience in mind, but it’s genuinely scary, and the bravest among the young audience will be able to handle it, and hopefully it becomes a test of their bravery. Ultimately, this is a character story; it’s a story about outsiders, and that’s a universal story.
Hibon: Because it’s animation, we have ways to present things and deal with certain elements of horror, scares, or dread that are very stylized. They can be pretty out there, but because it’s an artificial reality, there are shortcuts you can take.
Kalan: So much of our thinking was not, “Is this all right for this age group?” but, “How do we do right by Ghostbusters?” If we can do that, we will reach the same very broad, universal audience that Ghostbusters has always attracted and spoken to, and which made us love it in the first place.
