Exec Producers Tony DiTerlizzi and Bobs Gannaway Give Us the Scoop on the Wonderful Second Season of ‘WondLa’

This Friday, fans of Skydance Animation and Apple TV+’s fantasy series WondLa will be able to catch up with the adventures of its brave heroine Eva and her otherworldly friends. Based on the best-selling trilogy penned by acclaimed author Tony DiTerlizzi (The Search for WondLa), the beautifully animated CG show feature the voices of Jeanine Mason, Brad Garrett, Gary Anthony Williams, Teri Hatcher, Alan Tudyk, John Kim and Ana Villafane.

We first spoke with the author and creator DiTerlizzi and Emmy-winning show-runner and exec producer Bobs Gannaway when the first season of the show premiered back in June of 2024. We caught up with the talented duo again to find out more about the second chapter of WondLa:

Animation Magazine: It’s great to have Eva and her friends continue their fantastic adventures in this future world. What can you tell us about this second chapter of the show?

Tony DiTerlizzi: First of all, it’s been amazing to see how Bobs and the team at Skydance Animation have been able to capture the things that were important to me in the books. As you know, this team was comprised of a super group of animation professionals from Disney TV, Pixar, DreamWorks, Blue Sky that I love and respect. They’ve made some of my favorite animated movies and shows over the years. So I felt that WondLa was in amazing hands.

So, really what I wanted to do with the second season was continue what we had done in Season One — which was to look at the themes, ideas and concepts that were explored in the book. Bobs and his team would take those things and explore them throughout the episodes and throughout the entire season. That’s alchemy. It’s very tricky to transmute those things from the book and turn them into zeroes and ones of CG animation.

That said, I think the big themes of the first season were mankind’s reliance on technology, our disassociation from the natural world, and found family — which is about what constitutes family and the fact that it doesn’t have to be flesh and blood. The second book’s notions of morality become grayer, and the same thing happens in the series. The series follows Eva as she comes of age. The decisions she has to make will have no clear-cut right or wrong answers. I explored that with the family that she finds. Her flesh-and-blood family may not see eye to eye with her. They always don’t get along, and she may see the world through a different lens. It was up to Bobs and his team to figure out how we could convey that in the story and through the animation.

Bobs Gannaway: One of the things I love about the show is that that we WondLa’s world continues to expand and grow. I don’t think we go back to any of the places we went to in the first season. We continue explore this world which is super exciting. We will keep we’re going to keep going from the human world, New Attica, back out to Orbana, and exploring places we’ve never been and meeting new characters. We have new toys in our toy box.

Doubling down on what Tony said, Eve is young and she’s out in the world, and her journey is very clear in a sense of good and bad. In the second season, she’s starting to grow up and the world isn’t as easy and simple to navigate. Then, we try and have a North Star in each season. The first season, we had this notion of defining family. The second season is about home. “Look, I found home. I found my flesh and blood family. But wait a minute. Is that what defines home?” We are exploring that with them in the second seasons.

From an animation standpoint, in addition to writing the scripts for each episode, we iterate, iterate and iterate, just like a feature. We board it. We look at it. We bring in other directors on other projects. They throw tomatoes at it. We rebuild it, rinse and repeat. Deep storytelling is about iterating, testing it, bringing new eyes to it and rebuilding it. Because Tony’s ability to constrain himself and making this world bigger and greater and create these new places and creatures. Then, we have to realize these things, and we want to realize them in a feature-quality way, and all of that takes a lot of time. So, that’s why it took a while before the second season was available.

Tony, when we first interviewed you for the release of the first season, you told us that you came up with the idea for the books quite a long time ago, right?

Tony: You are right. I want to say it was in the last 1990s when had the first inclination of the idea. I really grabbed the keyboard and started writing when I turned 40 and my daughter was just a couple of years old. I was thinking about what the world would be like when she turned 40 and that’s really kind of what started to set me down the road of Eva and the story what would what will our reliance on technology be like when she turns 40. Will mankind continue to be dissociated from the natural world and will mankind be dissociated from one another. And surprise! The answers were yes!

Exactly. Things are certainly crazier now than they were in the ’90s! What is your take on where we stand as humans and our relationship to our planet?

Tony: I don’t want to say, “Well, I saw it coming!” But, I think I just did a lot of homework. You could kind of see where a lot of things were going. As a writer, I also love to read a lot and I read a lot of articles about where they projected and predicted technology would go in the next few years. I was actively working on the book in 2009, 2010, and even then, I started to worry about what social media was going to do to American society. I had no idea how it would impact other global societies. I also started seeing more and more people taking selfies, etc. They didn’t necessarily seem to concerned with the environment and this planet that we share with all the other living things.

What has the reaction been to the first season of the show?

Tony: They tell me, “What? They made a show based on that book?” (Just kidding!)

Bobs: I will say I think people are you know maybe you know it’s because it’s a series of other feature but I think they are they are blown away by the look of the show, which is one thing right that’s awesome and cool great that the show the show looks fantastic. But that would be meaningless without the depth of the story or the character, and without the sort of themes that Tony just spoke about that we’re actually trying to explore. And the answers aren’t always very clear.

In the first season, we’re going on this journey of maturity with Eva. And in the second season, we’re definitely starting to gray the world a little bit. What is wrong and what is right. Like a teenager thinks they’ve got it all figured out. Then, you go out there in the world, and you realize you haven’t figured it all out. You are going to learn some hard lessons, and we don’t shy away from the deep themes and exploring them, and maybe not providing a clear answer. I think audiences respond to the fact that show is appealing to younger people, but it’s also appealing to older viewers, because we’re not talking down to the audience.

Tony: As the author, I am often the interface between the core fans. Whenever I’m at an event or just in public, the response is a mixture, to be honest with you. You have the die-hard fans of the book who says, “Oh, it doesn’t look like the book. Why didn’t they keep this part? I wish they did this and I wish they did that!” Then, you also get the fans who love the series and the animation, and tell you that they love the book and the show and what they did with it. There are also the fans who have no idea that there was a book before the show. They really love the series, so there is this spectrum of fans out there. It’s the same way I feel when I see my favorite book adapted into a TV series of a movie. I am like oh, they did that right and oh, they missed that part. But overall resounding feedback has been that they think that the Skydance and Apple teams have done fantastic job!

WondLa’s second season begins streaming on Apple TV+ on Friday, Aprlil 25. The show is executive produced by Tony DiTerlizzi and Bobs Gannaway with Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Jeremy Bell, Julie Kane-Ritsch and Skydance Animation’s John Lasseter, David Ellison and Dana Goldberg. The series is also produced by Tony Cosanella.