X-Men '97 Directors Talk Collaborating Back and Forth on Episodes

Emi/Emmett Yonemura and Chase Conley talk about working together on X-Men '97.

By Jamie Jirak

The first season of X-Men '97 came to an end on Dinsey+ last week, and the series is officially the highest-rated Marvel project. Many people brought the follow-up to X-Men: The Animated Series to life, and ComicBook recently got the chance to chat with some of the folks from behind the scenes, including directors Emi/Emmett Yonemura and Chase Conley. During our interview with the duo, they spoke about collaborating on the episodes. 

"It's fun. I love working with Chase," Yonemura explained. "I mean, even though we're all remote, it's like you've got two teams with a fence and you just peer over to be like, 'What are you guys doing?' 'Oh, that's so cool.' And it's like, 'Okay, we got to run.' 'We got to do what they're doing.' I don't know. It's fun. And we both have such similar influences. I feel like it was already just naturally in both our styles to just be similar. We didn't even realize it when we started. I don't know. It's just been fun and I've actually been learning a lot from Chase and his team. I love watching them work."

"Yeah, no, same vice versa," Conley confirmed. "I think that it is very easy because not only do we vibe, our teams are all fans of the same exact stuff and want to see the same exact show, and that's very rare. I think that it made it a lot easier in order in terms of communicating, 'We're trying to build to this moment so do you mind trying to see this in this episode?' And you're like, 'Oh yeah, that's totally fine. Let's build this up.' And that way it has that level of impact when it does happen."

"It's just it's very easy," Conley continued. "And luckily, I think the way that the schedule was staggered, we were able to be able to do that as far as just thinking ahead and planting seeds. And credit to the scripts as well, they did a fantastic job, the writers' room as far as just giving us a great foundation and a great skeleton to build on. It made it really easy. I always feel the exact same as just poking my head over the fence. What's my man from Home Improvement?

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"Yeah. Wilson," Yonemura replied. "Yeah, Wilson. Except you could see my face, though," Conley joked.

Stay tuned for more from our interview with the creatives behind X-Men '97.

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