Everyone has theories as to why Sony Pictures Animation’s “KPop Demon Hunters” has proven to be such a massive phenomenon on Netflix, surpassing everything else to become the streamer’s most-watched original film.
During a sold-out panel at the Animation Is Film Festival in Los Angeles, the creative team let a few trade secrets slip as they unpacked an iconic scene from the film: the one where South Korea’s hottest singing trio, Huntrix, first crosses paths with the Saja Boys, a rival group made up of five ridiculously handsome hunks (who also happen to be demons).
“I’ve been waiting to talk about this scene for so long,” said director Maggie Kang, who came up with the idea of combining well-rounded female characters with Korean demons in a film where her three leads could be talented and attractive, but also silly and stupid. “When this movie first premiered, Kristine Belson, the president of Sony Animation, said, ‘Let’s objectify these guys’ bullshit.’ Finally ! So that was kind of our goal: to create really thirsty girls.
In the scene, when Zoey and Mira see the guys, their eyes turn into bulging red hearts, then change shape several times as the attraction intensifies. As Zoey spots lead dancer Abby Saja’s abs, hearts transform into a six-pack that turns into a corn cob, before the growing heat on Zoey’s flushed face causes them to “pop”.
According to Kang, this was the first major scene the team animated (not counting the 11-second “Let’s Get Ready for Battle” montage where the trio suits up). Why start there? “We thought all the jokes landed really well. And we desperately wanted him in the movie too,” Kang said.
Animation director Josh Beveridge described it as “a proof of concept” for the characters they had designed: “How are we going to make these glamorous faces also do these ridiculous things? It’s conceptually challenging, but just as technically difficult.”
If you break it down, the look of “KPop Demon Hunters” reflects the intersection of three key influences: K-pop music (which tends to be smooth and synchronized), K-dramas (melodramatic TV series with soft lighting, shallow focus, and slow motion that drops to the desired mid-shot speed) and Japanese anime (a traditionally drawn style). by hand with a wide range of exaggerated facial expressions).
“We had to come up with a whole bunch of fancy little animation illusions to make it happen,” Beveridge said, describing everything from tightly focused motion blur to interchangeable faces. “This whole thing breaks all the rules of everything we’ve done before” — and that’s saying something, considering Beveridge’s previous work at Sony Animation: “For ‘Spider-Verse,’ we had to be really graphic and flat, and it would be soft,” he said. “If you frame that, you’ll discover little secrets about how we could let the soft edges seep in artistically, only where you want them to, and protect those graphic lines so the jokes can be read.”
For example, when Zoey’s jaw drops and she starts drooling, your typical CG character isn’t flexible enough to adjust to the desired expression. “To have these big mouths, it’s basically a fake coin floating a foot in front of your face, but you have to [look right] in the same light,” Beveridge said, “so we do a lot of tricky calculations to make it work. »
If you were to reposition the virtual camera and see the scene from a different angle, it would look absolutely horrible, he said: “That’s why they’re not moving.”
According to production designer Helen Chen, to figure out how to achieve some of these more extreme expressions (inspired by the exaggerated “chibi” style used for comic effect in manga), character designer Omar Smith would sculpt in front of the camera. “We came up with this term, ‘half-chibi,'” Chen said. “We had the version where it would work flat out, like what you see in the anime,” although making it work with 3D characters required interchangeable parts and maximum flexibility – Kang platforms versus a Mr. Potato Head.
Chris Appelhans, who shared directing duties with Kang, credited character designer Ami Thompson for designing the female protagonists (whom he and Kang wanted to give a distinctly Korean look) and Scott Watanabe for making all of these expressions work in 3D animation.
“We had to study a lot of Korean cinematography for the lighting,” Appelhans said. “Lighting a Korean face is a different thing: there are different shot changes, different things that flatter, different tricks you do to make people look their best, which ties into our love of fashion photography, K-drama lighting, music videos. It’s all very beautiful and enhanced, which naturally gives the lighting a certain identity.”
In the scene, after Rumi scolds her friends for fainting in front of the Saja Boys, Jinu appears and an elaborate K-drama joke begins: the scene cuts to slow motion, as MeloMance’s “Love, Maybe” plays on the soundtrack (a cue that directly references the show “Business Proposal”, in which Jinu’s voice actor Ahn Hyo-seop starred).
“We’re trying to pay homage to a very K-drama moment, which uses slow motion, and we realized it’s not just slow motion. There’s like a ramp,” Kang said, referring to a shot like the one where Rumi’s purple braid appears, slowing down as it bursts out from under her hoodie. “We called it fireworks… because if we just did it in slow motion, it didn’t feel right.”
Appelhans added: “In a lot of K-dramas that we loved, they shoot a lot of cover art. If the guy gets hit by a car – which is going to happen in all K-dramas, even if they’re set a thousand years ago – they would just shoot the scene from a million angles.” He and Kang used a similar technique when Jinu bumps Rumi’s shoulder in the scene, and the editing breaks continuity to show the moment from multiple angles. “We have no coverage when it comes to animation unless these poor souls [the animators] we did that, so we had to find the little pieces that we actually wanted and then just animate them, and it was the same with concerts and music videos.
When it came to the action scenes, they wanted the audience to feel the K-pop and anime influences in the choreography. Kang also took tips from an ultra-intense Korean action film called “The Villainess.”
“You can get pretty violent if you put on a lot of glitter,” Beveridge joked. Generous helpings of “glitter dust” helped make these sequences (the bathhouse and subway battles) feel more like “dance fights” than full-blown carnage. “Some of these fight choreographers had done idol training, and between moves they would make these nice little adjustments. That’s where the personality is.”
When Kang was initially thinking about the project, she knew she wanted to deliver an idea specific to Korean culture, while also featuring a heroic female protagonist. “We just went down the list of Korean things and landed on K-pop. And when we added it all together, it seemed fun and exciting,” said Kang, who agreed to co-direct with Appelhans, who is married to Korean American author Maureen Goo.
“I knew his wife was Korean, and like all Korean wives, we try to make our non-Korean husbands as Korean as possible, so it was like he was Korean,” Kang joked. “On that strange trip to Europe, we realized we had exactly the same tastes, so our collaboration was seamless because we both knew exactly what kind of film we wanted.”
Appelhans had shown a strong commitment to cultural authenticity in his previous feature film. “I really respected the fact that Chris moved to China when he was filming ‘Wish Dragon,’ and he felt the importance of a Chinese crew producing this film.”
On “KPop Demon Hunters,” the entire team flew to South Korea for a research trip, even though Appelhans had 20 years of invaluable experience back home. Referring to his wife, Appelhans said: “She is exactly the type of woman that Maggie is and wanted to portray, who is very smart, very funny, but also angry and stupid and weird, who loves pajama pants, but also loves fashion and loves to eat.” »
When the two directors met, it was clear to Appelhans that Kang had a very clear vision of the type of women she wanted to portray in the film. “And I was like, ‘This might sound weird talking to the whitest person you’ve ever met, but I know exactly what you mean when you say that,'” he recalls. “Maggie often says that she made the film that she wanted to see, and also the film that 12-year-old Maggie wanted to see. I think I was making the film that I wanted to see, but also the one that 12-year-old Maureen would have wanted to see.”
Kang was coy about a potential sequel — which seems inevitable — but revealed one place where an extra song was cut from the film: “There was a moment that was a little bit like the dark night of Rumi’s soul,” Kang said. “It happened after he met Céline, and we had it for a little while, but it felt redundant. And we had a little demo that went with it, which was really beautiful and sad, but it didn’t feel right emotionally to have that moment and then build to a climax, so we took it out.”
Don’t expect this track to appear in future Huntrix adventures. The team insisted that the film’s songs were written to meet the narrative and emotional needs of the scenes in which they appear – although they take on new meaning when performed outside of the film – and the same will surely be true in the future.
“If we do another fully animated music video, it will take us back into the world of how Rumi, Mira and Zoey would live in those places,” Appelhans explained. “That was actually the very first reveal: We don’t want people to think of them as K-pop anime characters or a virtual group. We just want them to think of Mira, Zoey, Rumi. That first day or two on TikTok [after the film opened]you saw everyone move past all those things that we were worried about. They just went for character and music. That was the goal all along.
