Everyone has a theory as to why Sony Pictures Animation’s KPop Demon Hunters became such a huge phenomenon on Netflix, surpassing all others to become the streamer’s most-watched original film.
During a packed panel discussion at the Animation is Film Festival in Los Angeles, the creative team let slip some trade secrets while unraveling the film’s iconic scenes. This is the scene where Hantrix, Korea’s hottest singing trio, first meets Saja Boys, a rival band made up of five ridiculously handsome guys (who are also devilish).
“I’ve been waiting to talk about this scene for a long time,” said director Maggie Kang, who came up with the idea of combining a well-rounded female character with a Korean demon in the film. The three people she stars in are talented and charming but can also be stupid and stupid. “When this movie was first pitched, Kristin Belson, the president of Sony Animation, said, ‘Let’s put some perspective on this crap.’ Finally! That was kind of our goal: to create a really thirsty girl.”
In this scene, when Zoe and Mila see them, their eyes turn into bulging red hearts, which then change shape several more times as their attraction escalates. When Zoe catches a glimpse of lead dancer Abby Saja’s abs, her heart morphs into a six-pack, which turns into a corncob, before the heat on Zoe’s flushed face rises and “pops.”
Kang said this was the first major scene the team animated (aside from an 11-second “get ready for battle” montage in which the trio dons suits). Why start there? “We thought all the jokes landed really well, and that’s what we really wanted in the movie,” Kang said.
Animation director Josh Beveridge described it as a “proof of concept” for the characters they designed, saying, “For example, how can we make this attractive face do ridiculous things? It’s conceptually challenging, but technically it’s equally challenging.”
Broken down, the look of “KPop Demon Hunters” reflects the intersection of three major 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 slows down to a desired speed mid-shot), and Japanese anime (a traditional hand-drawn style with a wide range of exaggerated facial expressions).
“To achieve this, we had to come up with a lot of fancy little animated illusions,” Beveridge said, explaining everything from highly targeted motion blur to interchangeable faces. “Everything like that breaks all the rules of everything we’ve ever done.” And considering Beveridge’s previous job at Sony Animation, that’s saying something. “With ‘Into the Spider-Verse,’ we need to be really graphic and flat, and this is going to be something gentle,” he said. “When you frame it and look at it, it’s full of little secrets about how to artistically sneak in soft edges only where you need them and protect the graphic lines so the jokes can be read.”
For example, if Zoe’s jaw drops and she starts drooling, typical CG character rigs aren’t flexible enough to accommodate the desired expression. “To represent the big mouth, we basically float a fake room a foot in front of the face, but it has to look right in the same light, so we do a lot of tricky calculations to make it work,” Beveridge said.
If you change the position of the virtual camera to view the scene from a different angle, it will be downright scary, he said. “That’s why they don’t move.”
According to production designer Helen Cheng, character designer Omar Smith sculpted them for the camera to figure out how to achieve these more extreme expressions (inspired by the exaggerated “chibi” style used for comic effects in manga). “We coined the word ‘demi-chibi,'” Chen said. “We had a full-on version like you see in the anime,” but making it work with 3D characters required interchangeable parts and maximum flexibility. Rig Can compared to Mr. Potato Head.
Chris Appelhans, who shared directorial duties with Kang, credited character designer Ami Thompson with designing the female protagonist (he and Kang wanted her to look distinctly Korean), and Scott Watanabe for helping make all these expressions work in 3D animation.
“We had to study a lot of Korean cinematography when it came to lighting,” Appelhans said. “Lighting a Korean face is another thing. There are different plane changes, different ways of flattering, different tricks you do to make a person look their best. This ties in with our love of fashion photography, Korean drama lighting, and music videos. Everything is so beautiful and elevated that we naturally gave the lighting a little bit of identity.”
In this scene, after Rumi scolds her friend for losing consciousness to the Saja Boys, Jin-woo appears and an elaborate K-drama joke begins. As the melodic song “Love, Maybe” plays on the soundtrack, the scene switches to slow motion (a direct reference to the show “Business Proposal,” starring Jin-woo’s voice actor Ahn Hyo-seop).
“We’re trying to pay homage to those very K-drama moments with slow motion, and we realized that this isn’t just slow motion. There’s a kind of slope in there,” Kang said, referring to shots like the one where Rumi’s purple braids slow down and appear as they pop out from under her hoodie. “We called it Fireworks because we didn’t feel it was appropriate to just do it in slow motion.”
Appelhans added, “In a lot of Korean dramas that we loved, they shoot a lot of press. If a guy gets hit by a car, which happens in all Korean dramas, even if it’s set 1,000 years ago, they’ll just shoot the scene from a million angles.” In the scene where Jin-woo bumps Rumi’s shoulder, he and Kang use a similar technique, and the editing breaks continuity to show the moment from multiple angles. “It’s not going to be featured in animation unless this poor soul (animator) makes it for us. So we had to find the little parts that we actually needed and animate just those. It was the same with concerts and music videos.”
Regarding the action scenes, I wanted the audience to feel the influence of K-pop and anime in the choreography. Mr. Kang also showed off a trick from a super intense Korean action movie called “The Villainess.”
“If you put a lot of glitter on it, it can get pretty violent,” Beveridge joked. The generous use of “Sparkle Dust” makes these scenes (the bathhouse and subway fights) feel more like “dance fights” than full-blown carnage. “Some of the martial arts choreographers had been trained by idols and would make cute little adjustments between movements. That’s where the personality comes in.”
When Kang was first brainstorming for the project, she wanted to come up with an idea that was unique to Korean culture while also featuring a heroic female protagonist. “We went down the list of Korean things and ended up with K-pop, and putting that together felt fun and exciting,” said director Kang, who agreed to co-direct with Appelhans, who is married to Korean-American YA author Maureen Goo.
“I knew his wife was Korean, and like all Korean wives, we try to make our non-Korean husband as Korean as possible, so it was as if he were Korean,” Kang joked. “On this strange trip to Europe, we realized we had exactly the same tastes, which meant we both knew exactly what kind of film we both wanted, so the collaboration was very smooth.”
Appelhans has demonstrated a strong commitment to cultural authenticity in previous features. “I really admired the fact that Chris moved to China during the production of Wish Dragon. He felt the importance of having a Chinese crew producing it.”
For “KPop Demon Hunters,” the entire staff flew to South Korea on a research trip, but Appelhans has gained 20 years of valuable experience in his home country. Appelhans said of his wife, “She’s exactly the type of woman Maggie wanted to portray: very smart, very funny, but also angry and stupid and quirky, and she loves pajama pants, but she also loves fashion, and she loves food.” Plus, he was a lifelong musician who made it happen. “I suggested to her that we could tell a story about the power of music and its ability to connect and heal.”
When the two directors met, it was clear to Appelhans that Kang had a very clear vision of the type of woman she wanted to portray in this film. “And I thought, ‘It might seem weird to talk to the whitest person I’ve ever met, but I know exactly what you mean by that,'” he recalled. “Maggie often says she’s making the movies she wanted to see, but I think I’m also making the movies that 12-year-old Maggie would have liked to have seen. I think I was making the movies that I wanted to see, but I also think I was making the movies that 12-year-old Maureen would have wanted to see.”
Director Kang declined to discuss the possibility of a sequel, but did reveal that additional songs were cut from the film. “There were moments like a dark night of Rumi’s soul,” said director Kang. “It came about after she met Celine, and we had a little bit of it, but it felt redundant. There was also a little demo that went with it. It was really beautiful and sad, but it didn’t feel right emotionally to have that moment and go right into the climax, so we removed it.”
Don’t expect this truck to appear in future Huntrix adventures. The team argued that film songs are written to serve the narrative and emotional needs of the scene in which they appear, and the same will certainly continue to be the case, even if they take on new meaning when performed outside of the film.
“If we were to make another fully animated music video, we would go back to the world of how Rumi, Mila and Zoe live in that place,” Appelhans explained. “In fact, that was the initial inspiration. We don’t want people to think of these as K-pop animated characters or virtual bands. We just want them to think of Mira, Zoe, and Rumi. In the first day or two on TikTok (after the movie was released), we saw everyone go straight through everything we were worried about. They just went after the characters and the music. That was the goal all along.”
