‘Lost in Starlight’ Director Han Ji-won Charts Her Cosmic Animated Romance

This article was written for the May-June ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 350).

Set in a futuristic Seoul, the new Korean animated film Lost in Starlight is a romantic intergenerational, interplanetary story that feels fascinatingly optimistic about humanity’s commitment to analog technology. Its director Han Ji-won, herself an animator, illustrator and cartoonist based in Seoul, attributes this optimism to a cycle – a belief that everything comes back around eventually.

“I thought that just like how we are fascinated with antique objects and music from the past, I’d try to create a universe where the objects that we’re in love with right now is still fascinating for the future generation,” the director says. “Trends come back, come around every 20-30 years,” something that inspired Lost in Starlight on a story level, but also in its design, a deliberate collision of the past and the future. It began with a desire to tell a story that travels across generations and continues beyond them. “I thought about a mother’s dream being inherited by a daughter,” Ji-won says. She continues, with a laugh: “I thought that, rather than telling the story starting from our past, if the current times that we’re living in became the past, it would be much more intriguing for a current audience.”

The film, which is produced by Climax Studios and will be distributed by Netflix, features characters who are star-crossed in every sense of the word. Set in the future, the movie centers on Nan-young, a scientist and astronaut looking to walk in her mother’s footsteps on a mission to Mars. One day she meets Jay, an audio repairman and technician who specializes in now-outdated equipment from our present. The movie sees their relationship turn long distance, as Nan-young’s ambition takes her to space, and Jay’s career keeps him on Earth. The crossing over of these two worlds may sound like a rather far-reaching romantic match, but in Lost in Starlight it feels as natural as anything else.

Part of this comes down to Ji-won’s embrace of the input of the two lead actors, Kim Tae-ri and Hong Kyung, who had worked together as recently as the 2023 K-drama Revenant. The two were involved at the script stage and Ji-won took advantage of their in-person chemistry. “Even though we had the storyboard and the animatic, there were some scenes where I really wanted to give them more room to maneuver and go beyond the storyboard to do whatever they wanted,” Ji-won explains. This meant that the two actors had a lot of input on the script and character work, for which the director enthusiastically praises them. It’s reflective of the kind of animation that Ji-won wanted to make, where detail is focused on minute actions — citing work by Mamoru Hosoda and even recent films like The First Slam Dunk, where the everyday feels dynamic. After working on tighter schedules and budgets for her short film work and the previous feature The Summer, Lost in Starlight had more room for Ji-won to implement such experiments.

“Trends come back, come around every 20-30 years. I thought that, it would be much more intriguing to tell the story as if the current times that we’re living in became the past.”

—Director Han Ji-won

More interesting still is how the film’s production design iterates on present-day Seoul. “A lot of futuristic images include Earth’s buildings with a lot of spaceship-like details, but I thought just adding spaceship details to buildings wouldn’t be that useful for a future generation,” Ji-won says. The team also looked at ’70s retrofuturism, studying the gap between how past generations imagined the future and the reality.

Such a divide also meant deepening the visual differences between generations of the city as witnessed now. “One thing that I believe is beautiful about Seoul is that we can see both sparkling, advanced skyscrapers alongside these old colorful houses,” the director says. “So I wanted to highlight this contrast even more: make the old look older and worn-out, and the new things more minimal.” This also extends to things like signage and interfaces: a mixture of holograms, augmented reality and more tangible objects a results in a rather unique take on a future society, one that has embraced new technologies but not become overwhelmed by it.

This belief in analog devices and traditional methods enduring goes far back for Ji-won. The animator spoke of finding her first inspirations in becoming an illustrator being found the comic book cafe run by her grandmother. One thing led to another, as Ji-won got into drawing cartoons and comics. This sense of nostalgia for these tactile interactions with art bleeds into Lost in Starlight — in one of the film’s more interesting touches, characters in the movie see pens and paper as archaic. It’s not exactly a first for science fiction, but it feels more loaded in the context of animation.

“Really early on in my drawing days, I used to draw everything by hand,” Ji-won reflects. “But even as a student, I was drawing with a pen on a tablet device, even though they were not like display devices like the ones we see these days.”

She continues, “Even though the process is quite digitized now, I still prefer and am fascinated by 2D cel animation.” And these considerations of traditional forms of animation, and her own persistent love for older forms of the craft, inspired the line of thinking that led to Lost in Starlight — a film born from the optimistic belief that technology of convenience will never kill a love and appreciation of the older ways of doing things. It’s appropriate then, that Ji-Won attributes her interest in learning to make animation specifically to a first-time viewing of Princess Mononoke, a film which experimented with mixing 2D and 3D digital animation — in fact, a framed poster of the film directed by Hayao Miyazaki sits behind her on the Zoom call. And, as she points out, there’s a record player just out of frame too. Both feel like totems of Ji-won’s artistic approach and the ideals reflected in Lost in Starlight, tonally influenced by her own nostalgia and built from current trends and practices: while considerate of their cyclical nature.

One of the standout moments of the film is a cosmic visualization of this belief — Nan-young hallucinates in a moment of desperation, and the galaxy becomes a vinyl record. “We see this record-player aesthetic being tied in with the cosmos, so in a way, it becomes a tool for creative directing as well,” Ji-won says. “This concept of retro and analog is not just an element in terms of the aesthetic. I also wanted to instill that sense of nostalgia that people feel when they see these antique objects: objects like the turntable become a really important tool in the storytelling as well.”

Whether planets, trends in animation processes, or music technology part of the charm of Lost in Starlight is this fundamental hopefulness that we won’t indiscriminately discard the old for the new — like the record spinning, we’ll come back around.

Lost in Starlight premieres on Netflix on May 30.