The Directors of ‘KPop: Demon Hunters’ Take Us Backstage of Their Netflix/Sony Showstopper

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

 

“I wanted to just make a movie that was set in Korean culture, so I delved into mythology and demonology for something that could be visually unique from what we’ve seen in mainstream media. I’ve also always wanted to do a group of amazing kick-ass women.”

— Director Maggie Kang

 

From its title alone, KPop: Demon Hunters promises to be a completely original and unique story in an industry increasingly focused on sequels. Crafted by Sony Pictures Animation and its sibling studio Imageworks, the film follows a K-pop trio named HUNTR/X that moonlights as demon hunters, a classic superhero hidden-identity setup where the “regular” persona of the character is inflated to a stratospheric form of fame not afforded to the Peter Parkers and Clark Kents.

Zeroing in on Demonology

The idea came from Maggie Kang, who helms the movie alongside Chris Appelhans, director of Sony’s 2021 film Wish Dragon. “It’s known as ‘the KPop movie,’ but that was the last thing folded into the concept,” Kang tells Animation Magazine. “I wanted to just make a movie that was set in Korean culture, so I delved into mythology and demonology for something that could be visually unique from what we’ve seen in mainstream media. I’ve also always wanted to do a group of amazing kick-ass women. [Production designer] Helen Chen draws these amazing, beautiful female superheroes who are not overly sexualized but still very strong and feminine. I thought about a daily job that they could do, and Kpop just came to mind and became the pitching point of the movie.”

Appelhans was next to join the project. “I had just finished directing Wish Dragon and was planning to take a long break,” Appelhans recalls. “But when Maggie told me her initial ideas for this project, I was like, ‘Oh, no. No break for me. We have to do this.’ Maggie has the same taste and same ambition, and that was clear from our very first conversation.”

The base idea was enough to intrigue Sony Pictures Imageworks’ head of character animation Josh Beveridge (The Sea Beast, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse). “It’s an odd combination of words,” he says. “Intrigue is probably the first feeling I had, and as someone that views everything through the animation lens here at Sony, I saw this as an opportunity to make some really cool visuals.”

Before any visuals were defined, the story and themes were top concerns for Kang. “I wanted to portray women the way I’ve always wanted to see women portrayed, especially in a superhero movie,” she says. I wanted the girls to be funny and silly and goofy and messy, as well as cool and aspirational and sexy. Another thing I wanted to pull off is similar to how Bong Joon Ho juggles so many different tones in his films to where they feel very animated. They’re very comical but they’re very dark, and so we try to do that in our film.”

For Beveridge, the three main girls each having an on- and offstage persona allowed for some fun to be had with their movements: “The leader is Rumi, she is a hyper-professional perfectionist with a deep, dark secret. She’s the ticking time bomb of the movie; she’s holding this secret stress while trying to be perfect. And then there’s Mira, the tallest, lankiest, [with the] longest hair, and she’s the designer and dancer of the group. She’s very flowy in her movements, and we tried to have this fun contrast between how graceful she was to how aggressively direct she could be onstage, versus [her] offstage persona. Zoey is the youngest of the group, the shortest of the bunch, and we have this yo-yo between her being the most bubbly, fun, excited, high-motor one of the group and then onstage she gets intense and is much more fiery.”

A World of K-Inspirations

Through their research, Kang and Appelhans sought to make the K-pop backdrop feel as authentic as possible. “We drew inspiration from a different set of influences: music videos, editorial photography, K-dramas, concert lighting, a touch of anime,” says Appelhans. “All the artists, animators and lighters on the film embraced that challenge and did a fantastic job to realize our vision.”

“[Korean photography] is so good at lighting faces, but when you try to pull that off in CGI, it’s very difficult,” adds Kang. “Luckily, we’re working with Imageworks, who want to do new things we haven’t seen in animation. It took us a long time to hone a style that was very photographic and fashion-forward. We leaned into this editorial look. A lot of the Imageworks team were telling us that they were pulling a lot of their knowledge from working on live-action films to light our movie.”

Although Sony is known for innovative animation with the Spider-Verse movies’ hybrid 2D-3D style, Kang was keen to steer away from it. “Chris and I were invited to the premiere of Spider-Verse, and as soon as it started, I texted him saying, ‘Oh, no. How are we going to do this?’ Because it was just so stunning. They’re always breaking boundaries and showing us something new. So, if we played that game, it would be hard to beat [Spider-Verse]. So we pulled away from every 2D element in our movie. We took a lot of inspiration from faces and the look and feel of anime but do a CG version of it. There’s one thing that we didn’t catch, but I think 99.9% of everything is CG.”

“It is very much inspired by 2D aesthetics but with three-dimensional language,” adds Beveridge. “The movie’s on two’s a great deal too, so it’s very bold, graphic language, except this also has a lot of glamour, and we wanted a lot of lensing and soft focus and the bokeh effect on things as well. That was one of the really interesting challenges to have this very bold graphic look.”

“We drew inspiration from a different set of influences: music videos, editorial photography, K-dramas, concert lighting, a touch of anime. All the artists, animators and lighters on the film embraced that challenge and did a fantastic job to realize our vision.”

— Director Chris Appelhans

 

Imageworks nevertheless still looked for ways to innovate with K-Pop: Demon Hunters, specifically through character animation techniques. “The range of this movie is a lot. We deal between the very sincere and dramatic to the hyper-ridiculous,” explains Beveridge. “We transform the characters’ faces based on the tone. So in the high-glamour moments, they need to feel like pop stars in an animated world. When we want to get a little bit more animated aggro, we reshape their faces with a lot more line work, a lot more angularity. When we go hyper-ridiculous, there’s a thing we call Chibi, or demi-Chibi, that’s super-cute and exaggerated features. So we had a whole tool set of being able to have interchangeable facial features we could swap in and out, and we weren’t limited by the geometry of the model.”

Beveridge says he doesn’t feel pressure to innovate on every film he works on. “I think it’s an opportunity. I still feel like animation is in its infancy, as many decades as it’s been around, compared to other mediums and art forms. We’re in the Wild West, in the early days of trying to define it. The mentality that [Sony] doesn’t have a house style has been an evolution that I am so happy to be championing. Every single movie has its own thesis of discovering a new visual language.”

Originals to Save the Day

Original films are the lifeblood of the industry, and Kang found it surreal to be working on one. She says, “I didn’t believe it until a year ago. I was like, ‘They’re going to just change everything.’ Every milestone we hit, I was just waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under me. But it was great. Both Sony and Netflix were very supportive of my vision and Chris’ vision, and there were things that we had to fight for, but they were very supportive, and I know that’s not common. I just want to see more films like this that are very creator-forward.”

The team also put a premium on authentic stories told by people from diverse backgrounds. Kang laments the dwindling opportunities for people of color to grow in the animation industry. “There’s clearly a lack of training and mentorship that’s all across the board in every department,” she points out. “I do some lectures online to share what the important things are with what it means to be a storyboard artist, because I didn’t really fully know what my job was until five years in. When I was coming up, we would all gather in the cafeteria at DreamWorks and talk shop. As you’re doing that, you get to know each other and build these relationships. That’s how you jump from being an artist to a supervisor to a director. I feel like that bridge is not really happening anymore.”

For Kang, the experience of directing KPop: Demon Hunters underscored the need for more diverse stories in animation. “There’s so much pressure. You’re representing an entire culture,” she says. “I’ve gotten messages like, ‘I don’t know why you’re doing it like this,’ and at first it was very difficult, but I landed in a place where I had to just make a movie that I believed in, and I think it’s important for everybody to know that everyone has a different relationship to their culture. You’re not going to be representing things exactly the same way as somebody else is. It just means that we have to make more movies about every culture.”

 

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KPop Demon Hunters premieres on Netflix on June 20.