KPop Demon Hunters is a worldwide phenomenon, claiming the title of number one film of all time on Netflix. The record-breaking movie follows Rumi, Mira, and Zoey, who form the K-pop girl group HUNTR/X, who not only sing for their fans but also defeat demons through their music. Their goal is to seal the Honmoon, an invisible layer or gate between the human and demon world, to prevent demons from overtaking the Earth. Looking to thwart their plans, demon leader Gwi-Ma sends his strongest demons to Earth to defeat the hunters in the form of rival K-pop boy group, Saja Boys. The fierce battle between HUNTR/X and the Saja Boys has captured the attention of the world, earning the film two sold-out sing-along theatrical runs, as well as HUNTR/X’s song “Golden” topping music charts.
The movie has been an undeniable “I made it” moment for its cast members and vocalists—particularly HUNTR/X’s real-life singing voices Audrey Nuna, EJAE, and Rei Ami. The trio have performed on SNL as part of a skit with Bad Bunny, made their live stage debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and will even make their concert stage debut at this year’s Jingle Ball presented by iHeartRadio and 102.7 KIIS FM. Not only for the performing talent featured in the film, this movie has also been an unforgettable experience for the production crew. During this year’s Animation Is Film Festival in Los Angeles, co-directors and writers Chris Appelhans and Maggie Kang, producer Michelle Wong, production designer Helen Chen, and animation director Josh Beveridge sat down for a conversation about the film with a sold-out venue of fans, a majority of whom had already watched the movie between 5-10 times since its release.
While each of the five crew members on stage has a long history within the entertainment industry, particularly in animation, the project also offered many new experiences. “I’ve worked in animation for over 20 years. I was on Vivo, so this was also actually my second musical, but what really drew me to the project was the storyline,” producer Wong began. Also having spent over 20 years in the industry is Appelhans, one of the co-directors and writers. “We’re so old,” he began with a laugh. “I started out as a Production Designer, but I got into writing and directing. This whole project was unique in that it presented a chance for me to use everything I’d learned in my career thus far.” Turning to his left, he introduced his partner, co-director and writer Kang. “When this pitch came to my mind, I had been working in the animation industry for about 14 years. I wanted to see my Korean culture through the lens of animation, and I thought it’d be such a great thing to work on! I worked with story artists my whole career and had never come across that, so when it came time for me to get into the directing role, I came up with a pitch that revolved around Korean culture and Korean demons, and somehow it just landed on this weird idea of KPop Demon Hunters. I pitched it to a producer, and here we are seven years later.”
Production designer Chen mentioned that she’s also been in the industry for quite some time, and that she’s also been acquainted with Kang for some time as well. “I’ve known Maggie for like 10 years, and I was an anime kid who spent most of my time working at Disney Animation. This project gave me the chance to dive into what it meant to work on something that was a little bit more Eastern flavored with Eastern aesthetics, and K-Pop was just the perfect vehicle, so this project was a really unique blend of elements.” Unlike the others, animation director Beveridge has worked in other mediums as well. “I just crossed the 20 year mark this year, but I like to bounce back and go between live action and animation. But, I’ve been with Sony for all my career.”
Despite all the different paths they’ve taken, they each ended up at the same place at the same time: working on KPop Demon Hunters, a concept first imagined by Kang and her husband. “I had worked with [film producer and screenwriter] Aron Warner, who produced Wish Dragon, and when he was rolling off that movie, he really loved that experience. He asked me if I had any pitches or ideas, and I said, ‘Of course.’ Our kid was sleeping in the back seat of the car one day, and we were just driving around the neighborhood, and I looked at my husband and said we should come up with a pitch for Aron. I had a few ideas about Korean demons and this type of female character that wanted to do something kind of heroic, and he was like, ‘Why don’t you put those together?’ From there, it became this demon adventure story, but it still didn’t feel like that was it. So he went down a list of brilliant things, and we landed on K-pop. When we added it all together, it just felt fun and exciting. We truly believed in this elevator pitch of something very simple that could get somebody really excited just from the concept alone, and it really did excite us, so we pushed it to Aron the next day, and he loved it and said, ‘Let’s do it.’ I thought he was joking, but the week after, he had a deal ready, and we were just off to the races. It was an easy pitch, but it was [the result of] 15 years of building a reputation and building a relationship with this really, really talented producer.”
For Kang and the team, the decision to use K-pop was beautifully rewarding, but also added a bit of stress. “We really felt the pressure to satisfy the fans because K-pop is so specific, so there were certain things that we knew the story needed to do. One of the most beautiful things, I think, that’s very unique to K-pop is the relationship between the performer and the audience. Because we knew that was integrated into the energy being created between performer and the audience, we really focused on visualizing that energy and it became the Honmoon. The fans were needed to protect the world, so that was integrated into the mythology as a big piece of the puzzle. We didn’t feel super pressured about the rest of it, but K-pop and being authentic to the Korean culture kind of became our North Stars. Every visual, every song, every decision we made, was to serve a story. To have a cast full of all Koreans, to be true to the K-pop culture, this authenticity became our benchmark and what was most important to me, and then to everybody else, too.”
Speaking to that authenticity, the team revealed that they took a research trip to South Korea during the beginning phases of the project. “When we did the trip, we had already written the first draft, so it was a lot of location scouting,” Kang shared. “We actually hired a location scouting team, so we visited all the locations [they found]. For me and some of our Korean crew, we had been to a lot of those locations before, so it was reassurance that we were representing these places correctly. For a lot of our crew, though, it was a chance to experience our culture. Helen, for example, was taking a lot of photographs of like bricks and straw, and all the little details that the Korean audience would accept. The intricate details of the cities are crazy, and that was very important to us, so it was a big part of our trip. We also did a lot of eating, because that’s very important to our characters, so we bonded over food and we drank a lot.”
Chiming in about her experiences and what she focused on during their trip, Chen shared a bit about her background as well. “I’m actually not Korean, I’m Chinese,” she began. “So, for me, it was really important to go and take everything in and make sure that I was representing Maggie and her culture correctly. I really tried to pick up on the fine details. For example, rocks are a huge part of the architecture, and we even focused on things like the light and the writing on the streets. We also learned things like there not being that many trash cans on the streets in Seoul.” For Wong, the trip was also an opportunity to make connections and meet more valuable team members. “Another big part of our trip was meeting with our future partners. At the time, we had already sealed the deal with The Black Label and one of our choreographers, so it was a really great experience to actually meet them in person and talk about the movie. It was also kind of the launch into the music and song process.” Unfortunately, Beveridge was unable to participate in the trip, but he did go to a concert with the team to experience the K-pop idol and fandom dynamic in action. “This stuff really matters, and it’s not just about researching it, it’s also about experiencing it and immersing yourself in it to represent it.
Discussing the K-pop aspect of the film more, Appelhans credits K-pop’s popularity to its quality and shares what they were striving for. “K-pop is so experimental and invests in all kinds of musical ideas, and it’s like the best amongst pop music. People don’t care where it comes from; they just want great music. I think that was also our approach when we were developing the songs, and we kind of went into it with two things that were most important,” he started. “We really wanted to have the songs and lyrics have purpose and help advance the story. Every line and every verse is like an exchange of dialogue. When you write a screenplay, you’re ruthless about that. You do not repeat yourself, you advance the conversation, and you advance the thought. You always move things forward, so we had that level of storytelling scrutiny to the songs.”
Appelhans also revealed that every song started with a Google Doc. “We would make these long Google Docs that were like five pages long. For “Golden,” it was like monologues of Rumi talking about what she felt like before she found this gift, before she found Mira and Zoey, and what it meant to her personally to seal the Honmoon. It was incredibly pedantic and literal, and not at all like a pop song. Then, we would flip the page over, and we would come up with metaphors for the popular way of saying things. Instead of singing about wishing the golden Honmoon would someday be here, we just used the word golden as a metaphor, [and that’s how it became the phrase] I’m going to be golden. The hope was that, as musical lovers and storytellers, the audience would be able to hear these songs which now could function as a pop song, and fill in complete scenes by understanding the subtext of it all because they were poetic and metaphorical and had flow, and because we had fed the story into the lyrics. We had no idea if that would work, but that was the innovation.” Kang chimed in to share that the music was harder to perfect than the screenplay itself. “We actually wrote the songs more times than we wrote scenes. We had to do multiple passes of these five-page Google Docs that Chris mentioned because it kept changing, and we didn’t nail it the first time. We would do the long, five-page version a few times, then we would do the pop lyrics. We’d then revise that a bunch of times, too. It was a lot of iterating, and we were very involved in the writing. Sometimes, we would even scrutinize one single word in a verse because it held so much meaning.”
When it came time to cast the actors for each character, the team had originally searched for one all-encompassing talent that could voice act and sing the character, but they had to change plans. “We went through hundreds of people, and we found that it was a very difficult search,” Wong admitted. “Knowing the songs we wanted sung, we knew we would have to separate the voice actors and the singers. Obviously, our singers have amazing voices, but they’re pop singers, so it was difficult to learn how to sing in character to portray the character’s emotions [instead of their own].” Spotlighting Kang once more, Appelhans also revealed that she was the original voice of HUNTR/X. “The voice casting was a really late part of the process,” he began. “So for two and a half, three years, we had animation of the movie—a living, breathing version of it—and the voice of all three girls was Maggie. The funny stuff, the emotional stuff, the sisterhood. That allowed us to continue getting more specific in the writing of who each of these girls were. We were able to get our jokes to land perfectly and proof the relationships out before we even cast our actresses, and once we did get these wonderful actresses in, they connected so quickly to the characters and brought them to another level.”
Animating the film was no easy feat, either. One scene in particular that stood out to the crew was the introduction of the Saja Boys as EXO’s Love Me Right played in the background. “This was the second scene we animated and our first full sequence. It was essentially a proof of concept, so we knew we had to get this right,” Kang shared. Beveridge admitted the expressions and angles of the sequence made it particularly challenging. “It was one of the hardest things to get these glamorous faces to also do these ridiculous expressions. It was conceptually challenging and even more technically challenging to figure out a whole bunch of fancy illusions and dimensional illusions. We had to create interchangeable faces, but CG animation has to obey physics in a way that hand drawings don’t, and every character is rigged and has a skeleton that it obeys. We had to adopt some of the eye tricks I remember being used on Turning Red, which is maybe one of the first examples of doing these things with American computer animation. We used soft lighting and layers, and basically created a fake room floating a foot in front of the character’s face under the same lighting [to get those expressions to work].” Another important aspect of that scene was the Korean drama-esque switch in perspectives as we see Rumi, Mira, and Zoey’s first reactions to seeing the Saja Boys. While a Korean drama can be filmed with multiple cameras set up at different angles at once, creating this effect in an animation meant mapping out each angle and creating them individually. When it came to character movement, Beveridge shared that the team had also met K-Tigers, a Korean Taekwondo performance team that does fight and dance choreography to K-pop songs. Studying their movements and fluidity helped weave together the fight choreography in the bath house scene and the subway scene.
The impact of KPop Demon Hunters on the cast, crew, and audiences has been a surreal experience overall. “Hearing little kids singing about breaking into a million pieces was unexpected,” Kang began with a laugh. “HUNTR/X are not real, but our actors and our singers are. May Hong, who voiced Mira as her first voice acting role, actually recently attended the Anime NYC and did a signing, and she called me and shared a story,” she said. “A little girl and her mom went up to the table, and as she was signing for the little girl, her mom whispered to May that she was her daughter’s Sailor Moon.” While the crew credited the movie’s success in part to luck and timing, at the end of the day, it was truly thanks to the years of hard work, research, dedication, and creativity from the team.
