“KPop Demon Hunters” has taken the world by storm this year.
The movie, which follows a K-pop girl group who lead double lives as demon hunters, is the most popular Netflix movie of all time. The soundtrack, which includes pop bangers like “Soda Pop” and “Golden,” has topped the Billboard charts this year. Now, SCAD AnimationFest is getting in on the action.
The festival, which runs from Sept. 25-27, will honor co-directors Chris Appelhans and Maggie Kang with the festival’s Impact Award for their work on the film. Appelhans is expected to attend the festival to receive the award, and will sit for a Q&A following a screening of the film on Sept. 27.
Ahead of the festival, Rough Draft Atlanta spoke with Appelhans about his career and how he came to the project. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Before we jump into the movie, I wanted to start a little bit with your career. I know you got started as a character designer, a concept artist, an illustrator, etc. and then made your directorial debut in 2021. What was the most challenging part for you in making that jump to director, and then coming into “KPop Demon Hunters” working with a co-director?
Chris Appelhans: I worked as a production designer for the first maybe seven or eight years of my career. I did, in that first seven or eight years, all the things that I thought I was going to do. I really got lucky in terms of the projects I got to work on and the influence I got to have. But it occurred to me, about that time, that what I really loved, and probably what made my work helpful to the filmmakers [I worked with], was story. The whole time I was working as a concept artist or production designer, I was writing my own stories and coming up with my own ideas. About that time, I took an idea that I had for film and I pitched it around town. I was lucky enough that Robert Zemeckis at ImageMovers, which was his company at that time – decided to buy it and hire me to write a screenplay, which I had no idea how to do. Fortunately, he gave me a book about screenwriting that was really, really good.
I wrote an okay screenplay, but it wasn’t particularly good, because it was my first one. Probably another five or six years [later], I sold another idea to Laika, and developed that and wrote the screenplay for that. Both of those projects got really close to a green light, but they didn’t happen. What I essentially did was then spend almost six to eight years in the wilderness learning how to write – learning what a story was, learning how to construct a 90-minute feature and living through it. It was kind of an off-the-grid growth that I went through. “Wish Dragon” was a result of a friendship that I had with a friend who grew up in China, and all of that stuff that I’d learned about writing and filmmaking. I was able to come in and write and direct in a way that, if you just look at my IMDB, might seem like a leap, but there was a period of growth that bridged those two things. It involved a lot of learning of lessons and a lot of failure.
“Wish Dragon” was an incredible experience. One of the things I have known – and anybody who works in animation knows this – is that any really good animated film is the work of the director, but it’s also the work of hundreds of other really talented, dedicated people. I had a person like Aron Warner, who was my producer on “Wish Dragon,” and I had some incredible story artists, like Radford Sechrist, who’s Maggie [Kang]’s husband, and Josh Lieberman. They were incredible partners who helped to write and helped to develop. It took a village to make a good movie, including all of my talents. So when I met with Maggie, who told me about her K-pop idea, it was a perfect match for me. I grew up a musician. I chose art school over music school. I always wondered, what if? When Maggie told me her idea, I was like, “Oh my gosh – this is the perfect project to bring those things together.” It takes more than one person to make a great movie, and so to me, directing, it was almost irrelevant in terms of what it meant for [my] career. I don’t care. What I care about is this is an amazing idea. This other person is very talented and visionary, and I know together, we can make something awesome.
What was your relationship to K-pop before meeting with Maggie and coming onto this?
Appelhans: It’s a very personal movie to me, which might seem odd. But I was really influenced by Korean cinema and my wife, who is also an author – we have been together for 20 years – is Korean. I had an early education in K-dramas, and K-pop, and Korean films, and also just living it everyday. My wife is a very funny, weird, angry, vengeful, fashion-loving [laughs], music-loving person. When I met Maggie, she was like, “I really want to do these female characters that are weird and funny and angry.” My wife had always been hounding me, like: why aren’t there better female characters in animation? More interesting ones? So those were all very personal things to go with the music aspect of it.
I think that’s why Maggie and I had such an easy collaboration. We both watch the same Bong Joon Ho films, and we both love the same K-pop music, and we both love the same K-dramas. There’s a kind of shorthand in all those influences. We didn’t really have much to disagree about.
In a lot of ways, the movie feels like a Disney Renaissance musical in a way that I hadn’t experienced in a long time, but with music that is normally not involved in that type of thing. From the jump, the characters are so expressive, and that first song feels like a music video in a lot of ways, but also has a lot of character building. How did you approach the visual style of the film, drawing in all of those inspirations, making it a musical, and knowing you had to build character and plot through those songs?
Appelhans: I could talk for hours about it, because it’s so intricate. Fundamentally, Maggie and I love music, and we love some musicals, but we’re not the most die hard fans of the break-into-song thing – but when it works, it’s amazing. Like, who can argue with “West Side Story,” or “The Sound of Music?” But we knew what we didn’t want, in terms of that, and what we had in the physical plot of the movie. We worked hard to orchestrate the plot so that there were reasons for there to be songs, and performances weren’t just because somebody felt like it. The opening song is about, well we’re going to do a music video and basically a brawl in an airplane because we’ve been attacked, and this is who we are. And it also turns out, it’s the first half of our song that we sing when we land in the concert that we’re supposed to go to. There’s a kind of justification for it, and we kept that throughout.
There’s one song, obviously the duet, which is sort of the most traditional “being in your feelings” [song]. But we felt like that was also germane to the plot, because Rumi is struggling physically with her voice, so it was a way for her to say, in this different emotional space … there’s something about my psychology that’s affecting my gift. So, although it is an “in your feelings” duet, it’s also justified by the plot she’s living through. I think we went through all of the songs with that in mind. We had an incredible executive music producer – his name is Ian Eisendrath, and he really pushed hard on the songs in terms of treating them, in some ways, as conventional musical songs in that they need to tell a story, and every line matters, and we can’t repeat ourselves, and all the things that you would do to hold a scene to a high standard – you do the same with the song. That was a great pairing of people with different skills, and then amazing songwriters and amazing vocal talent to integrate all of that.
It’s interesting, because everything you said stands as far as the songs having to move everything along, but you’ve also got that added layer of them having to be great K-pop songs. It’s so fundamental, and I think we’ve gotten a little bit better about it in years past – there’s a great boy band song in “Turning Red” – about treating these things as real songs. Which I think is very well done in this movie.
Appelhans: That goes to having the songwriters we did – The Black Label, really great music producers who know that high level of production. I think great pop songs, they tell stories. When we were writing the finale, which was probably the hardest song to [write], because it’s this combination of the physical climax of your movie, which needs to have tension and uncertainty and reversals. That really is a hard thing to construct with a song that is meant to build catharsis and build more powerfully. But there were songs – “Green Light” from Lorde is a great one, or even “Driver’s License” by Olivia Rodrigo – where it’s personal, it’s vulnerable … Also, it’s fundamentally not just a happy song. It’s about living through pain and having it make you stronger, rather than yay, all is well! [Laughs] There are those really universally powerful aspects to a good pop song that suit the ending of a good movie, too. That is its own musical form of storytelling that’s different from Broadway. Broadway is more – not in a bad way – it’s more pedantic, it’s more literal. Every lyric is intended to add clarity. You can get away with more metaphors and more poetry, I think, in pop music, and more unsaid, implied things. That was really fun, but again, scary. The best part of putting the movie out in the world was going on TikTok at 3 a.m. and watching hours and hours of people, and you could see that they were understanding and connecting to all of the stuff that you meant the songs to say that maybe didn’t fit inside the actual song.
Watching this movie, it reminded me a lot of “Sinners” – both movies about the importance of music filtered through a specific culture. Obviously, different cultures have a lot of different art mediums – there’s theater, there’s visual art, etc. But I think music has such a specifically strong call to people and a connective power. Why do you think that art form elevates above others in that way?
Appelhans: I wish I knew. Maggie and I saw “Sinners” when it came out, and we were just texting each other like, “Oh my god, this is amazing! I hope people think our movie is as cool as this masterpiece.”
I think one of the great powers of art of any kind, but music especially, is it transcends a lot of boundaries. I have no idea why humans feel the need to bang on sticks and pluck strings and sing, but we do. We want to do it, and it’s a form of expression that’s different from language. I spent my whole life playing around in it and being personally moved by it.
When you listen to music and you feel those butterflies in your stomach, that’s real. We all know it’s real. When we wrote the songs and we had to set a bar for, is this good enough to go in the movie, that was it – it had to give us butterflies. You just can’t deny that when it’s happening. You can’t fake it, either. There’s something sublime, something transcendent about what music can do. You could talk about it all you want in a story, and that’s what we realized, was we can’t really talk too much about it. We just have to make it happen in people, and then everyone will believe. I think “Sinners” did an incredible job of that, along with so many other things.
Was there anything particularly difficult about the production? I was reading a couple of interviews with you guys, where you mentioned that sometimes you would have to animate a scene without having a song locked, which I can imagine is pretty stressful. What other sort of big challenges came along with this film?
Appelhans: We had to board a lot of scenes without a final song. I think we always held off animating until we had it, even if it was the demo. We would lock tempo and pick a temp track and work to that and wait for the music to come. That was really tricky.
A fun one that is hopefully not too obvious – when you make a music video, what you want is a synthesis of the way the music makes you feel and what the visuals do. The visuals, the lighting, might respond to the tempo, it might respond to the music, the cutting pattern, the performance of the characters. In animation, because of the way lighting works, you light a scene and then you divide it up in all these shots. And those 100 shots go to 100 different people, all working on their one little three-quarters of a second shot. We had to figure out a way to light the scene, but also, before anybody started really finishing the shots, we would roughly pair the rough lighting with the music, and then we would pull it into Photoshop and paint over it to try and get the visuals to feel like they spoke with the music.
That’s so slippery. You might think it seemed cool here, but actually it needs to be eight frames earlier. Now it feels exciting, whereas before it felt flat. We had to figure out some new techniques to do that so we could then prototype it and send it back to the lighter so they could do that. I’m proud of that. You shouldn’t notice it – ideally, you don’t even think about it. It just feels like a great concert. But there were a lot of technical things like that. Because we were doing something new. There wasn’t a blueprint.