When I watched "KPop Demon Hunters" ahead of its premiere on the 2025 movie schedule, I immediately knew I was in for a wonderful ride when I saw that Sony was behind it. Based on stills, I was already in love with the Netflix movie’s animation style, but knowing it came from the same studio as the "Spider-verse" films upped my enthusiasm even more. So, when I interviewed the directors, I asked how the Marvel movie influenced and inspired them.
In return, they told me you can see that influence in the fact that their movie on Netflix’s 2025 schedule looks absolutely nothing like the beloved Spider-Man movies.
00:00When I saw that this was a Sony project, I immediately was thinking about the other Sony animated movies I love, like Spider-Verse and Mitchell's Versus Machines.
00:07Did those influence you guys in any way when you were making this movie?
00:12It's interesting. It was almost like we wanted to, what they both did so well was something new.
00:19And so part of it was like, we did some early exploration with like flash frames and graphic elements.
00:24And we're like, I don't know, this looks like Spider-Verse and it's not our movie.
00:28So it became a real, in a way they raised a bar, which is bring something fresh and new to the animation sphere.
00:37And so we were like, what is our thing?
00:39And we had to go to some of those anime, subtle anime influences, but K-dramas, like high level music videos, stuff like that, that we felt like, well, we haven't seen this in animation.
00:53Editorial photography, fashion.
00:55Yeah, and even Maggie really had a point of view about like how the women, the girls should be cool, but also like really silly and flawed and weird in a way that like, you know, K-dramas are really good at, but also just, that's Maggie.
01:10So I feel like you...
01:11I'm flawed.
01:12Yeah.
01:13So I feel like that stuff, we were like, this is it.
01:19We just have to, how do we make it special?
01:21How do we make it visually striking?
01:23And the nice thing was Sonya is such a deep, talented group of animators and lighters and everythingers that when we brought those influences to them, they're like, cool, dude, we love this stuff too.
01:34How exciting, we get to do this kind of thing.
01:36And also don't want to do the same thing twice.
01:39So they were already on the mind of like, we want to be innovative and show something different.
