“We're goin' up, up, up, it's our moment! You know together we're glowin'!” You might recognize these catchy lyrics from Netflix’s animated sensation KPop Demon Hunters — and they certainly exemplify its runaway success. Since its release last summer, the film has skyrocketed to the top of the charts and cemented itself as a true cultural phenomenon.
"KPop Demon Hunters unleashed a global fan frenzy — we're talking dancing, singing and more screaming than anyone was emotionally prepared for," states Marian Lee, chief marketing officer at Netflix.
After racking up more than 500 million streams, the film now reigns as the most-watched original title in Netflix history. The soundtrack went certified double platinum in the US last fall, becoming the first film soundtrack to have four songs simultaneously reach the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100. A sing-along version hit theaters last year, marking Netflix’s widest theatrical release yet, and its first to top the box office. A partnership with Mattel and Hasbro is now unleashing a wide variety of official merchandise for fans worldwide.
In addition to a rabid fan base, the film also received critical acclaim for its animation, visual style, story, music, voice acting and more. A successful awards season culminated in a slew of accolades, including Golden Globes, Grammys, Critics’ Choice Awards, and Producers Guild Awards, plus a staggering 10 Annie Awards and two Oscar wins for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song.
Written and directed by Oscar-winners Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, the film follows Huntr/X, a trio of K-pop superstars who sell out stadiums to crowds of adoring fans. When Rumi (voiced by Arden Cho), Mira (voiced by May Hong) and Zoey (voiced by Ji-young Yoo) aren’t dazzling audiences on-stage, they’re living a secret double life as legendary sword-wielding demon slayers. With the emergence of the Saja Boys, an alluring new rival group whose members are actually demons in disguise, the all-star hunters must confront their greatest supernatural threat yet.
Springing from Kang's desire to craft a story inspired by her Korean heritage, the film boldly blends ancient mythology with a modern musical flair. This unexpected cinematic harmony needed to be brought to the screen in a captivating visual style. Sony Pictures Animation and Sony Pictures Imageworks teams in Vancouver and Montreal, led by animation director Josh Beveridge, were up for the challenge, delivering dynamic 3D animation that truly brought the film’s stunning dance choreography and demon-destroying fight sequences to life.
Kang and Appelhans shared insights into their directing process for the film at the 2025 VIEW Conference in Turin, Italy. Anime fans will rejoice when they hear the slew of beloved titles that influenced the film’s distinctive visual style.
“In terms of animation, we were inspired by anime, and when we say ‘anime,’ we're talking, like, ‘old people anime,’ like Cowboy Bebop, FLCL, Lupin [the Third], Sailor Moon,” Kang shares. “What we liked about those is there's this kind of snappiness to everything. All of our characters are kind of modeled after those proportions — very long, incredibly-long legs. They're like, seven feet tall if they were real people in real life.”
Despite the fantastical comic-like proportions, it was important to the directors to lean into a more three-dimensional animation style.
“We were very inspired by the kind of anime manhwa faces that you see that are very exaggerated and kind of cartoony, I would say. But in our movie, we didn't want to represent them in a 2D way,” she continues. “We thought that everything needed to be a 3D representation in our movie, so that's what we leaned into. Spider-Verse — which we are also very much inspired by — they go more of the 2D route, but they're a comic book and we are not, so we felt like doing a 3D style was more suitable to us. I'm also inspired by The Simpsons, Looney Tunes, so that kind of comedy and zaniness.”
The directing team looked to a multitude of specific influences and references throughout the visual development process.
“On the lighting front, we both are huge fans of less conventional animation inspiration — so things like editorial photography, ‘Vogue’ covers, music videos, concert lighting,” Appelhans recalls. “We took a lot of inspiration from that, and we really pushed our art department and our lighting department to incorporate that stuff. That's not normally what they get to do. The best part of this movie was, every time we brought that kind of new point of view to the crew, they were so up for it. They're like, ‘Cool, I get to do a music video? I get to do a fashion cover?’”
Drawing from these unconventional sources of inspiration led to a challenging animation workflow.
“We had to develop new tools and some new ways of thinking about color and light and shaping of characters, but the movie really needed it,” he continues. “We told everybody, this film lives in the K-pop world. It needs to hold its own when it gets there, so it can't look like the animation version of K-pop. It needs to be just as sleek and glamorous and stylish and high level.”
Blending the dramatic realism of live-action dance and the fantastical exaggeration of anime was no easy feat. Beveridge and the Imageworks team developed a custom modular system known as the “Chibi Face,” which embedded greater artistic control into the animation pipeline. This groundbreaking network of interchangeable facial features gave animators the freedom to overlay manga-style faces onto 3D-animated characters, pushing them beyond the boundaries of realistic expression. Acting as a dynamic facial rig library, the system allowed animators to create 2D expressive language within a 3D pipeline. The animation team also engineered a new lighting system dubbed “Motion-Blur Spheres,” a localized blur control system that gave animators the ability to keep characters sharply defined in the midst of ultra-soft, dreamy lighting.
The film is packed with brilliantly-choreographed dancing and fighting sequences, all portrayed in a mesmerizing animation style. The directing team worked closely with dance and martial arts experts to bring authenticity to these action-packed sequences.
“We had to do a lot of K-pop choreography, so we actually went to the K-pop choreographers for inspiration and reference,” Kang notes. “We worked with a choreographer named Ling Zhang and also Jam Republic —Nain was a choreographer that we worked with there. Also, this group called K-Tigers that really mix Taekwondo fighting with pop dance and modernize it. It was really cool.
“We would shoot reference videos with them and we would hand it to our animators,” she continues. “The team would sometimes be inspired by the moves exactly. But a lot of times they were actually creating choreography themselves — things that needed a bridge between two shots, or if we forgot to get the reference for this part. So they would come up with ideas inspired by what they were seeing. Some of them were actual dancers, and they would record themselves doing the moves.”
With inspiration being such a core principle of the film’s production, we asked the directors to share words of wisdom that inspire them creatively. Appelhans tells us, “I wanted to share a quote that I love and that I use for all the development of my films. It's by François Truffaut, who talked about what makes a great film. He said, ‘A great film has truth and spectacle,’ and that is something I've always looked to in terms of checking my ideas and my stories — whether or not they have something fantastic and entertaining and original to offer. And also, do they have something true to say about the world or the way we are or the way we feel? And if you're doing both those things and mashing them up, then I think audiences will always respond to those kinds of films.”
Kang shares, “A quote that I remember a lot is actually from my dad. He is a huge cinephile and I get my love of storytelling and movies from him. He told me it at a time when I felt very kind of lost and a little insecure about making a movie that would represent Korean culture. I felt like it was a lot of pressure on me. He said, ‘As a director, you have one job. You can only tell the story that you can tell.’ And so I try to remember that a lot when I'm directing.”
We also asked the team to recommend an under appreciated piece of art or an artist who inspires them. Appelhans recalls a favorite film from the early 2000’s: “I’m going to shout out a Korean romcom that everyone should watch if they haven't. It's called My Sassy Girl. It's really funny and the leading duo are amazing. It was my first time kind of falling in love with Korean cinema a long, long, long, long time ago…because I am old.”
Kang recommends the work of an iconic figure in cinematic history: “One of my biggest inspirations is Charlie Chaplin, and I think young filmmakers really don't know him too well. What's so great about him is he does all his storytelling through pantomime and acting. So I've personally learned so much from him about comedy, posing and how to storyboard, because he's so expressive with his movements and his facial expressions —and to only have to rely on your physical body to tell a story and convey emotion. It's what we have to do a lot in animation, so I highly recommend his work.”
A sequel to KPop Demon Hunters is now officially in development, with Kang and Appelhans both back on-board to write and direct.