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KPop Demon Hunters is not all about the hit songs – the Netflix film also has some impressive action scenes, and it turns out that the creative team had a very unlikely inspiration to create them.
During a sold-out panel at the Animation Is Film Festival in Los Angeles, the team behind the popular animated film shared some secrets about how it was made. Talking about action scenes, they revealed they wanted audiences to feel the K-pop and anime influences in the choreography, additionally borrowing tricks from a 2017 Korean action film called The Villainess.
"You can get pretty violent if you put a lot of glitter on," joked animation director Josh Beveridge (via Variety), describing how they used some "sparkle dust" to make those sequences feel more like "dance fighting" rather than raw violence. "Some of those fight choreographers had done some idol training, and in between the moves, they'd make these cute little adjustments. That is where the personality is," he added.
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Released in 2017, the ultra-violent The Villainess is a South Korean action thriller directed by Jung Byung-gil, which was inspired by Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita. It follows a young woman who was trained from childhood to be an elite assassin, until she embarks on a rampage of violence to seek revenge and finally earn her freedom.
It's an unusual inspiration for KPop Demon Hunters, which is primarily a family-friendly movie, but it also shows how the creative team incorporated different layers of South Korean culture into the film's DNA.
For those who want to see those sequences in the biggest screen possible, Netflix is bringing the movie back to theaters following its impressive success on streaming. The film had an initial cinema run this summer where it topped the domestic box office, so it's hardly a surprise that it's getting re-released so soon.
Mireia is a UK-based culture journalist and critic. She previously worked as Deputy Movies Editor at Digital Spy, and her work as a freelance writer has appeared in WeLoveCinema and Spanish magazines Fotogramas, Esquire, and Elle. She is also a published author, having written a book about Studio Ghibli's 'Kiki's Delivery Service' in 2023. Talking about anime and musicals is the best way to grab her attention.
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