🎧 ‘KPop Demon Hunters’: Maggie Kang on Rumi’s Skateboard Origins
The Oscar-nominated co-director on turning a personal sketch into a global phenomenon — and trusting her instincts
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Before Rumi was a demon hunter, a K-pop star, an incredibly popular Halloween costume and the star of an Oscar-nominated movie, she was a girl on a skateboard.
Quite literally! When I spoke to KPop Demon Hunters co-director Maggie Kang last week, she was sitting at home in front of a wall-mounted skateboard deck decorated with a figure with Rumi’s unmistakable purple braid.
As Kang tells me in our conversation on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, Rumi started as a quick illustration by her husband, animator and skater Radford Sechrist, and became a character who stuck with Kang during her time as a storyboard artist at DreamWorks Animation, on films like Shrek Forever After and Puss in Boots.
Still, even as she learned a lot about collaboration and animation storytelling while working on these major franchises, Kang, 45, knew she had a personal story to tell. She just didn’t realize how personal she’d be able to get with KPop Demon Hunters. Drawing on her childhood love of K-pop as well as traditional Korean culture, the Seoul-born, Toronto-raised animator teamed up with co-director Chris Appelhans to make a movie teeming with in-jokes, visual gags and tributes to elements of her culture she’d never seen onscreen.
Not that it was easy, as Kang told me. In fact, after one early test screening, she and Appelhans were left asking each other the same question: Do you even like this movie?
“I was like, ‘No. We don’t really like it,’” she says, noting an early version had gotten “really serious.” “And we made a pact at that point to make a movie that we both liked and could get behind. Because I would rather make a movie that I believed in and it fails — because at least it’s what I wanted — rather than something that I didn’t really believe in and have people go, eh.”
No ehs here. KPop Demon Hunters is both a globe-spanning hit (the biggest Netflix original movie ever) and an Oscar nominee, for best animated feature and best original song. It’s such a phenomenon that Kang says pretty much every one of those in-jokes has been spotted and dissected endlessly online.
“Everybody has found everything,” she tells me, saying she’s particularly proud of small touches like the girls putting on slippers indoors or even the details of the cobblestones on the streets. “In animation, you have to build everything — a set doesn’t exist. Everything is a certain color because an artist decided that it should be that color. All the choices for everything are intentional, and it’s really great that everyone’s picking up on it.”
On today’s episode of the podcast, you can hear Kang talk about even more of those choices she’s particularly proud of, how much time she and the team spent stressing over one seemingly throwaway joke and how she fought to keep the breakout characters Derpy Tiger and Sussie as minimal figures in the story — and silent. (“We were very proud in the early test screenings that when we asked young kids who the main character is, they didn’t say Derpy — they said Rumi and the girls.”)
The podcast kicks off with an Oscar race check-in with me and Christopher Rosen, and then Chris and I reunite with returning guest — our former boss! — Mike Hogan, who returned from Sundance with even more hope about the indie film business than you might expect. We talk about the festival’s breakout successes like The Invite and Josephine, and why so much of the Sundance nostalgia we’ve been reading this past week — as longtimers mourn the end of the Park City, Utah era — might be missing the point of the fest's mission entirely.
Hear it all on today’s podcast, and for even more, don’t forget to subscribe to Prestige Junkie After Party, where we drop exclusive bonus episodes every Friday that go even deeper into awards season. See you there!