Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans are the directors behind Netflix’s animated phenomenon KPop Demon Hunters. Introducing the world to demon hunting K-pop girl group Huntr/x, the film debuted on Netflix in late June and received two sing-along theatrical releases in late August and over Halloween weekend. It’s not difficult to understand how this film became one of the biggest streaming and theatrical hits of the year. In this interview with The Contending, Kang and Appelhans reveal their dedication to creating real women for the screen combined with beautiful animated choreography. They also understand how collaborative animation is based on their debut directorial feature jointly.
The Contending: One of the biggest compliments this film has gotten is that our heroes are so well-rounded. They are great fighters, but they are goofy, they get weird crushes, they eat noodles very intently. How did you guys go about making them so grounded?
Maggie Kang: I think they are all versions of myself. That was one of the tentpole ideas for the film and in the initial pitch was girls who were messy and were not afraid to look silly. I just wanted to see real women represented on screen, especially in animation where we have a tendency to want only beautiful women. I really wanted to break that.
The Contending: This film has musical numbers combined with fighting motifs. As directors, was there any serious difficulty crafting those sequences?
Chris Appelhans: I think it was often a chicken and egg challenge with the choreography beats we wanted to hit off the action and the music. Fortunately we had a temp track so we chose a tempo of the song early on and committed to that so we could build a rhythm to the sequence and the action. Then when we brought our final music in we could respond to that but not be completely resetting all the editorial rhythm of the sequence. Then it really became about an amazing animation team at Sony that really embraced the ways that you could overlap character and action and musical performance.
The Contending: Chris, this is your second film, and Maggie, this is your first film. What was that like for both of you and how was your collaboration?
Maggie Kang: It was quite the film to be my first directing. It was like the equivalent of directing at least two films I would say because of the music sequences. Every one of our scenes, and even the lyrics to our songs has so much subtext, needing to do two or three things at once. I have worked on many, many films throughout my career but this was without a doubt the most challenging story I’ve been involved with. But you know I won’t know any other way! I think I compared it to having twins. I’ve never had twins but I can imagine with twins you just juggle two things at once. I do think it is setting me up for bigger challenges.
Chris Appelhans: Yeah, I think for me one of the one of the most revealing things about the first movie I directed was just what a creative collaboration animation is. I already knew it from years of working in it, but being in the director’s chair you come to realize how important the other core members of your team are. An example from my first film, Maggie’s husband Radford Sechrist was one of my head stories and he was such a critical creative partner in figuring out the story and the comedy. So I came away from that film feeling like these things are really the product of probably 10 or 12 people’s brains deep inside the team. So when Maggie told me about her idea I was, like, oh, I love this idea, and I feel like I have really interesting things to bring to the film but I also knew I had to take my ego out of it because I knew it was going to take a lot of smart people to execute on this idea. That is the thrilling thing about collaboration, because at that point the movie is telling you what it wants to be and you’re kind of servants to that. I think that’s how our collaboration was so seamless, as we just really wanted to make the same movie and saw the same decisions through the same lens.
KPop Demon Hunters streams exclusively on Netflix.
