The writer/director of the smash Netflix animated musical, honored at last month’s SCAD AnimationFest, talks about the film’s exploration of identity, acceptance and found family and how that resonated with him as one of the film’s creators.
When KPop Demon Hunters co-writer/co-director Chris Appelhans took the stage at SCAD AnimationFest last month to receive his and Maggie Kang’s Impact Award, he had three pieces of advice for students after, “Animation is the fucking best.”
“Make the movies that you want to see,” he says. “Tell the stories that feel true to you. And anything is possible.”
Following his award speech, Appelhans sat in on a KPop Demon Hunters screening where SCAD students sang loud and cheered even louder. The film, which has been out since June and is now the Number 1 film on Netflix, still surprises Appelhans with its impact on viewers.
“It's so surprising and wonderful every time,” says Appelhans in an interview with AWN following the event. “The intensity is shocking. But these things are such a crazy collaboration and animation students know that, above all. They know what a personal and time-consuming and painful process it is to write and draw and animate and light. And so, I think they see the effort of the movie in a different lens than the general audience. And they celebrate it in a different way, as lovers of this medium and people who want to do it as a job one day. So, I think there's an extra connection there. And it feels really good to see them connect to both aspects of the film.”
Appelhans’ award presentation and KPop Demon Hunters screening was the closing event of SCAD’s annual three-day animation celebration; this year’s slate also including a “Legends of Animation” award presentation for Phineas and Ferb co-creators Dan Povenmire and Jeff ‘Swampy’ Marsh and special SCADshow theater panels for Prime Video’s The Mighty Nein, Warner Bros’ Bat-Fam, Crunchyroll’s Let’s Play and more. While the enthusiasm flowed a-plenty for all the festival events, SCADshow had never before hosted so many screaming HUNTR/X enthusiasts and glow stick wand wavers as they did the final night of festival.
“I remember when we got to watch the final movie and the final mix on the big stage at Sony,” remembers Appelhans. “We were all pretty high by the end of that. We were all euphoric.”
It’s a high that keeps getting higher. Kang and Appelhans’ Sony Pictures Animation film – which follows a Korean girl band as they balance their duties of becoming famous K-pop idols with demon hunting and saving the world – has reigned as the top film streaming on Netflix, breaking previous viewing records. Not only that, but the film’s fictional girl band HUNTR/X has also hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, the first all-women collective to achieve this feat since Destiny’s Child in 2001. The song that landed them there, “Golden,” was also performed live by HUNTR/X singers EJAE, Audrey Nuna, and REI AMI on The Tonight’s Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, where the trio was awarded with a Platinum Record.
But amidst all the awards and record-breaking milestones, Appelhans says it’s the smaller moments of impact that stick with him.
“I was really surprised when Audrey Nuna talked about how even though she loved her character and loved the songs, it was when she saw the characters eating Korean food on screen that she started crying,” says Appelhans. “This film’s impact does take so many different forms and some of them are deeply emotional.”
Appelhans has his own deeply emotional connection to the film’s exploration of identity, acceptance and found family.
“I grew up in a very small, very religious town, and I had a couple people close to me who were in the closet,” says Appelhans. “And, in both cases, their family really loved them, except for this one thing about them. But that really hurt them forever. Eventually, they found a place in the world where they could have unconditional love. They found people who would love them. All of them. Knowing what they went through and knowing that pain of feeling like there's a part of you that's not okay, but you know so deeply that you can't change it, but you're being told that it shouldn't be there, really added a connection to this project for me.”
He adds, “So, when we were writing our main character Rumi and thinking about how, in act three, she goes to the place that's raised her and she tries to get that unconditional love but fails, we thought it made sense to have her then go, ‘I have to go create my own honeymoon, one that has room for all of me in it.’ I think that's what so many people have had to do. They had to find their way to live.”
Not everyone’s struggles are the same. Certainly, very few have faced Rumi’s challenge of battling with half-demon blood. But families and friendships have been divided over far less.
Sometimes, the thing that isolates us from our peers is merely our interests, such as K-pop, downing spicy ramen or eating a sushi roll in one bite.
“My wife, Maurene Goo, grew up in the 80s and that was stuff that you hid,” shares Appelhans. “Maurene is one of the first Korean American voices in Young Adult literature. She's been writing for 15 years and is very smart and funny and weird and angry and vengeful and loves food and loves fashion. When Maggie told me about her vision of these girls for the film, she described Maurene, and I was like, ‘Oh, I can help you.’ Maggie says that she made the movie she and 12-year-old Maggie wanted to see. And I think I did the same. I made the movie I wanted to see, but I also made the movie that 12-year-old Maurene would have wanted to see.”
And that includes the “couch, couch, couch” scene, where the HUNTR/X idols trade their bejeweled leather for plush bathrobes to lounge on the couch and stuff their faces with junk food. Basically, living the dream.
“Sometimes it takes 20 years of sharing a life for a person to show you all of themselves, but my Maurene was always like, ‘You are going to love me in my pajama pants. You're going to love me when I'm spilling ramen all over myself. And you're also going to love me when I'm looking all cool and awesome,’” shares Appelhans, who has been married to Goo since 2012. “It’s a lot of lived experience together that I tapped into for this film. I was really happy that she liked the movie. And I loved seeing these 10-year-old girls looking at Rumi, Mira, and Zoey and seeing these characters be cool and weird and think, ‘Cool. I'm going to be awesome and weird too because I get to be both.’”
As for the friends from Appelhans’ hometown, they’ve also seen the film.
“One of them actually reached out after they saw it,” says Appelhans. “They didn’t get too specific, but they told me it meant a lot and, yeah, that meant a lot to me too. There are a lot of feelings hidden under the surface of this film.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
