Maggie Kang (head of story on The LEGO Ninjago Movie) and Chris Appelhans (director of Wish Dragon) direct Sony Pictures Animation’s new energetic action and music-filled feature KPop Demon Hunters, which premieres this Friday June 20th on Netflix. There’s a lot on the line for a girl group with layers of special powers. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: Maggie, we have had a lot of films lately with these concert scenes in them, from “Trap” to “Hurry Up Tomorrow”, the Taylor Swift movie. The concert scenes of the girl group Huntrix in this are incredible. How did you craft these and wanna bring us into this world with those concert sequences?

Maggie Kang: Well first off, we made our arenas gigantic because we were like, “Well, it’s animation. How do we plus what real life can do?” It was a stadium that could fit like 400,000 people. They were just massive. We wanted to showcase the scale and spectacle that we can create an animation. We wanted to make it big and loud and glittery.

JM: You succeed with that for sure. It is bold. This whole movie is bold. And Chris, I love that when it comes to the editing and the overall flare, it’s very modern, it’s very contemporary and very youthful. Did you have all of that in mind as you were making this?

Chris Appelhans: So much of the sources of inspiration, whether it’s pop music videos or K-Dramas… in terms of trying to mash up influences that are, to me, they’re contemporary and their living in all of art and younger generation’s set of influences, but they haven’t all made their way into animation up to this point. Organically, whether it’s a music video that’s done at music video pace, and you give that to a board artist with a great song and you say, “Let’s conceive of this rhythmically and editorially”, you end up with a certain vibe and tempo. And in other cases it’s a scene of the girls talking and joking and being silly, and that has its own set of inspirations from K-Dramas that the board artist draws on. Organically the kind of territory we were trying to cover invited these different paces, all of which felt pretty fresh. And we had a great editor who was able to move between those tones and somehow not make it feel jarring and like different movies.

JM: It works really well. It’s a great experience. And Maggie, for Rumi, Mira and Zoey, what does it mean for them to be demon hunters? It seems like an interesting, unique responsibility that they have. And how did you wanna explore what this responsibility and all this means to them?

MK: When we first meet the girls, they’re all kind of not sure that they should be… helmers of this centuries’ long legacy of these extraordinary women. They all feel like they kind of don’t belong or didn’t belong from where they came from. And when they became Huntrix, the Huntrix group meant more to them than actually being a demon hunter. So I think for them, this group dynamic, if they lost that they would kind of lose themselves and lose everything. So we really wanted to create a story where all three girls just wanted each other and Huntrix being a place where they belonged. So I think the demon hunting is kind of, “Yeah, we do that, but we’re all about Huntrix.”

JM: Chris, I like the rivalry you show between Huntrix and the boy group, The Saja Boys. How did you enjoy playing that up?

CA: It was obviously fun to have a kind of superficial public stage to do battle on, knowing that there’s all this other stuff going on behind the scenes between the groups, between certain characters. It’s also sort of a part of actual fandom that people stan different groups and fight over them. And it was fun to be able to kind of, because they’re fictional groups, they could just go at each other, and it didn’t feel like we were gonna offend anybody. And at the same time, there’s a certain charisma and believability that you needed those two groups to have. It felt like, above all, the most important thing about that competition was the boys’ song. However maybe annoyingly catchy, it had to be actually really good, and when they danced, they had to be actually really good, and the girls had to be good too. So you felt like, “Oh, this is cool. I get to watch two legitimate…” It’s like two really good boxers going at it in the ring, and that kept the stakes high. It felt more believable that fans could be won by one side or the other. That’s just a testament to all the hard work of the songwriting and the animators and the choreography.

JM: Maggie, you spend several years on a movie like this and you have these big songs, and I have to imagine they have to be earworms. They have to be stuck in your head, but for good reason. As you’re editing and looking at it and going frame by frame, note by note… Is it really that minute of hearing the songs over and over again in the process?

MK: Oh yeah. You just get different songs stuck in your head at different parts of production. Whatever is being shipped that week, that’s the song in your head. But it told us that the songs were good ’cause we didn’t get sick of them. These songs are really great and they can live up to all the other pop songs that exist out there.

JM: Chris, there are a lot of quick movements, not just in the action sequences, but in a lot of the comedic moments as well.

CA: I think we took a lot of inspiration from sort of doing the unexpected, especially with the girls. I think with the boys too, but kind of setting up a cool expectation and then subverting it. They’re so badass and then they’re being so goofy and they’re chowing down and they’re making faces and wearing stupid pants. Trying to always kind of do the unexpected and subvert the cliche was really helpful, and it gave everybody fuel to work with. And then when it comes to the aesthetic of choreography, that was something we felt was really important. It’s very easy for animated choreography to feel kind of mo-capy and lifeless. And so a lot of the animation work, incredible animators… if it’s snappy, it needs to be snappier than in real life. If it’s fluid, it needs to be more fluid. And that came all the way back to breaking down these girls as personalities who have different styles of dancing, different strengths and weaknesses as performers, and that had to get channeled into their performances to make it feel believable and eye candy and the way that great choreography should be when it’s animated.

JM: Ken Jeong voices [Huntrix] manager Bobby. Maggie, what surprised you about working with him?

MK: It was so fun. We were just riffing, and he laughed at some of my jokes, which was great. You can go in there with script pages, but you just write things on the fly and he was improvising a lot and we were making each other laugh. So we found a lot of that comedy in that room when we were working together.

CA: I was really impressed too with his desire to think about the character and, and say, “Okay, I know this is how you’re doing the character. This one part feels like… I’ve seen it before. And I want to do something a little different. I want to bring, whether it’s the style of the joke, or maybe subverting what was previously a silly moment by making it a genuine moment. He was trying to understand the character in a legit way, and I felt like that brought a different flavor to Bobby and gave him a little more depth.

JM: And Chris, after making this and “Wish Dragon”… it’s Bold Storytelling at Sony Pictures Animation. What do you love about what Sony stands for in the animation space in 2025?

CA: I think the culture of the studio has really impressed me in the sense that “KPop” couldn’t be more different from something like “Wish Dragon”, and that’s why I wanted to do it. I wanted to do something completely different… on every level. And I feel like in every department, from the studio leadership down to the animators, down to the CFX artists… there’s a kind of passion and rigor for, “Give us a challenge. Throw down a new gauntlet. Let’s do something different every time.” And by saying there is no house style, that becomes the house style. In a world where audiences are seeking stuff that feels fresh and unique, I think that’s such a smart identity to have. And you can only do that if you recruit and retain really talented artists who have a passion to basically figure out the crazy stuff that people like us throw at them.

JM: I feel like this is the kind of movie that’s gonna have a global appeal because of the mass appeal of “KPop”, but also on social media. Do you have that feeling as well?

CA: That’s our hope.

MK: Yeah, that’s our hope.

CA: I think we tried to make… all the characters feel real, both pop stars and offscreen, so that people can fall in love with them the way you do other KPop stars.

MK: And we really wanted to have this movie be entertaining all the way through. Every scene that we put into production… we just wanted it to be the best that it could be, and as entertaining as it could be.