The Korea Herald – Weekender Edition (Nov. 7–9, 2025)
The patient craftsman’s Korean canvas
Animator Ahn Jae-huun discusses hand-drawn sensibility, building a distinctly Korean visual language
By Moon Ki-hoon, Korea Herald Correspondent
SHARJAH, United Arab Emirates — Time slowed down in Sharjah. The emirate’s film festival moved at its own languid pace, with long gaps between screenings and plenty of empty hours to fill. Ahn Jae-huun, there as a juror for the animation competition, had just come back from a local museum when we sat down to talk.
“I saw this Chinese mother and her little boy at the museum today,” he says. “The kid was bouncing around everywhere, totally restless. And I thought: It’s totally fine that you’re like that right now. Someday, all these images you’re seeing will seep into whatever work you do.”
That’s how Ahn sees the world — everything feeds into the creative process. At 56, he’s spent 33 years in the Korean animation industry, and his studio’s name, Meditation With a Pencil, captures his approach. He still draws by hand, on actual paper, before his staff scans the images into digital files.
In an industry where Japanese anime and Hollywood studios dominate and Korean works still struggle for recognition, the studio has carved out a recognizable style rooted in Korea’s own landscapes and stories. His breakthrough work, Green Days, which took 10 years to finish, reconstructed the textures of 1970s and 80s Korea. Then came his adaptations of early modern Korean literary classics, an endeavor that culminated in the 2020 feature, The Shaman Sorceress. The work won a special jury prize at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival that year.
He has been expanding his scope since. His latest, Gill, a fairy-tale premise about a boy who sprouts gills after being tossed into water, premiered at Annecy last year with a Korean release date still pending.
At a time when trends and tastes shift every season, there’s something almost stubborn about Ahn’s path. But it’s definitely built something unmistakable — less about nostalgia than the conviction behind it.
Q. You’ve focused so much on adapting Korean classical literature. That seems like the harder road.
A. There were two paths, to quote Robert Frost’s poem. One that everyone takes, where content reaches its goals and makes money. The other is the road less traveled. Adapting Korean classical literature into animation was definitely the road not taken.
It’s not exactly a smart choice commercially. The studio does ambitious projects too, but the literary adaptations — that’s where my sense of obligation to the community really lies. I’ve gotten so much support from society over the years. I was the first animator to receive a Korean Film Council grant. I feel like I owe something back to the country.
Q. It sounds like more than just gratitude, though.
A. Korean animation missed a crucial period. From the 1900s to the early 2000s, when global content industries were taking off, we were stuck doing outsourcing work for American and Japanese studios. I wanted to fill that gap with these works, to connect the dots.
It’s the same thing I felt at the museum today. If animators here turned their history into films, Korean audiences could watch and understand how those people lived and loved. Animation erases barriers like that. My films might not do well at the box office, but they can help international audiences understand Korea. That matters to me.
Q. How did you end up sticking with hand-drawn animation all these years?
A. When I was young, I just loved paper and pencil. But later it became more strategic. We don’t have Hollywood’s capital or the history and diversity of Japanese anime. So what can we offer that’s unique? Craftsmanship is what others judge. Sincerity is what I can judge in myself — my own hard work. I figured the best way to show sincerity was to draw every frame by hand.
There’s also the sensibility — the specific rhythm that defines a director’s work. In 2D animation, the director’s feel goes directly into the timing of movement. Japanese animators each have distinct rhythms because they came up through 2D. Same with American animation. When you start with 2D, a country’s animation develops its own qualities. With 3D, it becomes more capital-driven, and everything starts looking the same.
Q. How have your staff handled your old-school approach?
A. I appreciate them for putting up with it. They take my pencil drawings, scan them, then continue the work digitally. That’s inconvenient for them, but they recognize the value in that approach. These days, they’re actually teaching me digital techniques — now I’m learning backwards.
Q. Your recent projects seem different — “Gill” and an upcoming remake of John Woo’s action flick “A Better Tomorrow.” What changed?
A. I’m always slow to adapt. When I first started in animation, I’d see others pick things up quickly, but I hated copying or making something work just by accident. I needed to fully understand it, to completely control it before moving forward.
With Korean landscapes and people, I wanted to focus intensely on getting that right first before expanding.
With Gill, my staff actually gave me the character design. We’re working more collaboratively now. It’s not me being magnanimous — we arrive at answers together through discussion, and the staff has grown to that point.
A Better Tomorrow, that’s more of a commissioned project. At first, I thought: John Woo’s direction is already so animated, why adapt it? But then I realized something. Right now, everything from Korea tends to get lumped under the K-label — K-pop, K-this, K-that. Taking on A Better Tomorrow felt like stripping away that label and doing something that could move all of Asia. The original is a shared text, but a Korean director is making it, and the settings might include Japan and other places.
Older Koreans who loved Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s and 90s — they have no memory of Korean animation. But if we bring them something like A Better Tomorrow, maybe we can create a new memory and expand who can connect with Korean animation.
Q. People often say Korean animation lacks a distinctive identity. What do you make of that?
A. When foreigners think of Japanese animation, they immediately think of Studio Ghibli, of Makoto Shinkai. There’s an impression, a distinct identity. Korea didn’t have that. That’s why I was grateful when people abroad said they recognized my works as distinctly Korean — not some offshoot of Japanese animation.
Having an impression isn’t enough, though. For a country’s animation industry to thrive, young animators need clear choices. They need to be able to say: I want to work at this studio because of that director’s philosophy and visual style. Korea never had that continuity — no director stuck around long enough.
Some animators at our studio now say Green Days was what made them want to tell stories like that, with that aesthetic. That’s how it works in any field — people need role models.
Q. What does that require from you as a director?
A. If I’d wavered or changed my attitude, the staff would have no reason to work with me. But when you meet people whose commitment exceeds even the value of the work itself, that’s when this profession becomes sacred. It’s different from box office success — it’s about something else entirely.
At the studio’s anniversary recently, I told my staff they’re the only people I’d want at my funeral. I used to think I’d hate anyone coming to my funeral. But them? They’ve worked with me, worried with me, helped draw Korea’s landscapes. They are welcome to come.
Q. What are your thoughts on new technology, especially AI?
A. I’ve lived through every format shift you can imagine. I’ve watched LP records become cassettes become CDs become MP3s become apps. I’ve used mechanical pencils, fountain pens, typewriters even.
AI is nothing like I’ve ever seen. Whether it’s 3D or 2D, traditional animation takes the same basic time. The budget and level of detail might differ, but the human effort is similar. AI radically cuts that timeline — and that changes everything about how we work.
A character that took two weeks to draw and revise now takes a day, and the satisfaction is incredibly high. In the past, you’d know the staff member dreamed about that character for weeks, so you’d choose your feedback carefully. With AI, we can be brutally honest about it. We can put this third party between us and say: This looks terrible. Doesn’t this drawing look awful? And we laugh about it together.
We haven’t gotten to the point where it handles movement and direction yet — other places are doing that, generating everything from character to motion at once. But for now, I think giving audiences fully controlled movement is still our responsibility as animators.
Q. So you still see value in what humans can bring?
A. The feel of a person going into the movement is crucial. It’s the same as my staff putting up with the inconvenience of my pencil drawings. How do we get human qualities to blend into AI? Our team is ahead on this because we’ve been testing it for six or eight months now.
One of my staff told me: You’ve worked your way up from paper, so audiences will see AI as a new challenge from you, not a shortcut. And because we know what goes into the work — what sincerity looks like regardless of the tools — we can experiment with it. The team wasn’t too anxious about being replaced. From the start, they wanted to figure out how to use it well.
Q. Going forward, what’s your vision for the films you want to make?
A. I can’t make everyone come see my films, but I want people who do come to remember them for years to come. I used to focus more on animation for adults. Now I’m thinking about what people call “family films” — though I think that term encompasses everything. A song for children, philosophy for young adults, a life story for the elderly. That’s what family films should be. I want to make at least one more like that before I’m done.
SHARJAH, United Arab Emirates — Time slowed down in Sharjah. The emirate's film festival moved at its own languid pace, with long gaps between screenings and pl
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