Bad tigers, bad monsters: What is holding Korean CGI back?

Na Hong-jin’s sci-fi thriller “Hope” opened at the Cannes Film Festival in May to divided responses. It seemed critics could agree on one thing, though: The film's computer-generated monsters were, frankly, terrible.

“Bad CGI,” Variety blasts in its review’s headline. “Slightly disappointing when we finally see [the creature],” the BBC’s film critic says. “Thanks to some substandard CGI, ‘Hope’ often resembles a video game.”

“Some of the worst creature effects this side of the Syfy Channel or 'The Mummy Returns,'” writes David Ehrlich for IndieWire, referring to the U.S. cable channel focused on science fiction programming. “It’s like if Dr. Alan Grant got to Jurassic Park and instead of a photorealistic Brachiosaurus, he was greeted by Corey Stoll’s M.O.D.O.K. from ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.'” 

Na seemingly acknowledged the film's poorly received CGI in an interview in Cannes, France, after its screening, saying the movie was "not completely finished" and that the production team will keep refining the film until its box office release. "Hope" is set to premiere in theaters on July 15 in Korea and in September in North America.

Has VFX lost its edge?

Criticism of the film’s CGI served as another rude awakening for Korea’s visual effects (VFX) industry,  which had appeared to enter a new era with the dazzling spaceship chases of “Space Sweepers” (2021) and the alien robots and miniature prison cells of “Alienoid” (2022).

After all, the country's VFX — the process of creating or altering imagery beyond what is captured during live-action filming — has come a long way. Who can forget the snake-like creatures in “D-War” (2007), then promoted as a high-water mark for Korean film technology; or Ha Ji-won appearing conspicuously detached from the background as she raced a motorcycle in “Sector 7” (2011)?

A 2022 study of Korean VFX history by Hong Jin-hyuk, currently professor at the Pusan National University Film Institute, identifies three industrial turning points: “The Host” (2006), which exposed Korea’s limited production scale and reliance on overseas expertise; “Haeundae” (2009), which gave domestic studios experience completing large-scale effects; and “Mr. Go” (2013), whose fully computer-generated lead helped lay the groundwork for the domestic VFX pipeline behind films such as the “Along With the Gods” series (2017-18).

Against that progress came, this year, the CGI creatures in “Hope” and the tiger in “The King’s Warden,” now the country’s second-most-watched film, which viewers widely criticized as unrealistic and stiffly animated.

An industry in limbo

Kang Yun-geuk, an industry veteran and professor in Sejong University’s Department of Comics and Animation Technology, estimates that Korea remains “at least three years” behind Hollywood, the global industry benchmark. 

Kang made the assessment by comparing the current capabilities of Korean studios with the real-time, generative AI-powered de-aging — one of the most technically demanding in VFX — used on Tom Hanks and other actors in “Here” (2024), largely produced in 2023.

“A top-tier Korean studio would still need at least two more years to reproduce it using its own proprietary technology,” said Kang, who has worked as chief technology officer at Wysiwyg Studio, a CG supervisor at Dexter Studios and as a CG artist at Sony Pictures and Walt Disney.

His assessment of a roughly five-year technological gap suggests the industry has not moved far beyond where it stood in 2018, when an industry survey by the Korean Film Council (Kofic) rated Korea’s CG and special-effects capabilities at 66.7 percent of those in the United States, or a lag of 5.6 years.

What's keeping Korean CGI behind?

Kang pointed to a "long-standing practice" of Korean studios allocating insufficient time and budget to VFX.

“As production budgets grow, the share allocated to CGI should grow with them. But there is still a long-held assumption that, ‘Isn’t this about all we need to spend on CGI?’” he said.

He added that Korea’s relatively short history with CGI has left directors more prone to making changes on set, disrupting the precise planning that VFX work requires, and making last-minute changes ahead of release that strained artists' schedules.

The tiger in “The King’s Warden” was refined for streaming after the film’s theatrical release, which director Jang Hang-jun said had been moved up, leaving the production team short on time.

Kang, who sat in on meetings and reviewed the VFX workflow for “Hope,” said the film faced a similar situation. The movie's effects were produced by Westworld, a domestic firm whose portfolio includes Netflix show "The Silent Sea" (2021) and film "Exhuma" (2023).

By contrast, Hollywood’s powerful unions and stricter contractual relationships with outside firms make last-minute changes more difficult. Productions therefore plan more meticulously during the development, production-planning and preproduction stages, running simulations in advance and executing only what was originally planned.

Besides, in Hollywood’s more competitive system, where films are routinely distributed worldwide, the effects would have faced far greater scrutiny before being approved, Kang said.

“If ‘The King’s Warden’ had been made in Hollywood, it never would have been released,” he said. “The distributors would have looked at the tiger and said, ‘We can’t put this out. We’d be ridiculed.’”

Some also point to a demand-side problem: Because Korean audiences do not necessarily choose films for their visual effects, studios often have little incentive to prioritize VFX spending over other elements.

In a 2025 survey of 3,000 people by Kofic and the Korea Productivity Center, respondents gave visual and special effects an importance score of 3.3 out of 5 when choosing a movie. That trailed cast, at 3.6, and genre and subject matter, which tied for the highest score at 4.0.  

"Domestic audiences consider other elements more important and tend to be fairly forgiving of CG quality,” said film critic Youn Sung-eun. But they "still have a discerning eye for good visual effects,” she said, adding that it is especially true of genres like science fiction and horror, where VFX does much of the world-building. 

She rated Korean CGI as “not yet on par with the United States, but good enough not to be distracting."

'Invest for survival'

And while Hollywood studios have larger budgets overall, Kang pointed to a deeper problem: Korean studios’ failure to invest enough in technology and human resources. He noted that public listings had allowed major VFX companies to raise capital, improve working conditions and attract better-trained staff compared to a decade ago.

Dexter Studios, the company behind “Along With the Gods” and “Space Sweepers,” became Korea’s first VFX studio to list on the Kosdaq in 2015. Other major firms followed, including Wysiwyg Studios in 2018 and M83 in 2024.

But in Kang’s view, the firms have invested only a "modest amount” in technology and talent, while focusing more heavily on acquisitions, share prices and other financial concerns. As workers leave to launch their own companies, pursue listings and eventually cash out, capital and expertise become even more fragmented.

At the large studios, “only a small number of stakeholders reap the benefits, while employees are left feeling relatively deprived,” he said, which has led to "much of the industry’s best talent leaving."

Korea has an umbrella union that represents workers in the sector, but no union dedicated specifically to VFX artists.

"It's not like Hollywood is making the investments because it has money to spare. Studios are making them to survive,” Kang said. “Korea needs to start making those investments now,  to create a sustainable cycle [for long-term industry health]."

BY KIM JU-YEON [[email protected]]