‘Gill’ director Ahn Jae-huun forges distinctly Korean animation identity 

A colleague once told animator Ahn Jae-huun that Korean dramas had stolen the wallets of Japanese fans, but Japanese animation would steal the souls of Korean children. That line has haunted him for more than two decades — and his new animated feature “Gill,” which opened in theaters Wednesday, is his latest answer to it.

Ahn heard the remark while working on spinoff shorts for the drama “Winter Sonata” (2006) in the early 2000s, not long after he began his career as an animator in 1992. The comment stung enough that it became, in his words, a driving force: He has spent the years since trying to keep the visual language of Hollywood and Japan's Studio Ghibli from creeping into his own work, studying how Koreans move and how Korean landscapes look so he could build something that was recognizably his country's own.

That project has taken him from short spinoffs of dramas like “I'm Sorry, I Love You” (2006) and “Winter Sonata” to feature-length adaptations of Korean literature — “The Shower” (2017) and “The Shaman Sorceress” (2021) among them — and now to “Gill,” based on author Gu Byeong-mo's “The Boy with Gills” (2011). 

A version of “Gill” was screened at festivals in 2024, but he spent two more years revising it based on audience reactions before it was ready for theatrical release. It had already played the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France, London FrightFest, the Tokyo International Film Festival and the Taichung International Animation Festival in Taiwan.

Now, a day before “Gill's” release, Ahn was in his studio, tucked at the foot of Mount Namsan in Jung District, central Seoul, that seemed closer to a wizard's cottage in the woods than a downtown office — his expression carrying a mix of nerves and anticipation. 

“Gill” follows Gon, a boy thrown into deep water as a child who survives when gills sprout on his neck, and who grows up in the home of an elderly man living by a river. Jung Hae-in provides the voice for Gon; Yoo Jae-myung voices the old man; Kang Ha-neul voices the old man's grandson, Gangha; and Lee Chung-ah voices a woman named Haeryu who becomes entangled with them.

“Both I and my staff loved the original novel,” Ahn said. “The protagonist has an extraordinary ability because of his gills, but he lives an ordinary life. He's isolated because he's different from everyone else, and yet underwater is the one place he can fully enjoy what makes him unique — that felt like it would translate well into animation.”

Water is the film's central symbol: a source of life, but also where people, weighed down by hardship, lose theirs. Gon was abandoned in the water, but it's also the water that gave him the gills that let him breathe. “There's a complete happiness that comes from the feeling of being cut off from the world once you're underwater,” Ahn said. “The gills do end up saving a life at one point, but I saw their deeper meaning in this film as something that lets him find peace with himself in the water, more than as a rescue ability.”

Ahn put significant work into research before animating. Looking for a way to closely observe how people move underwater, he found a large aquarium studio at the Seongsu-dong neighborhood in Seongdong District, eastern Seoul, that shoots underwater wedding photography and cast people to film from multiple angles. To study the movement of water droplets, he set up a camera in front of a bathtub and repeatedly submerged himself and resurfaced. For the character Haeryu, he leaned heavily on the input of young female staff members, down to her clothing and how she moved. The studio also expanded beyond its usual analog process to bring in 3-D animation techniques, working through 1,125 scenes over roughly two years.

He made one bold change from the source material: The novel is set in a region of Gyeonggi, on the outskirts of Seoul, but Ahn moved the story to the Seine River in Paris. “The setting never really stood out to me when I read the book,” he said. “The poverty and isolation in the Korean landscape of the original have already shown up plenty in live-action films, so I didn't think animation needed to repeat that. I wondered what would happen if I took Paris — a place many people travel to in order to forget the sorrows of real life — and did the opposite, folding those sorrows back into it.” Saxophone by musician Lee Jeong-seon on the soundtrack adds a weighty texture to the foreign backdrop.

“Animation is a field that takes a long accumulation of time and experience,” Ahn said. “We still have a long way to go, but I believe the path we're on will become part of the history of Korean animation.”

BY JEONG EUN-HYE [[email protected]]