One Last Monster: Exploring Independent Animation With Gene Kim

My university’s animation program was woefully underfunded. With a faculty of two professors and a classroom capacity of roughly twenty students, my peers often bemoaned the shortage of tools and the exorbitant costs of computer programs.

Yet their passion for the medium disregarded any despair at the shortage of resources. No matter how bleary-eyed we were from countless all-nighters, our eyes always brimmed with excitement as we shared our projects and awaited the next assignment. On our first day of the program, everyone expressed their reasons for choosing animation and what fueled them. Many had grown up with Disney animation and proclaimed it was their dream job. Others wanted to go into video games or TV animation.

“I want to create more opportunities for Asian diaspora creators,” I’d said. “As nice as it is to have characters of color in animation, I think it’s important to have creators of color behind the scenes.”

I didn’t say how I secretly felt pessimistic about making this dream a reality, as I knew larger studios banked on marketability to sell toys before anything else. Even if more diverse creators rose to prominence, how far could their creativity and innovation go before being stifled and made palatable to white audiences? How many times would they be told their perspectives were too alienating?

The animation professor I had the next semester made me realize how narrow it was to rely solely on larger animation studios like Disney or DreamWorks. She rarely referenced them in her lectures on artistic mediums and expression. Instead, she played independently-made animation during lectures—short films experimenting with different art styles and mediums, exploring mature themes, and unconventional storytelling methods. Although she never disparaged storytelling formulas popular with mainstream animation, she encouraged us to broaden our horizons and consider how much more we could explore in independent, smaller studios. I began to reconsider how I’d felt that first day of class and what diverse creators could achieve in independent animation.

Gene Kim’s animated short One Last Monster brought back the memory of watching those experimental short films as a student. In the Korean-inspired fantasy world of Adin, the protagonist Empress Eura must overcome her prejudices of a perceived monster to save her country while confronting its history. Despite it not having a particularly large budget or crew, something about the film’s worldbuilding and premise spoke to me. It was refreshing to see an Asian American creator envision a land influenced by his own culture, rather than an awkward amalgamation of East Asian cultures. Furthermore, although it could be enjoyed by audiences of all ages, One Last Monster dealt with themes of prejudice in a more somber way than is typically present in family-geared media. To me, it exemplified the worlds creators of color could explore in independent animation.

In our interview, Kim describes to me his filmmaking process and the challenges of strengthening diversity in the animation industry.

What was your journey into animation like?

I’ve loved anime since I was a kid and I feel fortunate to have grown up with that wave of awesome anime in the late 80s/90s that was shown on Cartoon Network in the US. I had made live action films and videos throughout high school although I learned a lot about CG animation and VFX while doing so, inspired by the anime I had watched. 

It never occurred to me though to concentrate exclusively on animation until my junior year of college at NYU Tisch when I succeeded in landing an internship at Pixar that allowed me to work in all areas of their production pipeline. I went on to work at Disney’s Blue Sky Studios while creating original work as well on the side. 

I’d say that the process has always been laborious and long - whether working on independent projects or studio films. I’ve met some awesome people along the way though and they make the journey better. You still spend most of your time (or at least I do) wondering, “Can I actually finish this? Can I actually bring this into reality?” You’re talking on the scale of years often to finish things so it is a test of character to actually follow through on making things. 

I actually ran the NYC marathon in the middle of making One Last Monster and I found that all the pacing, patience and endurance I was employing to create animation actually carried over into running and made it much easier than I thought it would be.

Why did you choose to go into independent animation? How does the experience differ from working in big studios?

I think mostly because you just have freedom to talk about whatever you want as long as you make a quality film and tell a good story. Big studios (and God bless them because they still make great things) generally have less freedom to explore original, innovative or different ideas because it’s less risky to play it safe and tried-and-true ideas. It’s an understandable mentality - people have to pay the bills after all - but I find this a little ironic given that they have oceans of resources and financial backing. 

Ultimately, I think people want good content. We live in a world where thanks to YouTube and social media, videos with low production quality have gone viral while Hollywood mega blockbusters can tank. Now maybe it’s not valid to compare the two directly but the point is that it seems that now a great story can come from anywhere - not just from the big studios - and find an audience. I think that makes doing independent animation even more attractive and accessible to more creators - even if it is more difficult.

When did you decide you were ready to direct your own film? What aspect of this project made you confident this would resonate with audiences?

I’d made around a dozen short films before but nothing ever at the scale of One Last Monster. It was intimidating to think of creating something north of 20,000 frames with lots of characters, sets, etc. 

However, I felt that after having worked in and observed the production management strategies and tricks of the studios I worked at, I could apply these lessons to take on a bigger production. 

I also think reading and learning about the importance of story structure and storytelling principles from books like Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey and Robert McKee’s Story  was super important before doing something like Monster. 

I’m also very indebted to the amazing David Zung who teaches storyboarding at NYU and FIT for agreeing to critique my drafts of Monster on a weekly basis before I started animating. Big shout out to my awesome co-animator Elmer Barcenes, composers Lulu Chen and Cai Jhen Jhu, concept artist Eileen Kim and the rest of the team by the way for bringing this thing to completion.

I was pretty sure that the fantasy aspects of the story would find an audience, as well as the fact that there hasn’t been (to my knowledge) a big adventure epic like China’s Journey To The West in Korean history, so that seemed like an interesting sell. 

Although I started writing Monster before the 2016 US Election, I felt came to realize that the story’s theme about whether to trust or reject an outsider resonated with the unfortunate direction the global political conversation was taking towards building walls instead of bridges. My mother also died from cancer in 2015 and I wanted to process and channel that loss and so I felt that would hopefully provide another relatable emotional theme to explore.

This is all heavy stuff for sure! So I also made sure to balance out all the seriousness with some amusing animal characters like Prime Minister Oolong the Rabbit and General Bizzo the Bear - both of whom were based off of stuffed animals me and my brother grew up playing with. I'm very happy that in a way, Monster is simultaneously the most serious and most absurd thing I've ever made.

You’ve addressed wanting to explore themes of prejudice and hypocrisy in your film. What experiences led you to wanting to discuss these topics?

I grew up in the Korean church and although faith is still very much an important part of my life, I was always confused as a child as to why seemingly good people would become so prejudiced, behave so poorly or so inconsistently with their beliefs. This question very much extended to people outside the church as well and ultimately, I had to aim that same question at myself as I got older. 

A turning point for me came when I read Philip Yancey's Where Is God When It Hurts? sometime around 2013 and it struck me that what we think can be good for us can actually be bad. Conversely, things that we think of as bad for us can actually turn out to be good. As soon as I had this realization, I knew I had a potentially very twisty and dynamic story on my hands.

There’s a notable problem in Western animation where Asian diaspora writers at large are not given creative control over directing and writing stories about their own cultures. How did your experiences with your culture as a Korean American shape your creative decisions on how you depicted it in your film?

And it’s a real unfortunate problem for sure; hopefully it will change soon. I feel lucky because the whole process of learning about and reimagining the history, culture, art, etc of Korea felt like learning about something that was always part of me - and at the same time, allowing my creative influences and imagination to take that and go in new directions (while hopefully being as respectful as possible.) 

I think it allows you to have one foot grounded in reality and another one in imagination. I very much didn’t want to end up culturally appropriating anything and so this balance I think helped me navigate that. A good example of this is how actual Korean history influenced the story of Monster: 

The idea of an isolationist world based on Korea is inspired by the fact that in the 16th Century AD (if I remember my research correctly), Choseon dynasty Korea closed off itself from the outside world; probably tired of repeated invasions from the Chinese, Japanese, Mongols, etc. It dawned on me that modern day North Korea, with its isolationist rhetoric and nuclear arsenal, was in a way carrying on this old way of thinking. 

I thought that if you swapped out East Asian nations for mysterious alien powers and Korea for another planet, you could tell that same story in a new way - and I just ran with it.

When it comes to representation, do you feel it is more beneficial for marginalized creators to work independently for full creative control but reach a smaller audience, or to work on projects with bigger studios with a wider audience but with less creative control?

This is a really great question because there’s pros and cons to both approaches and there is a logic behind both. Larger studios do indeed have to comply with more marketing demands and so they have to appeal to as broad and general an audience as possible which threatens to water down representation or niche themes.

I like to think of an idea the author Simon Sinek explained in his great book Start With Why on marketing and building an audience. He seems to suggest that if you carefully examine the history of at all the popular products or services in our world, they seem to succeed not because they appeal to 100% of the general population but because they first appeal to a much smaller but hardcore slice of the market. 

The noise and passion that smaller slice or niche creates can then carry over into other sections of the market until it becomes much bigger and word of mouth spreads. A thousand super-fans has more reach and power than ten thousand people who aren’t passionate about something. This seems to really be the case with a lot of things. The big rock bands for example generally start off with a local fanbase that evolves into a regional, then national and ultimately international audience - but it doesn’t skip a step. 

I know with social media now and the internet things may be different but it makes sense to be true to yourself and not water down anything - while at the same time creating something accessible and of quality - and then beginning the long journey of finding your base of fans. It’s encouraging to see projects on Kickstarter and WebToons take off in a similar spirit. Granted, having the marketing and resources of a giant studio has to be absolutely amazing as well but one has to start somewhere.

Your film is inspired by both Asian and American media. Which particular shows/books/movies inspired you? What aspects of each did you incorporate into your film?

I've long admired stories that have both style and substance; things like Star Wars, Lord Of The Rings along with Studio Ghibli and Pixar films really helped me figure out how to try and create a story that has both. Evangelion, Akira and wuxia classics like Hero, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the aforementioned Journey To The West were also huge too for me. 

 There were even a few seemingly random films/TV shows that influenced me like Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, The Queen with Helen Mirren, Breaking Bad and the Walking Dead. These all featured characters struggling with moral problems and so that was a huge influence on this film. I also try to watch as many non-anime/animation things as possible to broaden what influences me. 

There’s a little bit of a Star Trek vibe in there as well along with some Dune. I also took tons of inspiration from the wild world building and art direction of the Final Fantasy games. I think it was really fun to try and create sci-fi/fantasy from an Asian perspective because it usually isn’t done that way in Western pop culture - and yet it very much also is indebted to Western sci fi as well. It really is an Asian American movie in a funny way. 

What’s your favorite part of the production process? What has been your favorite project to work on?

That feeling of finishing shots - and of finishing the film. I think to go from thinking every day, “Can we actually do this?” to actually doing it is the most incredible feeling ever. It makes you feel like there are no limits to what you can create and realize. A more specific answer would probably be storyboarding and screenwriting because I love drawing and seeing how writing can affect and move people. Animation is fun but it is very tedious and time consuming - I have serious respect for all animators everywhere because they are hard core.

I think the challenge of this film, combined with the fact that it is the first time where I’ve really been able to try and develop a full and dimensional story, makes this one my favorite thing I’ve made so far.

What’s the advantage of storytelling through animation rather than live action?

For me it’s the ability to create anything and go anywhere - the limitless freedom. At the same time, I also really admire that the storytelling generally has to be really disciplined and thought out as it is really difficult to change things in the middle of production. I guess those two qualities are kind of paradoxical but they both seem to be why there is so much good animated content out there. 

Do you have future projects planned?

Aside from the freelance animation and storyboard gigs on my plate, I am planning on developing and pitching more One Last Monster content, whether as an expanded TV series or feature. WebToons would also be really fun to explore with stuff from the Monster universe. Stay tuned at onelastmonster.com or @one.last.monster on Instagram.

In terms of festivals, the film will be playing the following festivals soon via streaming:

FilmQuest (Provo, Utah) - May 21-29, 2021

Phoenix Film Festival (Phoenix, Arizona) - August 12-22, 2021

In addition, the film is available to watch on Roku via UKW Media and potentially other platforms in the future.

Check out more about One Last Monster at https://www.onelastmonster.com/

Blog banner graphic by Megan Cheung.

One Last Monster images by Eileen Kim (IG: @art.eileenkim)

Images provided by Gene Kim.