Without singing a note or swinging a weapon, one character from “Kpop Demon Hunters” has entranced the audience off pure vibes alone.
We’re talking about Derpy Tiger, an oversized blue cat with glowing yellow eyes, a snaggletooth grin and a penchant for righting overturned vessels. The breakout character is a courier, delivering messages between rival K-pop band members: Jinu, a demon seeking to drain souls from fans listening to his tunes, and Rumi, an idol by day and a hunter by night, protecting the souls of humanity.
Co-directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, “Kpop Demon Hunters” has quickly become a hit for Netflix, claiming the No. 1 spot on the streamer’s English-langauge Top 10 list and ranking in the Top 10 in all countries globally, with an additional 24.2 million views in its second week. Derpy Tiger has ridden this wave as well, with Netflix boasting how the character’s plushie is among its Top 5 sold items in its shop for the year already.
We’re introduced to Derpy in a late-night scene when he emerges from a portal from the Underworld and promptly knocks over a flowerpot. Several awkward seconds pass as the stubby-legged feline attempts to set the pot back upright, but fails every time. Who knows how long the tenacious tabby would have continued with this Sisyphean task had Rumi not stepped in? And with that, he won over the hearts if not souls of the audience. Take a look:
“When I saw the pot scene with Derpy I thought that it was genius. It’s so good,” raved story artist Radford Sechrist told Salon. “I believe the idea came from a story room and it was first storyboarded by an artist named Jessie Wong.”
Sechrist, who happens to be married to Kang, is the veteran animator tasked with designing the cat who would be king of derps.
“He is the creator of ‘Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts,’ so that whole aesthetic is his,” Kang said about Sechrist. “He started as a character designer and he storyboarded for the movie as well, and wrote a lot of the scenes. When you’re doing storyboards, you get a character that has no design so you also end up drawing it and designing it. The design of the cat is based on minhwa, which is a folk art that depicts this tiger and it’s always paired with a magpie.”
“I would say 90% based on the minhwa artwork, which was incredible to reference and 10% is our cat.”
Minhwa is a style of Korean folk art popular during the Chosun era, with the Hojak-do genre specializing in images of tigers, magpies and pine trees. And while these images were often hung up at entrances for the new year – tigers were seen as keeping evil at bay while magpies would deliver good news – the way these animals were depicted together evolved over time to become more satirical by the 17th century. The once powerful tiger, a stand-in for the ruling class of aristocrats, was painted to look foolish and yes, derpy, hence the nickname “idiot tiger” (바보호랑이). In contrast, the magpie was positioned over the cat and represented the common folk, cheekily flipping the hierarchy of the day.
“The way the tiger is depicted in this art is so funny,” said Kang. “It’s very goofy, and that is the reason why we call him Derpy Tiger. Those drawings are very derpy. He’s always walleyed and weird looking.”
Sechrist reveals that while he did draw on that traditional art for inspiration he also looked closer to home.
“I would say 90% based on the minhwa artwork, which was incredible to reference and 10% is our cat,” he said. “For instance the shorter body and shorter legs feel like our cat. A bit of the neck as well, how our cat has this fluffy bump. We named our cat ‘Yumyan’ after Yumyan Hammerpaw, a cat character from a show I created called ‘Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts.’ But we call her ‘Fluffy’ for short because she’s a long-haired Himalayan cat.”
Check out an early Derpy model and then swipe to check out Fluffy:
“I was a little nervous at first to design something based in history with cultural significance, but we had an advisor who was supportive of the idea,” he added. “We wanted to include a tiger in the movie because tigers are the national animal of South Korea. Also, a lot of us on the crew are cat lovers.”
“We didn’t want to just have a sidekick.”
As for Derpy’s bright blue hue, Sechrist said, “I believe that may have been [production designer] Helen Chen giving the tiger a more magical feel. I was designing it closer to the old artwork which was gray.”
Although Derpy clearly had star potential, he didn’t initially have a defined role in the movie.
“We were like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is such a fun character that we could have in the movie,’ but we didn’t want to just have a sidekick,” acknowledged Kang. “We didn’t want to just do that, so we put it off to the side . . . We [also] needed some way for Rumi and Jinu to communicate with each other. We wanted him to send her an invite to meet, and it felt odd for him to text her. He’s 400 years old. He doesn’t know how to use a cellphone. So at first, we were like, ‘Do we use a carrier pigeon?’
“Our production designer, [Helen Mingjue Chen] did this really beautiful painting of a statue of a tiger turning into a real tiger, and Jinu is standing next to it and he has his shirt open for no reason. When we saw that, we were like, ‘Oh, maybe he is Jinu’s pet, and he can use this tiger to deliver messages to Rumi.’ So that’s how Derpy was integrated into the movie as a mailbox basically, and then the bird tagged along with him.”
Check out Chen’s art that started it all:
The bird Kang refers to is Sussy, the magpie who accompanies Derpy. (It should be noted that neither of these names are official (yet), but rather the default names given by the crew for the creatures.) Sussy has two distinguishing features. First, he has too many eyes. While most fans believe he has three eyes (which led to some conjecture of its relationship to the three-legged crows in Eastern mythology), we are only seeing one side of his head. “I can confirm it does have six eyes total, three on each side,” said Sechrist.
Neither Kang nor Sechrist could recall who came up with the idea for the additional eyes or why he has them, but it could be similar to the decision to make Derpy blue. A six-eyed magpie is a good indicator that it’s from another realm and not your average two-eyed terrestrial bird.
Sussy’s second defining feature is his love of hats, namely a tall, jaunty gat, similar to the ones that the Saja Boys wear in the Underworld and in their performance of “Your Idol.” Whence came this love of headgear? In the film, Jinu tells Rumi, “I made [the hat] for the tiger, but the bird keeps stealing it.”
“We were in a brainstorm and someone asked, ‘Why does the bird have a tiny hat?’ And I just said, ‘Jinu made it for the tiger, but the bird keeps stealing it.’ It got a laugh so I suggested maybe Jinu actually says that. I always love it when everyone is just riffing ideas together, and you can actually throw some of those ideas in. The energy in a brainstorm room is really fun, especially with Maggie; she’s so funny. I still remember her pitching me corn eyes or even, ‘What if there’s a demon boy band?’”
The success of and “Kpop Demon Hunters” has opened the audience’s eyes to how collaborative the creative process is for what we see onscreen, which especially true of animation. Fans hungry for more of the story are clamoring for a sequel, and in the meantime are finding the rich treasure trove of concept art and other story and visual elements that led up to the finished product. Secrhist has felt this love from fans of the movie as well.
“The team elevated the tiger design and made it so cool – from Helen Chen’s color choices and [art director] Scott Watanabe’s refinements, as well as the modeling, animation and lighting,” he said. “At every step this movie was such a labor of love so I figured if we were all fans, everyone else would love it too. But I didn’t anticipate the cultural phenomenon aspect. I’ve never been part of a movie that went so viral online. It’s kind of amazing to see how much people love it.”
In addition to dominating Netflix streaming, the film’s original soundtrack has broken through as well, entering the Billboard 200 at No. 8. This is the highest-charting soundtrack from an animated film since the OST from another Sony Animated film, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” ranked No. 7 on the Billboard 200 in July 2023. Over on Spoitfy, the cast soundtrack is currently No. 5 on the Weekly Top Albums on Spotify globally and No. 6 in the U.S. It also boast the most spots on Spotify’s Daily Top Songs Global list, with the anthem “Golden” the highest at No. 3.
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