At this point, expecting anything less from Bong Joon-ho would be the mistake. The Oscar-winning filmmaker has a well-documented relationship with obsessive dedication, the kind that starts before most people are awake. As he revealed in a 2017 masterclass, his mornings typically begin with a film. Not a scroll, not a meeting. A film. It is a ritual that says everything about how seriously he takes the medium and how little distance there is, for him, between living and making.
So it tracks that while the rest of the world was still processing Parasite and its sweep of the Academy Awards, Bong was already building something new. Six years separated that historic night from his latest release, Mickey 17, but that gap was never empty. It was, by all accounts, a period of quiet and deliberate construction. The kind of development cycle that only makes sense once the finished thing arrives.
Since 2019, he has been working on an animated film alongside screenwriter Jason Yu, the director behind the 2023 psychological thriller Sleep, and longtime producing partner Seo Woo-sik. V8 Pistons Pictures has now unveiled a first look at the project, and what it confirms is exactly what longtime followers of his work would expect. Bong is returning to the anti-industrialist themes that have quietly threaded through his entire filmography, from the class warfare of Parasite to the systemic brutality of Snowpiercer.
Animation as a format is a meaningful choice for a director who has always used genre as a vehicle for something sharper underneath. The freedom it offers, visually and narratively, feels well suited to wherever his thinking has been since Parasite rewrote the conversation around what foreign language cinema could accomplish in Hollywood. Whether this project runs parallel to other work or represents his primary focus right now, one thing has been consistently true about Bong Joon-ho. He is always, in some meaningful way, at work.
