Bong Joon-ho Is Working on an Animated Feature Film about Sea Creatures

Oscar winner and Parasite visionary Bong Joon-ho is a very busy man these days, with multiple feature film irons in the fire, in addition to an upcoming Parasite series on HBO—which he spent time on during the pandemic, working with Adam McKay to outline a series set in the same world as his Academy Award-winning film. Today, however, comes news that Bong Joon-ho will be expanding his repertoire in an entirely new direction, which is feature length animation.

Multiple outlets are reporting that one of Bong Joon-ho’s two projects in development is a feature-length animated film, to be filmed in Korean, focused on underwater sea creatures and their relationship with humans. One outlet, The Film Stage, cites a reddit user who claimed the film would follow “an invertebrate deep-sea fish who believes he’s suffering from spinal disk herniation,” which is a concept so immediately ludicrous that we wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a gag. No other outlets have reported that particular bit of information.

What we do know is that Bong Joon-ho is working on the film with production company 4th Creative Party, frequent collaborators who also contributed visual effects for Bong Joon-ho movies such as The Host, Snowpiercer and Okja. There’s no news on casting, but we would hardly be surprised to see Parasite and The Host star Song Kang-ho end up attached to the project, given his closeness to Bong Joon-ho.

The director, meanwhile, has plenty of other responsibilities on his plate as well. He’s also working on the script for an English-language film based on “a true event that happened in 2016,” to be set in the U.K. and the U.S., which will reportedly be his next directing project. Likewise, he will serve as the president of the jury at the Venice Film Festival later this summer, and will produce another drama film, Sea Fog, in Korea.

Let’s hope the director can stand up to this kind of workload, and that we hear more about this deep sea animation sometime soon.