Seven years after Parasite swept the Oscars and changed Korean cinema forever, Bong Joon Ho is back at Cannes with something unexpected: his first animated feature. But before we talk about singing squid or deep-sea action sequences, there’s one line from his recent Variety interview that’s already making the rounds—because when asked whether Mickey 17 turned out the way he wanted, Bong didn’t hedge or deflect.
When the Weinstein Company tried to force changes in Snowpiercer, Bong rejected them. As punishment, they sent the film to Radius TWC for a limited release, but he saw it differently: “It was punishment, but to me, it was triumph, because Tom was there.”
That Tom is Tom Quinn, now at Neon, who’s distributing Ally in North America. This year marks their 20th anniversary together. Bong met Quinn when he was at Magnolia, distributing The Host, and through Snowpiercer, Parasite, and now Ally, that relationship has remained intact.
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Even with a contract guaranteeing director’s final cut on Mickey 17, even with a studio protective of his vision, Bong still feels the weight. “Because it had quite a big budget — it was my first film that had a budget above $100 million — I felt a lot of psychological, mental pressure,” he admitted. That pressure doesn’t come from studio interference. It comes from knowing the ball is entirely in your court.
We’re living in an era where directors blame studios, studios blame test audiences, and everyone blames the algorithm. When something flops, there’s always someone else to point at. Bong just said: no. “All the good parts of that film and all the bad parts of that film came from me. I take full responsibility. So shit on me if you didn’t like it!”
That’s radical accountability in an industry built on passing the buck. It’s also oddly refreshing. After working with Netflix on Okja, after navigating the Korean studio system on Snowpiercer, after finally tackling a classic Hollywood studio with Mickey 17, Bong realized something: “In terms of the actual filmmaking and the mechanism of creating the film, I thought there weren’t really any differences in the process.” The process is the same. The pressure changes with the budget. The responsibility never shifts.
Ironically, Bong is now making an animated film after avoiding it for 20–30 years. Why? Because his first short was stop-motion animation, and it was miserable. “Making that was so difficult that I was like, ‘Okay, I’m just gonna work with actors, because they just move on their own and I don’t have to do anything.’ It was so taxing mentally,” he said. But he always wanted to return, and with Ally, set in the South Pacific Ocean with a piglet squid dreaming of becoming a wildlife documentary star, he finally has.
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With animation, the constraints vanish. “With animation, there’s no limit — the control freak in me can be fully unleashed,” he explained. That’s the same control freak who now owns every good and bad choice in Mickey 17. The same control freak who’d rather you blame him than blame anyone else.
“I think at first they might be surprised that it’s an animation and they might find it quite refreshing. But once they actually see the film, they’ll be like, ‘Ok, Bong didn’t go anywhere.’ It’ll be quite familiar to them and they might be happy to see my signatures,” he said.
He’s not trying to reinvent himself. He’s trying to surpass George Miller and Miyazaki Hayao in one specific area: “I’ve always wanted to create an awesome action sequence, to create a sequence that can surpass the great ones created by George Miller or Miyazaki Hayao, and I felt like this film was my chance to practice that ambition.”
