Kakao announced on November 10 the release of Ryan Begins, the company’s first AI short animation featuring its popular Kakao Friends character Ryan. The project was produced through a technology collaboration with OpenAI.

The approximately seven-minute short is adapted from the webtoon of the same name and blends human creative direction with generative AI tools across both the planning and production stages.

Production Team and Process

The film was helmed by director Jiwon Han, previously known for directing Netflix’s animated feature Lost in Starlight, alongside AI supervisor Young-jun Kim. The team leveraged ChatGPT‘s image generation feature to produce initial visuals from scene sketches and detailed written prompts, with artists then manually refining and revising each image to meet the intended visual standard.

The team revealed that for a single scene they used as many as approximately 1,500 prompts in order to achieve the precise direction and emotional tone they were aiming for.

Advance Screening and Fan Response

On November 8, Kakao hosted a special advance screening and Q&A session at Movieland in the Seongsu-dong district of Seoul, accompanied by an exhibition documenting the animation’s production process. Tickets for the Q&A sold out within a single day of going on sale.

Creative Philosophy

Director Han stated that the team prioritised conveying Ryan’s emotions without relying on dialogue or exaggerated facial expressions, deliberately leaving room for viewers to draw their own interpretations. Kim added that the team repeatedly revised AI-generated images whenever they fell short of the intended emotional tone, stressing that the creators’ own decisions and hands-on involvement ultimately shaped the final result.

About the Ryan Begins Webtoon

The Ryan Begins webtoon launched last year and marks the first official storyline-driven Kakao Friends series to build a dedicated narrative universe around Ryan — a departure from the slice-of-life format of earlier Kakao Friends webtoons. An English version of the original webtoon is not currently available.