What is the Bird Featured in KPop Demon Hunters? We’ll Tell You!

When you’ve been wherever close to a tv or social media display screen lately, you’ve most likely heard of the smash-hit film KPop Demon Hunters. I do know I’ve: My children demand the soundtrack on repeat each time we’re within the automobile. Along with demons, demon hunters, demon searching, and a complete lot of singing, the film contains a fowl character that undoubtedly caught my eye: Sussie the Magpie. I needed to know extra.

To know Sussie the Magpie (or maybe Oriental Magpie-Robin, featured within the picture above), it helps to have a really cursory understanding of the film plot. To make a really lengthy story quick, three younger girls kind “Huntrix,” a KPop singing group additionally answerable for protecting demons at bay and away from the human world. A very evil demon desires to destroy demon hunters and eat the souls of all of the people he can discover, so he sends his personal boy band referred to as “Saja Boys” to the human world to work towards Huntrix. Sussie the Magpie, together with a strange-looking tiger, carry messages forwards and backwards between Rumi (the chief of Huntrix) and Jinu (the chief of the Saja Boys). I received’t let you know the tip—it’s price watching the film (and getting earwormed just about instantly) for your self.

However what about that fowl? The six-eyed magpie in KPop Demon Hunters is an Oriental Magpie (Pica serica), although in actual life they’ve two eyes like an everyday fowl. In Korea, the magpie is assumed to symbolize success and luck. It’s a logo of Korean id, and is even the nationwide fowl of South Korea. The tiger repels evil spirits, and has appeared alongside the magpie in Korean artwork for hundreds of years. The fowl and tiger characters in KPop Demon Hunters are launched because the plot descends to a very bleak a part of the film, including a little bit of comedian aid (the fowl wears a hat). Additionally they counsel that Jinu, although he himself is a demon, might not be evil.

Magpies internationally are identified for his or her curious natures and affiliation with individuals, however the magpie-tiger pairing is especially vital in Korean artwork. In keeping with curators on the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, California, “[t]he tiger and magpie pairing seems so often in Korean artwork that it includes its personal style: jakhodo, work depicting tigers and magpies.” When painted or portrayed collectively in Korean people artwork, the tiger turns into not stern and scary however, properly, sort of dopey. The magpie is clever, even crafty. In some people variations, they defend individuals from the tiger, in others they warn individuals of a tiger’s presence. The Asian Artwork Museum curators additionally notice, “[i]n time, a political dimension additionally emerged: caricatured as a silly oaf, the tiger grew to become a logo for the aristocratic yangban, whereas the dignified magpie represented the frequent individuals; the show of such imagery allowed villagers to quietly insurgent towards the ruling class.”

In KPop Demon Hunters, the tiger and magpie pair lighten the temper, nod to conventional Korean tradition, and foreshadow the conclusion of the film. They’re additionally a essential a part of director and author Maggie Kang’s dedication to illustration within the movie. In an interview with BBC, she explains: “We went to people villages, we checked out what the bricks appear to be and the way the streets are designed in Myeongdong. We took photos as a result of capturing the sensation is so vital…We tried to make the film really feel as Korean as doable. And a technique to try this was to, in each scene and each design facet, add in Korean components.”

Are you interested by magpies however do not stay in Asia? North America hosts two species of magpie: the Black-billed Magpie (Pica hudsonia) throughout a lot of the western United States and Canada in addition to into Alaska; and the Yellow-billed Magpie (Pica nuttalli), one of many few fowl species endemic to California. So far as I do know, none of them put on hats, however they’re nonetheless fairly cool.