Bong Joon-ho is sets to make waves with his first ani­mat­ed feature

As one might expect from a film­mak­er com­ing off the great­est suc­cess of his career and the awards wind­fall that fol­lowed, Bong Joon-ho has a few dif­fer­ent irons in the fire.

His next fea­ture will return him to the Eng­lish lan­guage, resum­ing the pos­i­tive Hol­ly­wood rela­tions estab­lished with Snow­piercer and Okja, but now he’s got his next next fea­ture lined up as well. (And that’s in addi­tion to the HBO series spin­off of Par­a­site, a gig as Pres­i­dent on this year’s jury at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val, and some oth­er to-be-pro­duced screen­play work.)

Screen Dai­ly has revealed that Bong’s dis­tant future will see him direct­ing an ani­mat­ed project, a first in his eclec­tic fil­mog­ra­phy. In keep­ing with the spir­it of The Host and Okja, in which odd fau­na from the nat­ur­al world col­lide with man­made indus­try to under­score envi­ron­men­tal­ist themes, the new film will explore ten­sions between Homo sapi­ens and a race of sea creatures.

Screen Dai­ly sourced the sto­ry from the Kore­an news site Naver, which one Red­dit user has trans­lat­ed for slight­ly greater detail: the script focus­es on ​“an inver­te­brate deep-sea-fish who thinks him­self has an inter-ver­te­bral disc” [sic], a far cry from the soft­ie emo­tion­al­i­ty West­ern view­ers may asso­ciate with fish-based car­toons. Though this seems no less uni­ver­sal­ly acces­si­ble – we are all fat­ed to devel­op con­tentious, com­plex rela­tion­ships to our spinal health as the years go on.

The film will see Bong return­ing to the Kore­an lan­guage after the upcom­ing for­ay into Eng­lish, and he’s report­ed­ly reached out to a voice actor already, though the iden­ti­ty remains a mys­tery. Chances are that this film will get a dou­ble-release in Europe and the US, as is cus­tom­ary for Asian ani­ma­tion, with one ver­sion sub­ti­tled and the oth­er dubbed by rec­og­niz­able Eng­lish-speak­ing actors.

For his con­stant genre-hop­ping and wed­ding of pop­corn thrills to for­mal mas­tery and a sly intel­li­gence, Amer­i­cans have come to think of Bong as Korea’s answer to Steven Spiel­berg. If that’s the case, that would make this his The Adven­tures of Tintin, an intrigu­ing exper­i­ment in an unfa­mil­iar medi­um guar­an­teed to yield unusu­al results at the very least.