Kakao and OpenAI Team Up for Ryan Begins AI Animated Short

Kakao announced on November 10 that it had produced its first AI animated short starring its popular character Ryan. The company made Ryan Begins through a technology collaboration with OpenAI.

The roughly seven-minute film adapts the webtoon of the same name. It combines human creative direction with generative AI tools during planning and production.

Director Jiwon Han, who directed Netflix's animated film Lost in Starlight, joined the production alongside AI supervisor Young-jun Kim. The team used ChatGPT's image generation feature to turn scene sketches and detailed prompts into initial images. Artists then refined and revised those images by hand to reach the intended visual quality.

The production team said a single scene took approximately 1,500 prompts to reach the desired direction and emotional tone.

Kakao hosted a special advance screening and Q&A on November 8 at Movieland in Seongsu-dong, Seoul. The event included an exhibition showing the animation's production process. Tickets for the Q&A sold out within one day of going on sale.

Han said the team aimed to convey Ryan's emotions without dialogue or exaggerated facial expressions. That approach left viewers room to interpret the story themselves.

Kim said the team repeatedly revised AI-generated images when they missed the intended emotional tone. He stressed that the creators' decisions and hands-on work shaped the final result.

The original webtoon launched last year and stars Ryan from Kakao Friends. Earlier Kakao Friends webtoons focused on everyday life. Ryan Begins became the first official story-driven webtoon to expand Ryan's universe.

The original webtoon has no English version.

Ji-eun Oh reported the news for YNA.