For ‘Okja,’ growing a GMO pig from page to screen

NEW YORK » The giant genetically modified pig of Bong Joonho’s “Okja” is 8 feet tall, 13-feet long and would, if real, weigh six tons. It looks most like a hippo, but it has big floppy dog ears and moves a little like an elephant.

It’s a hybrid creature for a hybrid movie. Like the South Korean director’s previous films (“Snowpiercer,” “The Host”), “Okja” is a mishmash of genres: magical fantasy and grotesque political satire. It’s a cross between Spielberg and slaughterhouse.

Since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival, “Okja” has been thrust into debates over Netflix’s impact on traditional moviegoing. Most large movie theater chains in North America and Bong’s native South Korea have refused to screen a film that will simultaneously hit Netflix’s streaming service.

But on screens large or small, the animal named Okja is a wonder to behold. She snorts and slobbers, does running belly-flops into lakes and shoots poop like a low-caliber machine gun. Up until now, Netflix original films have been largely lower budget affairs or documentaries. The giant pig of “Okja” is Netflix’s first special-effect marvel.

The largely English-language, international film, made for $50 million, boasts a cast of Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal and Paul Dano. But the heart of it is a young Korean girl named Mija (An Seo Hyun) and her loyal pig companion. After ten years raising Okja, the corporation that created these “super pigs” wants them back.

Here’s how she was created:

While in Seoul in 2011, Bong’s eye caught an animal on the street with a melancholy look. The image stuck with him.

Bong began sketching the ani- mal that would become Okja. When he first mentioned the film to Swinton (they were driving to the airport after the Seoul premiere of “Snowpiercer”) he merely showed her a pencil drawing of the animal.

To flesh out his own sketches, Bong turned to Jang Hee-chul, the conceptual artist who designed the monster of the director’s 2007 thriller “The Host.” Bong calls Jang, whose monster for “The Host” looked like a bottom-feeding fish but with legs, “a young genius.”

As much as computer generated effects have advanced in recent years, placing a CGI character amid live-action scenes is still arduous and expensive to do. It changes a film’s entire production pipeline and affects every lighting decision.

“We didn’t have one of those shots, we had hundreds of those,” said Erik-Jan De Boer, the Oscar-winning animator who crafted the tiger Richard Parker in Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi.” “Almost in every shot, we had somebody putting their hands on Okja. In some cases we had six people touching Okja and we had to legitimatize all of it.”

But the seamlessness and tactile feel of Okja is also what sets it above many others. During filming, they used a foam puppet rig to stand in for Okja — sometimes the whole animal, sometimes just part of it. It was controlled by VFX animation director Stephen Clee, who typically puppeteered the head, himself. Clee stayed connected by radio with De Boer.

This image released by Netflix shows Seo-Hyun Ahn as Mija and the character Okja in a scene from “Okja.”

Seo-Hyun Ahn as Mija petting Okja in a scene from “Okja.”