"I'm Popo", which its distributor promotes as South Korea's first feature whose images were all generated by AI, was shown to press in Seoul ahead of its 21 May release. In a near future where AI is in every home, a robot police officer run by AI pursues a boy its system has marked as a criminal-to-be, and a grieving father sues the algorithm. The film mixes courtroom drama with long detours through landscapes and spectacle.
Webtoon artist Kim Il-dong, directing his first feature, wrote it and ran the prompts mostly alone over about two months. Professional actors voiced it and no one appears on screen. He said it shows the one-person film has arrived. He admitted the images look awkward, so he recorded the dub first and fitted the visuals to it. He also based faces on people close to him so the characters would not blur together. His regret is that the film sat for a year after it was finished, while video tools moved past a five-second shot limit. He also wants the film to start an overdue conversation, saying AI may be gaslighting people without their noticing.
The Korea Herald's critic found the 64-minute result weak: plastic-looking faces that shift from shot to shot, quick cuts over scenes that do not hold, and a short film's story stretched to feature length.
Earlier Korean work used AI only in part, as in CJ CGV's "Run to the West", or ran under 20 minutes, as with CJ ENM's "M Hotel". "Man in Hanbok", based on Lee Sang-hoon's best-selling novel, opened the same day. Its settings, medieval Korea and Renaissance Italy, are made entirely with generative AI. It took the top award at this year's Korea Artificial Intelligence Cinema Festival, its second edition, and has screened at AI film festivals in Busan and elsewhere. The paper also recalled "The Meter Reader", an AI short pulled from YouTube after actress Yeom Hye-ran's agency said a lead closely resembling her had never been approved; Yeom said she learned of it from the news.
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