Kim Il-dong

Kim Il-dong (김일동) is a South Korean webtoon artist. Korean press describe him as the creator of the Naver webtoon Kkabaeng (까뱅), which a YTN interview says ranked first worldwide, and a 2019 short film, "Who Could Have Killed Her?", is also listed among his earlier work. He says he has always been curious, writing various stories and drawing pictures, and that curiosity about whether a whole film could be finished with the first AI tools led him to cinema.

His feature debut, "I'm Popo" (아이엠 포포), is a 64-minute film distributed as South Korea's first feature made entirely with generative AI visuals, released in cinemas on 21 May 2026. He wrote the script, turned it into prompts and extracted the footage himself, working largely alone; the script was finished about a year before the April 2026 press screening and the generation took roughly two months. The story follows an AI police robot, Popo, that kills a child flagged as a future criminal, and a grieving father who challenges the system.

Kim recorded the voice acting first, using professional voice actors, and attached the visuals afterwards, to offset the unfamiliar, plastic look of AI faces. He based the faces on people close to him so characters would not blur together. At a Seoul Film Center press screening he called the results awkward, and said the film's argument is that the era of the one-person film has arrived. The Korea Herald review was mixed, and the film was reported to have screened, sold out, in a special section of Russia's Amur Autumn International Film Festival.