Shiyoon Kim

Shiyoon Kim (; born 1983) is a Korean American character designer and concept artist. He has worked at Walt Disney Animation Studios and Sony Pictures Animation, where he designed the characters for the Academy Award winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. He is also known for his work on the animated films Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph (2012), Big Hero 6 (2014), and Zootopia (2016).

Early life Shiyoon Kim was born in South Korea in 1983. He moved to the United States at the age of two. Kim began to draw at the age of three, and throughout his childhood would "constantly draw whenever [he] got the chance or got bored." After seeing his proclivity towards drawing, his parents encouraged him to keep on going, and moved from Massachusetts to California to enroll him in a high school animation program shortly after tenth grade. The program Kim entered was the Rowland R.O.P. Animation Program.

Kim credits one of his professors Larry Kurnarsky with teaching him the importance of a story-driven piece. One of the main lessons which Kurnarsky taught Kim was that everything within a piece of art, or even a collection of art relates back to the story in one way, shape, or form. Kim even stated that, "Everything he looked at (storyboards, character design, layouts, animation, etc.) was in terms of how it is either pushing the story or hindering it." It was the advice of Kurnarsky that prompted Shiyoon Kim to take his first life drawing classes at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. After graduating from his high school, Kim decided he wanted to continue his education at CalArts. It was here that he studied the different components of filmmaking and animation. Kim credits the school with teaching him how to create a film, compelled by an intriguing story narrative.

Big Hero 6 designs

Lead characters In Big Hero 6, Shiyoon Kim worked as lead character designer for the film. As a major character designer during the early phases of production, Shiyoon Kim wanted Korean characters to be in a Disney animated feature film for the first time. According to Jin Kim, the character design supervisor of Big Hero 6 and a fellow Korean Disney artist, Shiyoon Kim originally designed the lead [Asian] characters, (such as Hiro Hamada, Tadashi Hamada, and GoGo Tomago) as Korean characters according to an interview with The Korea Herald.

"Early designs were drafted by Kim Shiyoon, a fellow Korean animator, who originally created the characters as Koreans. Of course, there are no mentions of specific nationalities in the film, but that was what we, the artists, imagined," (Jin) Kim said.

As the project finalized, the approved designs for Hiro Hamada and Tadashi Hamada were ultimately given Japanese origins with GoGo Tomago resulting in being the only character to be officially Korean. However, the Korean origins among the characters are still evident as Hiro Hamada's design was based on Shiyoon Kim's childhood self, Tadashi Hamada by his Korean-Irish American voice actor Daniel Henney, and GoGo Tomago by her Korean American voice actress Jamie Chung, based on her personality and Korean actress, Bae Doona based on her looks.

Baymax Kim was also in charge of designing Baymax, a sentient robot created by Tadashi that takes care of Hiro and his friends. Kim stated that for Baymax's simple yet quite expressive face, Japanese traditional bells were used as reference and for his durable yet inflated body, "Soft Robotics" (founded by Professor Yong-Lae Park at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute) was incorporated into the design.

Personal life On July 20, 2013, Kim married Jihyun Park. Kim currently lives in Los Angeles, California with Park and his two daughters.

Awards Kim was nominated for the 42nd Annual Annie Awards for Character Design in an Animated Production for Big Hero 6 (2014).