KPop Demon Hunters clinching the Oscars for best animated film has made three Indians proud.
Keralites Kurian Onnunny Samuel, Binku Mathews and Joseph Tom Neriamparambil were part of the 500-member crew that worked on the 1-hour-40-minute film at Sony Pictures Imageworks in Vancouver, Canada.
The 2025 musical urban fantasy film has also won an Academy Award for best original song.
Combining elements of K-pop music, action and Korean mythology, the story follows Rumi, Mira and Zoey, part of the globally famous K-pop girl group called HUNTR/X, who secretly live double lives as demon hunters. While performing concerts and maintaining their celebrity status, the trio use the power of music and teamwork to protect the world from supernatural forces.
Together, they must face their biggest enemy yet — an irresistible rival boy band, Saja Boys, who are demons in disguise.
Kurian, Binku and Joseph belong to the pipeline engineering department at Sony Pictures Imageworks. While animators and artists typically get the spotlight, the pipeline team is the invisible technical backbone that keeps the production running behind the scenes. They develop tools and scripts for artists, creating software that speeds up work and eliminates manual tasks. When an animator cannot load a character, a scene refuses to render, or a department’s workflow gets interrupted, the pipeline team steps in, diagnoses the problem and gets the production moving again.
Kurian, 47, the principal software development engineer, has been with Sony Pictures Imageworks since the studio first began operations in 2012, making him one of its longest-serving members.
Speaking to The Telegraph over the phone from Vancouver, he said when people think of animation, they only see what’s on screen. “But there is a whole world of engineering and technology behind every frame. For young people who love both technology and cinema, this field is worth exploring,” Kurian said.
For Kurian, this is his second Oscar-winning production. He was also part of the team that worked on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which won the Academy Award for best animated feature in 2019.
Pipeline team lead Binku and senior pipeline technical director Joseph have been with the studio for the past five years.
Joseph, 47, said pipeline work was not glamorous. “Nothing about this journey was easy or fast. It took years of hard work and a lot of patience. There are no shortcuts here. Put in the hours, stay patient, and one day you will see your work on a screen that the whole world is watching,” Joseph said.
Binku, 49, said a film was the result of scores of people “trusting each other, learning from each other and pushing through every challenge together”. “That mindset is what gets a film to the finish line,” Binku added.
In January this year, Netflix announced that KPop Demon Hunters had broken streaming records by drawing 482 million views over six months. Its soundtrack continues to trend globally.