Kakao announced on November 10 that it produced its first AI short animation starring the character Ryan, through a technology collaboration with OpenAI. The short is based on the Ryan Begins webtoon and combines human creative direction with generative AI tools.
The project places one of Korea's best-known webtoon and character brands alongside OpenAI's tools in an animated production. For readers following the use of generative AI in animation and in the adaptation of manga and webtoons, it is a concrete example from a large rights holder, with named creative staff attached.
Production team and tools
According to Anime News Network, the short runs about seven minutes. Korean outlet Digital Today gives a different account, calling the work "Still, Ryan" and describing it as roughly five minutes long. The two accounts therefore differ on both the title and the running time, and Kakao's announcement as relayed does not settle which is correct.
The production team includes director Jiwon Han, who directed Netflix's Lost in Starlight, and AI supervisor Young-jun Kim. Digital Today renders their names as Han Ji-won and Kim Young-jun, and identifies Han as the animation director. The pairing of a director with experience on a Netflix animated title and a dedicated AI supervisor reflects the stated approach: people set the creative direction, and generative tools carry out part of the production.
The work uses OpenAI's ChatGPT Image feature. The details of how that feature was used in the pipeline, and how much of the finished short it produced, were not part of the information released alongside the announcement.
An exhibition showcased the production process of the short, giving viewers a look at how the human and AI contributions were combined.
The source webtoon
The Ryan Begins webtoon launched last year and stars Ryan, a character from the Kakao Friends lineup. It was the first official storyline-driven webtoon built on Ryan's universe. Before it, Ryan was known mainly as a brand character rather than as the lead of a continuing narrative, which makes the webtoon the natural source for an animated story.
The animation adapts that webtoon directly, carrying the same title as the original series in Anime News Network's account. No English version of the webtoon is available, so readers outside Korea who want to compare the short with its source cannot yet do so in English.
Kakao framed the short as the first AI animation to feature Ryan, which suggests the company sees it as a starting point for the character rather than a one-off. The announcement gave no further release plans in the material available, and Kakao has not said whether more AI-assisted shorts are planned.
The collaboration with OpenAI is described as a technology partnership, so the short serves as a test case for the tools as well as a piece of entertainment. The central claim in Kakao's description is that human creative direction remains in place while generative AI handles part of the work, a framing that places the director and AI supervisor at the center of the credits rather than the software.
The differing titles and lengths reported in English-language coverage may reflect translation, edits to the work, or separate versions of the announcement. Kakao's November 10 announcement is the origin of both accounts.
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