What happens when animation artists and writers incorporate their own lived experiences into their stories? When can a stereotype be used for good? How important is it to teach kids the expanding definition of what it means to be a family? And is it possible for all of this to be done in 20-odd minutes and still entertain audiences?
Welcome to the challenge of creating Wylde Pak. Inspired by Co-Creators and Executive Producers Paul Watling and Kyle Marshall’s own family lives, the series focuses on 11-year-old Lily and 13-year-old Jack, half-siblings who develop a bond when neither’s summer vacation goes as planned—i.e. Lily’s goal of tricking out the spare bedroom into a gamers’ paradise is delayed when Jack comes to stay.
The kids’ dad is married to Lily’s mom, whose family is from South Korea, and the Wylde-Paks live in a multigenerational household that includes a menagerie of animals and Lily’s K-drama-obsessed, boba-stealing—and scene-stealing—grandmother Halmoni. The series explores Korean culture, and this was an aspect that appealed to Art Director JiSoo Kim and Supervising Director Bert Youn. “My husband is from Texas, and I’m from Korea, and the story and the premise and everything really intrigued me,” says Kim, while Youn, who spent much of his youth in South Korea, knew that he wanted to be part of shaping the show from the start.
All of the episodes had a Korean consultant, and Kim and Youn were asked to flag anything that felt wrong to them. “I think it’s about the authenticity,” says Youn, who also voiced one of the characters on Halmoni’s favorite drama. “When [a] stereotype misses the authenticity, that’s when it starts being offensive. I’m proud to say that we did a good job of authenticating these things throughout the show.”
They also sought authenticity in the way Lily and Jack deal with their situation. They don’t see it as a big deal that they share a dad and not a mom. This is just one of the perfectly imperfect aspects of the show. Another is the aesthetic. Set in the fictional town of Canyon Valley, Wylde Pak’s broken sidewalks, hilly streets, and green-yellow skies will look familiar to anyone who has spent time in Los Angeles’ east side neighborhoods of Highland Park, Eagle Rock, and Silver Lake. Neighborhoods where, not coincidentally, a lot of the members of the animation team also live.
“We tried to put all that into the background design and color,” says Kim, explaining that they hoped to capture the disorder and reality of life, but also the beauty that can be found in that messiness.
Kim followed the template set up by the show’s creators to develop backgrounds that were “ugly but still adorable.” To do this she turned to watercolor, “because that’s what I was growing up with in Korea,” she says. “That’s actually the base skill that you learn in all the Korean academies.”
As production was starting, Kim went to Korea and bought Hanji paper, which is used for traditional Korean painting. “My son and I kind of went crazy one weekend just tossing colors on them to make textures,” says Kim. Their imperfect brushstrokes on the rough paper fit the show’s vibe. Happy to be able to contribute something from her childhood, she scanned them into her computer. These scans were then used as a guide for background textures that were created digitally.
Like the backgrounds, neither Lily nor Jack has an especially tidy style. She wears the same clothes every day and uses a red beanie to express her personality. Jack, who is accustomed to sliding down rivers and chasing wildlife shots with his documentarian mother, eschews fancy material possessions in favor of jeans he can shove into a duffle bag. He also has a firm idea of who he is, in his mind, and “we try to make sure that his thoughts are always reflected in his outfit or the color palette that he chooses to wear,” says Youn.
The way the kids look reflects their comfort with being outsiders. They don’t put a great deal of effort into bonding with their peers. Jack can easily talk to adults and impresses Halmoni with his manners and knowledge of Korean culture. And kids glow with awe when Lily saunters into the local arcade to raid a game for the treasure she seeks. But she swiftly leaves before she can break a sweat–”comfortable in her nerdiness,” Youn says.
“I think in our generation, we were the shy nerds,” he adds. “The generation nowadays is the complete opposite where they’re proud to be nerds… I like observing trends, so that was something I was definitely keeping in mind when I was [working on] Lily.”
In bringing multiple elements together, Wylde Pak manages to cover a lot of ground, both artistically and thematically, and still entertain. And Kim notes that while, yes, there are fun and silly episodes, there are heartfelt moments, too. Moments, she says, that go beyond mere entertainment and “make you think, make you wonder.”
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