Shiyoon Kim (김시윤) is a Korean-American character designer and animator, who currently works for Walt Disney Animation Studios. His major role was when he started working on Big Hero 6, as chief character designer who designed the lead characters of the film along side with character design supervisor, Jin Kim, another Korean animator. According to Shiyoon Kim in an interview, he said he mainly focused on Hiro Hamada and Baymax.
Animation credits[]
| Year | Film | Position |
|---|---|---|
| 2009 | Prep & Landing | Character Designer |
| 2010 | Tangled | Character Designer |
| 2011 | Winnie the Pooh | Character Designer |
| 2012 | Paperman | Character Designer |
| Wreck-It Ralph | Character Designer | |
| 2013 | Frozen | Character Designer: Duke of Weselton |
| 2014 | Feast | Character Designer |
| Big Hero 6 | Lead Character Designer: Hiro Hamada/Baymax/Tadashi Hamada/Go Go Tomago | |
| 2016 | Zootopia | Character Designer: Mayor Lionheart/Assistant Mayor Bellwether/Flash/Gazelle/Bonnie and Stu Hopps |
| 2016 | Inner Workings | Character Designer |
Big Hero 6: Lead Character Designer[]
Lead Characters[]
In Big Hero 6, Shiyoon Kim worked as lead character designer for the 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 Go Go 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 Go Go 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 Go Go Tomago by her Korean-American voice actress, Jamie Chung.
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 (discovered by director Don Hall at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute) was incorporated into the design.
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