![]() ![]() Buddhism is an ancient religion in Korea, stemming back since the 4th and 5th century, and gods' faces (especially in shrine temples or Buddha statues) are quite distinct. "The faces of the gods in my film have certain references". "The reason why my character looks normal is to make a difference from the gods' face," Cho explains. ![]() So, how do you design a woman shaman in animation? One would expect heavy symbolism, masks etc., yet the shaman in A Sip of Water has an ordinary face of a young woman. She attributes this to the fact of a matriarchal Korean society, and she gives it a hereditary character as well. "There are shamans in other Asian countries as well, but Korean shamans are usually women," Cho explains. Her main character is also a woman with both supernatural powers and a willingness to offer her help at the same time. Yet they have no way to avoid it, and it leads to their finally being acknowledged as shamans (god-picked).īeing a Korean woman in the UK, Huyna Cho felt suddenly that her Korean identity continued to be strong, even though she is still self-described as a global person. Shamanism is more like a calling based on shinbyeong, the rite of passage to become a shaman that even the shamans don't know -in its visible manifestations, it looks like a disease: shamans cannot drink, eat or sleep like that. "They usually cry when they are interviewed," Cho notes. So, she was one of the few to turn their focus on the shamans themselves. The shamans I interviewed were happy because I didn't ask myself for their services, but on their being a shaman in Korean society". "Shamanism is not a general job in Korea" Cho qualifies, "and people don't really want to talk extensively about folk religion. Her questions were usually met with surprise not because of their nature, but simply because of the fact that someone cared to ask them about their profession and not simply asking for a solution to a personal project. She also met different shamans during her Christmas Korean holidays. " Typically, the young shamans have their own Instagram account, so I just contacted and interviewed three of those". Watch the trailer for A Sip of Water:īut how do you go on and meet those shamans, especially during lockdown or simply if you're far away from home? Hyuna Cho started her graduation project in London, but she was able to find her interviewing subject online. So the shaman in my film becomes a vessel for such sacred water". If you pray to gods with a bowl of water from the mountain and a clean body with water without other sacrifices, they believe that gods will fulfill their wishes. "Our ancestors used to offer clean water as a sacrifice in their ancestral rites. Water is indeed paramount in the film, and the female young shaman navigates this space. In a country which is a natural peninsula and has abundant precipitation, water and its rice-farming agriculture is important. "Sometimes shaman counseling is a sip of water to people," Cho explains. The film title 'A Sip of Water' still came from this very same practice of shamans even today helping out in ordinary problems. A long and extended Christianization of the Korean peninsula has somehow obscured this fact ("but even Christians have the experience of shamanism" Cho notes), yet this practice of counselling and healing has continued to flourish. Even though she didn't have herself a shaman in her family, she was exposed early on to this underappreciated ancient culture of shamanism and its artistic manifestations. " I think every Korean has experience of shamans and shamanism" Huyna Cho tells Zippy Frames. The film has already been selected in the competitive section of major festivals, such as Fantasia International Film Festival (Ontario, Canada) and Odense International Film Festival (Denmark). Her UK work culminated in the transparently compassionate 'A Sip of Water', a 2D computer animation film about a female shaman and her relation to both gods and the common people. Having studied both in Kaywon Art University and Hong-ik University in Korea, she moved to Royal College of Art (before the pandemic) to study for an M.A. ![]() Hyuna Cho South Korean animation director has a sensitivity for the extraordinary, sometimes hidden below our ordinary life chores and appreciation. ![]()
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