Move over Rocky, Grogu, Yoshi, and that little capybara from Flow — there’s a new lil’ guy (well, gal) on the block and her name is Ally. Having wooed us last year with Mickey 17‘s inaccurately named cuties the Creepers, Bong Joon Ho is going all in on the charm with the protagonist of Ally, the director’s debut animated movie. And now, having spent the best part of the last seven years developing his ocean-based odyssey alongside co-writer Jason Yu, director Bong has revealed a first proper look at the piglet squid at the centre of his latest film. Check it out below;
Don’t say we didn’t warn you — Ally is going to be on every little (and big) cinephile’s Christmas list when director Bong’s latest hits cinemas in late 2027. Billed as a ‘family adventure’, adopting a deep-sea angle on ideas of bravery and connection, Ally — whose creature designs are inspired by real-life marine biology — centres around its eponymous heroine, a piglet squid who calls the South Pacific Ocean her home. As the movie’s logline reveals, Ally has “ambitions of reaching the surface and one day featuring in a wildlife documentary. Her world is upended when an aircraft goes down into the sea, setting her on an unlikely journey upward alongside a mismatched group of companions.” If you’ve seen Bong Joon Ho’s Okja, or the above-mentioned Mickey 17, you’ll know that the South Korean filmmaker has form for deploying borderline mythic creatures at the heart of socially and environmentally conscious yarns — and with its deep-sea-dweller-meets-human-world set-up, Ally seems well placed to pick up that thread (albeit in more film night friendly form.)
An international production whose collaborators include animation supervisor Jae Hyung Kim (Toy Story 4), production designer Marcin Jakubowski (Klaus), and eight-time Academy Award winning British VFX and animation company DNEG (Interstellar, Inception, Ex Machina), Ally has no shortage of creative firepower aboard helping to bring Bong Joon Ho’s vision to life. Here’s to enjoying baby’s first Bong in 2027 — which is not a sentence we thought we’d ever write in an Empire news piece.
