How the Character Industry is Leading Hallyu’s Next-generation
Han Changwan
President of Korea Character Licensing Industry Academy Society
Professor of Comics & Animation
Department of Creative Software at Sejong University
Even though the Walt Disney Company succeeds in distributing its animation worldwide, its long-term revenue is ensured through profits from character licensing. The Star Wars franchise, which originated in the 1970s, is a prime example of a “super” intellectual property (IP) that generates sales of a wide range of products based on their grand fictional universe. Walt Disney World has even opened a Star Wars theme park in Florida. Like this, the fantasy of a character generated from a content IP lives long, just like Mickey Mouse, who still shows its childlike manner even a century after its creation.
In Korea, the character industry originated from commercials screened at movie theaters in the 1950s and the brand marketing and ads that followed the opening of TV broadcasting in the 1960s. Characters from TV commercials for Jinro soju, Lucky toothpaste, Haitai candy, Rocket batteries, Gompyo wheat flour, Binggrae, and Ottogi have been developed like those of Disney’s or Japan’s Hello Kitty and Totoro. Korean character creators joined the World Intellectual Property Rights Organization after the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics and began selling characters through proper licensing contracts. In the 1990s, the industry grew rapidly as Korean characters in comics and animation, including Dooly the Little Dinosaur, Kkachi, Oh Hye-sung, Young-Shim, Dokgo Tak, >and Run Hani (Honey) grew popular and were sold alongside famous foreign characters. As a result, domestic stores specializing in character products like Fancy Garden and Artbox grew into franchises.
In 1998, with the nation in the grip of an economic meltdown that required a bailout from the International Monetary Fund, Korean characters began taking over on the internet to replace foreign characters whose prices had soared. The digital debut of Mashimaro, also known as Bizarre Rabbit, Pucca, Woobiboy, or Jolaman, boosted the presence of Korean characters online. In the early 2000s, the animated series Pororo the Little Penguin made big strides and presented a new profit-earning model for Korean characters. Since 2010, the rise of smartphones has fueled the market for emoticons on social media and the setup of character shops at home and abroad through the global network of Naver’s Line Friends. Kakao Friends has also seen its product value maximized through use in O2O services that connect online and offline marketing and manufacturing.
Amid the “homebound economy” era caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Korean character industry has undergone self-innovation to produce tech-intensive intelligent characters, going as far as employing virtual influencers as digital characters with top-notch technology that even outdo globally famous foreign characters in recognition and reliability. Korean characters have seen more outstanding results overseas, where they are hailed as the next-generation content of Hallyu, the Korean Wave. Appearing in popular TV series, movies, and K-pop videos, as well as on the packaging for Korean food and cosmetics, the characters are taking on challenges to achieve a new vision and speeding up progress as Korea evolves from an economic power to a cultural one.
The key to earning long-term profits from content lies in character IP licensing. The Korean character industry is a successful business model ensuring stable profit, and the industry’s future is connected to the outcome of Korean content leading the next generation of Hallyu. The virtual environment of the metaverse in the post-COVID-19 era will accelerate the expansion of the industry and the popularity of characters. Avatars active in the metaverse bring out all the activities plausible in real life into the time and space of the virtual world, showing the infinite possibility of a new world. The success of the metaverse depends on realizing the infinite possibility of content that exists virtually but looks more real than reality. The Korean character industry’s future has already begun, and its direction and technological evolution present another scenario for the evolution of human culture.
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