The Secrets of One Last Monster

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SCR197: What would you do if a monster arrived with a warning that could save your world — or destroy it? In the award-winning animated short One Last Monster, a widowed empress named Eura has to decide whether to trust the giant alien Didasor kill him, all while her grief and her people’s fear push her toward the wrong answer.

Filmmaker Gene Kim sits down with Angela Sealana and Jeff Haecker to talk through the film, which is free to watch on Kim’s YouTube channel and has collected more than a hundred international festival awards. Kim wrote, storyboarded, animated, and even scored the roughly 23-minute short with a small crew over about four years — a “garage punk rock” production where everyone carried their weight.

At the center of the story is the comfort zone: how the fear of the outsider quietly nudges people, nations, and even corporations toward isolationism. Kim grounds that idea in real Korean history, reimagining the Joseon dynasty’sisolationist era as a sci-fi epic where alien invaders stand in for the historical powers that once pressed in on Korea. The result fuses traditional Korean design — turtle “tank” ships drawn from Admiral Yi Sun-sin, talchum theater masks, royal architecture — with the anime and Western influences Kim grew up on, from Studio Ghibli’s Nausicaä and Princess Mononoke to Star Wars, Dune, and The Three-Body Problem.

The conversation goes deeper than craft. Kim wrote the film while processing his mother’s death from cancer, and that grief runs through the story’s losses and sacrifices. As a Christian, he talks about wrestling with God, the temptation that “masquerades as an angel of light,” and the daily call to put on the new self — all wrapped in a candy-colored world of talking bunnies and giant monsters, because, as he puts it, the bright wrapper helps you swallow what’s inside.

Angela Sealana, Jeff Haecker, and Gene Kim also look ahead to the growing world of Adin: new lore videos, animatics, and Kim’s hope to turn the short into a full series.

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