· A conversation with a friend who, after every argument with their partner, would make up by sending a heartfelt apology written by AI—only to discover that the messages from the other side had been written by AI as well.
· Wondering why reCAPTCHA asks us to declare “I’m not a robot” rather than “I’m human,”¹ while having to repeat the same verification again and again because a finger slipped or one’s eyesight failed.
· News of livestock diseases and mass culling caused by hyper-intensive factory farming; of heat waves that make the reality of the climate crisis palpable on our skin; and of people suffering from invisible, synthetic chemicals.

These are some of the moments, light or grave, that have recently brought questions of the human and the nonhuman to mind. Technologies created by humans now speak in place of us; proving that one is not a bot becomes, paradoxically, a reminder of the limits of the human body; and ways of life once embraced as progress return to confront us through their effects on animals and the natural world. From the artificial to the natural, the lines by which we have divided the human from the nonhuman are being unsettled in different ways. The changes we face today ask us to reconsider the criteria by which that distinction has been drawn, and the relationships it has produced.

Looking back, cinema has long been fascinated by beings other than human. Extraterrestrials, artificial intelligence² and cyborgs, monsters and zombies—the list of nonhuman figures imagined by cinema is seemingly endless. Perhaps cinema has returned so persistently to such beings because imagining them has offered a way of extending the imagination beyond the body, senses, and experiences of the human species. And few areas of cinema have explored this possibility as freely as animation. By giving movement—and with it, the semblance of life—to that which is still, animation has continually experimented with how far it might be possible to see the world through the eyes of beings other than human.

This program presents fourteen works that bring together the many forms the nonhuman has taken in animation. There is no single way in which these films represent the nonhuman. In 〈AAchi & SSipak〉 and 〈Ghost in the Shell〉, nonhuman beings appear either as threats to humanity or as figures poised at its boundaries, while 〈Sun Wukong〉 imagines them as neighbors who share the world with humans. In 〈Leafie, A Hen into the Wild〉 and 〈Love Is Protein〉, chickens in a poultry farm and on the dinner table take unexpected action, opening a path for the viewer into nonhuman lives. 〈Mad God〉, along with the late Hur Bum-wook’s 〈Ordinary Meals〉 and 〈Pig That Survived Foot-and-Mouth Disease〉, pushes us deeper into the discomfort of what we perceive as “inhuman,” questioning the very standards by which humanity itself is defined. If 〈Free Dogs〉 and 〈A Little Dinosour Dooly - The Adventure of Ice Planet〉 use anthropomorphism to approach the senses and experiences of lives unlike our own, An Gayoung’s short works draw on machinima³ to explore “thought beyond the body,”⁴ transporting the viewer into the midst of a future nonhuman world. Taken together, these divergent imaginings of the nonhuman reveal how humans have decided which beings may be recognized as akin to themselves, and which are relegated to the position of the Other.

As we follow the unfamiliar bodies and perspectives of these nonhuman beings, appearing before us in so many different forms, the questions ultimately return to us: Where does the boundary between the human and the nonhuman lie? And can humans really remain the sole subjects from whose position all other beings in the world are seen?

¹ For the collective wisdom of internet users around the world on this question, see:
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-CAPTCHA-say-I-am-not-a-robot-instead-of-I-Am-not-an-AI
² Park Seung-il, “Is Artificial Intelligence a Nonhuman Being? On the Ontological Turn and Technological Nonhuman Beings,” in Kim Sang-min et al., Biin-gan: Samul, Saengmyeong, Gigye, Haengseong-gwa Hamkke Sayuhagi [The Nonhuman: Thinking with x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-objects, Life, Machines, and Planets], Sawol-ui Chaek, 2025, pp. 302–335.
³ A portmanteau of “machine” and “cinema,” machinima refers to a mode of moving-image production in which characters and virtual spaces are staged using the real-time graphics engines of games or other virtual environments. In this program, machinima is presented as a form of animation expanded through digital environments.
⁴ Jean-François Lyotard, “Can Thought Go On Without a Body?,” trans. Lee Seung-hyeon and Ahn So-hyeon, The Inhuman, Ebi, 2026, pp. 21–41.