Car Chases, Analog Technology, and Social Commentary: An Interview with BULLET/BULLET Director Sunghoo Park

While anime is often thought of as being created by Japanese people by definition, this isn’t always the case. Take, for example, Sunghoo Park. In recent years, this South Korean man has garnered no small amount of acclaim as the director for Garo: Vanishing Line, The God of High School, and, of course, Jujutsu Kaisen (Season 1 and the movie). Recently, Anime News Network met up with him in Tokyo to discuss his new original anime coming this summer, BULLET/BULLET.

Spoiler Warning: This interview contains spoilers for both halves of BULLET/BULLET, including its climax.

At its heart, BULLET/BULLET is a post-apocalyptic heist anime with a lot of focus on the car chase action sequences. “I love cars, and I love driving. I love the tension that comes from speeding up,” Park began. “When I’m watching Hollywood movies with car chases in the theater, I get so excited by the speed that I feel like I can’t breathe. I enjoy those moments. […] I’ve made a lot of motorcycle scenes in other works, but I haven’t made any serious car action scenes. So I put all the excitement I’ve felt into the soul of this anime. I wanted to present what I’ve felt [while watching similar movies] to the audience—and that’s why I made this movie with car action as the main focus.”

Of course, when you think of car chases in the post-apocalypse, one film series instantly comes to mind. “Mad Max is one of my top three favorite movies,” Park told me. “The first anime I directed was Garo: Vanishing Line—and I included some elements of Mad Max in that. This time, the anime is also set in the wastelands, and episode 11 [in particular] has more than a bit of a Mad Max vibe to it. I think both the work and the atmosphere fit, so I wanted to go that route again.”

But Hollywood films aren’t the only inspiration for car action in BULLET/BULLET—especially when it comes to the visual direction. “I was originally a big fan of the PlayStation game Ridge Racer. At the time, it was a game where the camera angle was locked [right behind the car], but the game still did a lot of different things with it,” Park explained. “I wanted to introduce the [locked-camera] perspective from [Ridge Racer] into my anime as well.”

To have exciting car chase scenes, you need some killer vehicles. And while Bullet, the protagonist Gear’s car, oozes cool, it’s Noah’s vehicle that steals the show. “Regarding its design, I left it to the [concept and mechanical] designer (Hidetaka) Tenjin,” Park said. “I had had an image of a cool, normal, racing-like bike in my head, but Tenjin came up with the complete opposite—the image of an airplane.” The result is something that looks like a motorcycle crossed with a Lockheed P-38 Lightning.

Noah’s vehicle is far from the only place in BULLET/BULLET where past and future technologies mix. Analog technology permeates the walled city that the human survivors live in, from VHS and cassette tapes to floppy disks (which are now used as keys). Part of the reason for the inclusion of analog technology is simple nostalgia. “The Super Nintendo!” Park exclaimed, when talking about how robotic character Q u-0213 has a cartridge slot on it, “It was part of the culture at the time for kids to remove dust off the cartridge by blowing into it and stuff like that. It’s something which young people today don’t understand, so I wanted to include similar things in BULLET/BULLET—the fun of analog.”

However, there is also a deeper reason for the inclusion of analog technology in the anime. “I’m from the generation that’s been in contact with both the analog and the digital. I’ve experienced all the moments when analog changed to digital. In the midst of all that, I feel like it’s not like everything has gotten better by becoming digital. On the contrary, it feels like the ‘human touch’ of analog has disappeared in the transition to digital.”

Moreover, Park believes that with the evolution from analog to digital—and the increase in automation that came with it—an aspect of human connection has been lost. This can be seen through the various locations our heroes visit throughout the show. “The town Gear’s from, it’s like the 80s in Japan or Korea—where people live next to each other and when someone dies, it’s just a fact of life. Everyone talks and everything flows—everyone understands and gets along,” Park told me. “The wastelands are the result of where I feel we are going—from analog to digital. […] We have to assume that this is the path we are currently on.”

The final location is one in the middle—one where the separation between humans is in place, but where things haven’t fallen into ruin yet. “[It’s] a high-tech town, but the setting is a bit like a town somewhere in Greece,” Park continued. “And although it looks beautiful, there is evil in that world, and the people there don’t know what’s going on. They, too, just live their lives as they’re told.”

This ties directly into one of the anime’s thematic explorations: the prevalence of AI and how it’s affecting humanity. “As for AI in this anime, the world is now dominated by it,” Park explained. “I don’t think that AI should become like that. After all, the good thing about analog is that it gives you a sense of humanity—[…] it creates a society where everyone can communicate, but if the world becomes dominated by AI, people will stop listening to other humans. They will become too dependent on AI. If that’s the case, I’m worried that this loss of humanity will cause the world to collapse.”

However, that doesn’t mean that Park is completely against AI or that he doesn’t feel that it has a role in society, or even in artistic work like anime. It’s a matter of efficiency. “I’m very interested in the idea of using AI to create 80% of the work to complete the project faster and with good quality. It’s in that remaining [creative] 20% where the question of whether humans will be controlled by AI or not comes in. That’s the problem area.” Park explained. “So if we just set rules to follow, I think AI can become a very useful tool for the world.”

Another theme explored in this anime is the rich exploiting the working class, and the working class accepting their exploitation as it’s easy and the norm. “This may be different for each person, but I respect people who, even if it’s unfair, just go along with what they’re told and live their lives as they are—and find joy in that,” Park said. “I think that even if you think the world is unfair, it’s hard to express your thoughts out loud. One of the themes [in this anime] is to express the feelings you have right now, even if it’s saying just a single word.”

Yet another major theme in BULLET/BULLET revolves around the role of entertainment in human lives. In the story, it is used as a tool to placate the people for some and as an escape from reality for others. “Rather than simply escaping into fiction, it’s more about humans inevitably ending up feeling a sense of stability from—or rather, becoming dependent on—that fiction,” Park told me, detailing his thoughts on fiction in general. “So in this anime, fiction is used to exploit the world, but if you ask me, it is a natural theme in the story. This time around, the protagonist destroys the fiction [the people are escaping into].”

Of course, in the end, BULLET/BULLET is itself a work of fiction—and one its creators hope as many people as possible will escape into. Park is more than aware of this inherent contradiction. “I always say this, but isn’t the world a tough place?” He laughed. “You have to go to work and deal with all kinds of people, and you have all kinds of family problems. If you just watch BULLET/BULLET, which is an anime in our reality today, you will be ‘exploited’ by us. You’ll forget about all those hard times—drink beer, laugh, cry—and in that way, I think the audience will want to be exploited by us, the creators of this work.”

Among all the themes explored in BULLET/BULLET, the most hopeful one is the idea that even seemingly useless actions may inspire the next generation. “Without Road, there would have been no Gear, and without Gear, there would have been no Noah,” Park explained. “[Even after the events of episode 8], Gear and friends couldn’t change anything. But if you ask me if the actions of the main characters were in vain, they weren’t.”

“In episode 11, after Noah’s speech, all the exploited people initially denied her words, saying they didn’t need [the truth]. But when they saw the main characters fighting [the government], they understood that each of them was taking a step forward, saying they didn’t like being exploited. This in and of itself is a great step forward.” Park continued. “While it may seem like an action made in vain, the truth is that each person’s actions make it feel like things are changing bit by bit—and I think that is what brings about the biggest change. I made this work with the hope that this message would be conveyed—even if only a little bit.”

To close things out, Park laid out the moral of the story. “These three main characters in BULLET/BULLET are not that famous, or very good at fighting, or anything like that—but if they think something is wrong, they take a step forward, address the problem clearly, and crush it properly in a straightforward manner. That’s the kind of characters they are,” Park said in conclusion. “So even if there are a lot of things happening in the world, I hope that viewers will have the courage to say something, even if it’s the opposite opinion [of most people]—or take action or something like that—after watching this anime.”

BULLET/BULLET can be watched in North America on Disney+.