The Legless Pigeon That Inspired ‘Fingerbang,’ Kim Yeonwoo’s Gothic Tale Of A Woman In Love With A Severed Finger (EXCLUSIVE BTS)

Director Kim Yeonwoo used to see legless pigeons on the streets of Seoul, hobbling after crumbs with a hunger that looked less like survival than obsession. That image, tangled up with a painful memory of watching someone lose herself in an obsessive relationship, became the starting point for Fingerbang, her gothic, wordless graduation short about a woman who falls hopelessly in love with a severed finger.

The film screens today at Fantoche in Baden, Switzerland, and Cartoon Brew has exclusive access to a collection of behind-the-scenes sketches and production artwork, below.

Fingerbang follows a lonely, faintly unsettling office worker who can’t quite connect with the people around her. She pokes and touches them in ways that visibly unnerve them and struggles to fit in until a disembodied finger appears and begins to court her. She follows it to its castle and surrenders to an escalating, increasingly bizarre affair that swings between comedy and horror as her obsession spirals toward something neither the finger nor the film will allow her to walk away from unscathed.

Humor wasn’t initially part of the plan. “The film had almost no comedy. I was planning a much darker and more destructive story,” Kim told Cartoon Brew. She worried about whether she had the right to fictionalize someone else’s real pain: “Am I allowed to tell this story?” A professor’s advice changed her approach. “He told me, ‘Then you just have to love the woman.’ That advice changed the way I approached the character. I tried to understand and care for her. As I began to do that, the humor naturally found its way into the story.” A formative trip to Annecy, where she watched a theater audience laugh uncontrollably at a dark comedy, convinced her that the tonal shift was worth the risk.

Made almost entirely solo as Kim’s graduation film at Hongik University, the 15-minute short uses digitally hand-drawn 2D animation to evoke the texture of pencil and charcoal. “I wanted to see what kind of film could emerge if I controlled every part of the process myself,” Kim said, describing the process as “often lonely and physically demanding.” Her professor repeatedly pushed her to cut scenes. She kept a few anyway, including one in which the woman transforms into a pot of samgyetang, or chicken soup. It was “strongly discouraged,” but too precious to lose.

The character design came quickly and instinctively. Kim keeps the woman barefoot and emotionally legible while rendering every other character’s face as an unreadable black surface. She modeled the finger on her own hand, aiming for an androgynous quality. Rigid, vertical spaces define the woman’s ordinary world. She moves through the office, rides the subway, and crosses the street, with the drudgery of her daily routine contrasting sharply with the rougher, curved spaces of the finger’s castle. A tightly limited black, white, and red palette does the rest: “Red could effectively represent both love and blood, or perhaps love turning into destruction.”

Composer Minhee Han, whom Kim discovered by chance at a graduation exhibition, created a score inspired by Steve Reich’s gradually accumulating minimalism. “I wanted the music to feel as though it was pulling the story forward,” Kim said, adding that, in key moments, it does so more than the visuals themselves.

Since premiering, Fingerbang has screened in Annecy’s Graduation Films Competition and at Animafest Zagreb, Imaginaria, Odense’s OFF26, BIFAN, Fantasia, and Fantoche. At Fantasia, it won the Silver Award in the Kon Satoshi Animation Competition. Kim is now developing her next short, another dark fantasy centered on a woman confronting her own emotional void.