KPop Demon Hunters' Tiger and Magpie: The 434-Year-Old Painting Behind Derpy and Sussie
Summary: What are the tiger and the bird in KPop Demon Hunters?
- They come from kkachi horangi — a Korean painting genre that pairs a tiger with a magpie. You will also see it written as jakhodo (鵲虎圖) or hojakdo (虎鵲圖). Same picture, three names.
- The oldest surviving example is dated 1592. Not "Joseon era," not "around the 18th century" — the inscription in the upper right corner names the year. It belongs to Leeum Museum of Art and went on public view for the first time in September 2025.
- The tiger is widely read as the ruling class and the magpie as the common people. That reading explains why folk-painting tigers look faintly stupid even with their fangs out.
- Director Maggie Kang named the tiger Derpy for exactly that reason — she found the folk tigers "very goofy." Its final design came from her husband, modeled on the couple's two flat-faced Himalayan cats.
- The catch: tiger-and-magpie paintings were charms against disaster, while the jeoseung saja is a guide for the dead. In traditional iconography those two do not share a frame. KPop Demon Hunters put them in one anyway.
If you watched KPop Demon Hunters and wondered what the chubby tiger and the odd little bird actually are, the short answer is that they are a 400-year-old painting.
Their names are Derpy and Sussie. Neither is spoken in the film — Maggie Kang revealed them afterward, which is why the merchandise arrived before the names did. In Korea, the National Museum of Korea's gift shop sold a kkachi horangi pin so fast that people queued online for it; from January 2026 the museum moved it to in-store-only limited sales.
But the pairing itself is not an invention. Korean painters put tigers and magpies together for centuries, following a fixed compositional formula. How long is centuries? The oldest one still with us was painted in 1592.
The 1592 anchor
Almost every English-language explanation of this motif stops at "a Joseon-era folk painting." There is a reason for that vagueness: Korean folk paintings were rarely signed or dated. Most surviving examples float somewhere in the 18th or 19th century with no way to pin them down.
One painting breaks the pattern. A hojakdo in the collection of Leeum Museum of Art carries an inscription in its upper right corner stating that it was made in the imjin year — 1592. Ink on silk, 160.5 by 95.8 centimeters. It is considered the oldest surviving tiger-and-magpie painting, and it stayed out of public view until September 2025, when Leeum showed it in an exhibition titled Magpie and Tiger 虎鵲. That show ran from September 2 to November 30, 2025, and has since closed.
One caveat worth keeping straight: the 1592 painting is not a folk painting. It sits closer to orthodox court-style painting. The composition originated in Yuan-dynasty China, and this piece captures the moment the imported formula was turning Korean. The bumbling, cross-eyed tiger most people picture when they hear "kkachi horangi" is a much later face — late Joseon, after the genre had drifted downward from the palace.
Why the tiger looks like an idiot
A tiger painted for the royal court is dignified. A tiger painted for a village household is not. Its lips are bright red, its fangs are bared, and it still manages to look like it has lost an argument. Meanwhile the magpie sits on a pine branch and scolds it.
The standard reading goes like this: the tiger is a person in power — more specifically a corrupt official — and the magpie is an ordinary person speaking truth to him. The magpie chatters away and the tiger either stares blankly or looks off in another direction. Power that cannot hear what the public is saying. This is not an academic consensus, but it is by far the most widely circulated interpretation.
That composition only became possible once the genre moved out of the court. The formula came down from above; the people painting and buying it did not. Bit by bit the tiger got sillier, and "foolish tiger plus confident magpie" hardened into its own genre in late Joseon.
About that magpie — it is not the European one
English readers should be careful here, because the word "magpie" carries the wrong baggage.
The Korean bird is the Oriental magpie, Pica serica, a different species from the Eurasian magpie familiar in Britain and continental Europe. And the symbolism is close to inverted. In much of Europe the magpie is a thief and an omen of bad luck. In Korea it is a bringer of good news. Hearing a magpie call on New Year's morning meant the year would go well, and there is a set phrase for the idea — sinnyeon bohui (新年報喜), "the new year announces joy."
Layer that with another old association and the picture gets richer: the tiger is a messenger of the mountain god, and the magpie carries the god's word. Which is why a pine tree shows up in nearly every version of this composition.
Enough English speakers went looking for this bird that the Audubon Society published a piece explaining what it is. Princeton University Library has tagged blog posts under kkachi horangi. The film sent a lot of people hunting for one small bird.
These paintings were not made to be admired
Treat kkachi horangi purely as art and you miss what it was for. Its actual job was to be a munbaedo (門排圖) — a picture pasted on the front gate on the first morning of the lunar new year, usually paired with a dragon painting on the opposite door. The purpose was to keep evil spirits out.
It was a consumable, not a keepsake. Stuck up, weathered, replaced. That is why most surviving examples are on paper and why well-preserved early pieces are so rare.
Which makes the film's version oddly faithful. Derpy and Sussie panic constantly and never leave their post. Guarding the doorway was the original job description.
The 1988 Olympic mascot came from one of these
This is not the first time Korea exported its tiger.
Among 19th-century examples there is one nicknamed the "Picasso tiger" — ink and light color on paper, 91.7 by 54.8 centimeters, privately held — for the way its forms are chopped into flat, bold planes. That painting was the basis for Hodori, the mascot of the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
So there is a straight line from a folk painting to Hodori in 1988 to Derpy in 2025. Roughly once a generation, the same source produces a new character.
The genre also allowed variation. A work attributed to Shin Jae-hyeon and dated to around 1874 (116.5 by 83.0 centimeters, private collection) puts a mother tiger, her cubs, and a whole group of magpies into one frame — a rare departure from the standard one-tiger-one-magpie setup.
Derpy's real design reference was a pair of cats
Maggie Kang has said the tigers in folk paintings struck her as "very goofy," which is where the nickname came from. The final character design was done not by her but by her husband, using the couple's two flat-faced Himalayan cats as reference.
A 400-year-old painted face and a squashed housecat face, merged into one character.
Sussie is a stranger case. She is a supernatural magpie with multiple eyes, wearing a small black gat, the traditional Korean hat associated with the Joseon gentry. Korean commentary has connected that hat to a reading of the original iconography in which the commoner magpie has taken the aristocrat tiger's hat for itself, which fits neatly with the power-satire interpretation above. As for the name, fans widely assume "Sussie" comes from "suspicious," but that has never been officially confirmed.
Where the film breaks with tradition
Everything so far suggests the film did its homework. There is one objection worth raising.
Tiger-and-magpie paintings belong to the category of protective charm images — pictures whose function was to drive off disaster and disease. The jeoseung saja, the figure the Saja Boys are built on, is something else entirely: an escort for the dead. In the grammar of traditional Korean iconography, these two do not belong in the same frame. Putting a gate-charm and an underworld official into one scene is a bit like hanging a good-luck amulet in a funeral home.
Whether the filmmakers knew this is impossible to say from outside. Either way the result is interesting, because recombining unrelated sources is exactly what folk painting always did. The genre began by taking a courtly formula and bending it out of shape.
The names, sorted
Searching in Korean turns up three terms that look like three different things:
- Jakhodo (鵲虎圖) — magpie first
- Hojakdo (虎鵲圖) — tiger first
- Kkachi horangi (까치호랑이) — the plain Korean name, literally "magpie tiger"
All three mean the same painting. Museums tend to use the Sino-Korean forms; ordinary Korean speakers say kkachi horangi.
KPop Demon Hunters was released on Netflix in June 2025, produced by Sony Pictures Animation and directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans. At the 98th Academy Awards it won both categories it was nominated in, Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song, and HUNTR/X's "Golden" spent a cumulative eight weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. A sequel was officially confirmed in March 2026 with both directors returning.
Nobody knows yet what Derpy and Sussie will be doing in it. Their source material, on the other hand, has been holding its position for 434 years.