Korea’s cultural export machine has spent a decade proving its comics travel — as prestige drama, as streaming horror, as tentpole action. Animation has been the slower conversion, and it is the one Finecut keeps betting on. The Seoul sales agent has boarded ‘Guardians of the Video Game,’ a 3D animated feature built from one of Naver’s most-read webtoons, and it is framing the film not as a domestic curio but as Korea’s next crossover animation title.

The pitch leans hard on pedigree. ‘Guardians of the Video Game’ is directed by Uhm Young-sik, one of Korean animation’s most established hands, whose credits run from ‘Running Man: Revengers’ to the animated segment of ‘Yumi’s Cells’ and, most tellingly, ‘Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs’ — the feature he co-directed with Moo-Hyun Jang and Hong Sung-ho and that Finecut sold into 120 territories. That earlier run is the template: a Korean animated feature engineered for dubbing and wide family release rather than the arthouse circuit.

As Deadline first reported, the film adapts Gasfard’s Naver Webtoon of the same name, a series carrying a 9.98 reader rating and 345 million views that has already spun off a mobile game. Its premise is pure gamer nostalgia: an exiled guardian of the gaming world tumbles out of cutting-edge 3D titles into a forgotten pixel RPG, where he must covertly steer an unwitting hero toward the ending while uncovering a conspiracy bent on erasing both of them — and the game itself. Locus Animation, the studio behind it, is wagering that the retro-versus-modern visual gag needs no subtitles.

The timing is the argument. Finecut will unveil first footage at TIFF: The Market, the industry marketplace newly bolted onto the Toronto International Film Festival, where a Korean seller can plant a flag before the fall buying calendar hardens. Animation with a pre-built fandom is exactly the low-risk, high-recognition product distributors chase when theatrical family slots are scarce, and a webtoon with nine-figure readership arrives already marketed. The feature is in post-production and slated for release in the fourth quarter of 2026.

If the bet pays off, the forgotten cartridge at the heart of ‘Guardians of the Video Game’ won’t be the only thing dug up and rebooted for a global audience — it will be Finecut’s entire playbook.

Tags: festival deal, Finecut, Guardians of the Video Game, Locus Animation, TIFF Market, Uhm Young-sik