"Okja" is a wonderful movie, beautiful and bizarre, and without a convincing creature, it wouldn't have worked at all.

Bong has said that a sad-looking animal that he saw in Seoul in 2011 initially inspired him. Based on sketches by Bong (one he showed to Tilda Swinton got her interested in the project) then went to his go-to creature designer Jang Hee-chul (who also designed the monster from Bong's outstanding 2007 creature feature "The Host") and then to visual effects supervisor Erik-Jan De Boer (an Oscar-winner for "Life of Pi").

Comparing the process of designing the two creatures, Bong told me (through his very helpful translator, Jason), "There were a lot of iterations to the design and a lot of trial and error but the difference is whereas the Host was a monster, Okja, even though it doesn't exist in real life, has to have a sense of familiarity and a sense that you've seen portions of it in real life." Bong went on: "So we needed to create an animal that would seamlessly fit into a National Geographic Channel special and so with that we looked at combining elements of a manatee, hippo, and pig."

De Boer, armed with "mature concept designs" from Jang, just had to finesse the design in the computer. "That concept is not that different from what you have seen in the movie. So once we had the maquette, we scanned the maquette for rigging and once we had it in the virtual world we played around with the paws, the tail, the ears shape, there were more indicated lips in the original design that we smoothed out because it got too goofy and humanistic. We made it more canine."

"It was the spring of 2015 when we were transitioning from the first draft to the second draft, there was a design that came up with Okja was so lovely and sweet," Bong said. "And we wanted to lean on it because it looked so plush and soft." (That draft, by the way, was co-authored by British writer Jon Ronson, who Bong hired because he was a big fan of the movie "Frank" that Ronson had written. Bong said of the experience: "It was incredibly enjoyable, we're on the same page with how we view humanity. Every character pathetically resides in the gray zone. There are no heroes or villains.")

Of course there had to be something on set. Something has to stand in for her and to be there for the cast to interact with. There are a lot of shots with hugging or sleeping on Okja, or Jake grazing on the side of Okja," Bong said. (De Boer said that these moments of "tender physicality" are extremely hard to pull off in CGI.) Bong (who said his next film was a fully Korean genre movie about "very peculiar group of people") continued: "To take her place we created something called a stuffy, which was a fiberglass material that replicated the size and shape of Okja and had a puppeteer who moved Okja."

De Boer said that there were about 25 "stuffies" in all, "They were foam and shaped depending on each set-up. Sometimes it was a piece of the butt or flank or head. We had hats with Velcro ears. For each of these shots, we had a very specific solution. Sometimes these were solutions designed just for one shot."

When Okja is running around in the forest, that's a "weird hybrid solution." De Boer's animation supervisor was dressed in something that made him look like a sumo wrestler and mounted "tennis balls on his head." "For each of these tricky set-ups, all we focused on was legitimizing all the contact and really felt that Mija was trusting her weight to the pig."

Another goal for the team was to make it feel like there was really a six-ton creature in the forest (it then went to a team of animators tasked with "selling that weight" via "subtle shape changes in the feet, dynamic and harmonic motion in the skin that betray the collision that happens with the great"). To De Boer, this was one of the most important aspects of creating the character. "We could have animated the face and make Okja as cute as possible but if you don't believe that gravity is yanking all that weight down and trying to push it through the ground, I don't think anything is worth doing, because you won't believe that she's there," he said.

Later, when I asked De Boer if he used every trick in the book to bring the character to life, he said, simply, "Yep."

"Okja" is on Netflix and in select theaters now. Don't miss it.