애니메이션 <케이팝 데몬 헌터스>에 나타난 한국문화 요소 분석과 문화교육적 활용 가능성

초록

This study aims to analyze the patterns of Korean cultural representation in the animation K-Pop Demon Hunters and to explore its pedagogical applicability to Korean culture education for foreign learners. With the expansion of global streaming platforms, popular culture content is produced, distributed, and consumed within a transnational reception environment, and culture is not a simple reflection of reality but a process of meaning-making through selection, arrangement, emphasis, and transformation. Accordingly, this study establishes an integrated analytical framework combining representation theory, cultural hybridity theory, and intercultural education theory, and conducts a scene-based textual analysis grounded in a qualitative case study of the entire animation. The analysis reveals that Korean cultural representation in the work appears in five major categories: traditional beliefs and folklore symbols, traditional arts and body culture, space- and place-based culture, everyday life and food culture, and the combination of traditional culture with contemporary popular culture centered on K-pop. These elements are not presented as isolated information but are interconnected within narrative structure, character identity, and performance direction to construct a coherent cultural world. In particular, traditional culture is symbolized and combined with popular cultural forms to generate hybrid meanings, presenting Korean culture not as explanatory knowledge but as an experiential audiovisual phenomenon. At the same time, such representation functions as a cultural signification involving selection and simplification, indicating that the work should be understood not as factual cultural material but as a cultural text open to interpretation. Based on these findings, this study proposes using the animation not as a source of factual cultural knowledge but as an educational text that encourages learners to observe, interpret, compare, and critically reflect on represented culture. It further presents a five-stage instructional model—cultural awareness, interpretation, comparison, critical reflection, and expansion—along with a process-oriented assessment framework. The study is meaningful in that it demonstrates the meaning-making processes of Korean cultural representation in popular culture content and connects them to instructional design in Korean culture education.

키워드