With the recent announcement of the second season of Tower of God, the question of the adaptation of manhwa (Korean comics) in the anime space grew ever more pressing. However, almost as if clairvoyant, Netflix has addressed whether there will be more adaptations of popular non-Japanese works in the anime space, WEBTOON titles in particular.
It’s official: LOOKISM, the WEBTOON by Park Tae-Joon is receiving an official anime adaptation courtesy of Netflix, and what’s even more of a surprise is that the adaptation is arriving sooner than anyone could expect. LOOKISM will be available on Netflix on November 4.
LOOKISM follows 17-year-old Park Hyung-Suk, a young man who has always found himself at the bottom of the social pecking order. Considered far from conventionally attractive, Hyung-Suk is relentlessly bullied and has been throughout his life for all kinds of things; including his poverty, looks, and weight; however, none of the bullies in his past compare to Lee Tae Sung, who eventually prompts Hyung-Suk’s departure from their high school to Seoul’s Jae Won High, a prep school that has a rather unconventional approach to its education.
A few days prior to Hyung-Suk’s transfer; however, he wakes up to find himself in a taller, leaner, more conventionally attractive body; however, his original body lay asleep right next to him. Hyung-Suk comes to realize that both bodies are his and that when he falls asleep in one body, he wakes up in the other.
His new, handsome body brings him immense popularity at school; however, Hyung-Suk must find a way to balance his new literal double-life with investigating just how his new self came to be, leading him down a rabbit hole he could never have imagined.
The teaser trailer features something that has rarely been seen in the anime adaptations of Korean comics – the voice acting for this series, unlike its predecessors Tower of God, Noblesse and The God of High School, is all in Korean. This is an interesting shift away from the Japanese voice acting that commonly accompanies anime works adapted from manhwa, and is a definite step towards the proliferation of many more adaptations of WEBTOONs, as well as manhwa in general.
The new Netflix anime series, LOOKISM, will be available for streaming on the service on Friday, November 4; however, no information regarding the regions in which it will be available has been released as yet.