And the Cure for Millennial Burnout Is...This Giant Penguin

Pengsoo was created for children’s television, yet it became such a surprise sensation with adults that it was named South Korea’s person of the year. Now it's ready to take over the globe.

Photos courtesy Jimin Kang | Story edited by Brendan Spiegel

Growing up in the South Pole, Pengsoo was to his penguin peers what Rudolph was to Santa’s reindeers: an outcast shunned for being different. Bullies latched onto Pengsoo’s toweringly tall frame — at nearly 7 feet tall, Pengsoo is almost twice the height of the average emperor penguin — and its large, unblinking eyes, which, when you stare into them for too long, can come across as somewhat eerie. (Pengsoo is referred to as “it” for reasons that will be explained a bit later.)

“The other penguins didn’t play with me because I was too big,” 10-year-old Pengsoo, donning a pair of red-and-yellow headphones, told producers at a studio in the Korea Educational Broadcasting System (EBS) headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, in April 2019. Sitting in a gray room, empty save for a too-small chair positioned beside a childish self-portrait, Pengsoo stared at the producers as it spoke. Pengsoo had swum to South Korea from the Antarctic “not too long ago,” it said, in the hopes of becoming the next big sensation on YouTube, which was “getting very popular” in its homeland. But the bullying there had been too much.

By that point, Pengsoo had accrued just one subscriber on its nascent YouTube channel, and by all appearances didn’t seem primed to succeed in South Korea. Aside from being large and conspicuous in an image-conscious society, Pengsoo isn’t afraid to talk brashly and arrogantly — unlike the human stars that populate South Korea’s entertainment industry, who are rigorously trained to present themselves as “clean-cut” and “genteel” in order to appeal to global audiences spanning all age groups.

A crowd of people waiting in line to get their photos taken with a Pengsoo statue at Gwangalli Beach, Busan, August 2020.

In the dim light of the studio, the EBS producers — who had handpicked Pengsoo as their new trainee, hoping to make the penguin into an internet star — asked Pengsoo the question that started it all: “Do you want to increase your fanbase?”

Pengsoo perked up.

“Yes,” it responded, giving a thumbs-up. “And I’m going to work very hard to do just that.”