After seeing his proclivity towards drawing, his parents encouraged him to keep on going, and moved from Massachusetts to California to enroll him in a high school animation program shortly after tenth grade.
It was the advice of Kurnarsky that prompted Shiyoon Kim to take his first life drawing classes at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.
Kim credits the school with teaching him how to create a film, compelled by an intriguing story narrative.
[1] At Disney, Shiyoon Kim has designed characters for films including Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen.
Once Winnie-the-Pooh was taken care of he worked on Minkyu Lee's Academy Award-nominated short film Adam and Dog (2011) as an animator and digital colorist.
Kim would later serve as lead character designer on Sony Pictures Animation's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in 2018.
Kim was also in charge of designing Baymax, a sentient robot created by Tadashi that takes care of Hiro and his friends.
Kim stated that for Baymax's simple yet quite expressive face, Japanese traditional bells were used as reference and for his durable yet inflated body, "Soft Robotics" (founded by Professor Yong-Lae Park at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute) was incorporated into the design.
[6] Kim was nominated for the 42nd Annual Annie Awards for Character Design in an Animated Production for Big Hero 6 (2014).