My Beautiful Girl, Mari: A Coming-of-Age Cartoon

I'll be honest from the get-go. I'm not a big fan of animated movies. And while I did get a kick out of Doggie Poo, a Korean claymation short that's literally about a piece of shit, that fecal fantasy appealed to my absurdist side, not my esthetic one. So if you're wondering how well Lee Sung-gang's My Beautiful Girl, Mari works as a cartoon feature, I'm not going to be able to help you that much. The artwork is very realist children's book: Unblemished people tend to face the viewer directly or in exact profile; the scenery is often static with moving elements. (Just because there's rain doesn't mean you'll see water running off the rooftops, too.) It can be lovely to look at but it doesn't exactly grab your attention. And the dream sequences are never as detailed as the events that take place in reality.

Is there a hidden message in that discrepancy? Perhaps. My Beautiful Girl, Mari is all about two adolescent boys who journey to a imaginary world accessed through a magical marble at the top of an abandoned lighthouse. That world, unlike their own, doesn't have faulty electric lights, ailing grandmothers or a bratty girl throwing a soccer ball at your head. In this alternate universe, a kind of junior Barbarella -- with a white shag cut, a white jumpsuit and a giant white dog -- silently communicates sympathy and bewilderment amid tethered clouds and zeppelin-shaped creatures that are like blowfish that fly in the air. Both boys are lucky to travel to this mini-cosmos since neither merits it based on good behavior. Nam-woo (Lee Byung-hun), the artsy one, is continually inconsiderate to his mom (Bae Chong-ok) and grandmother (Na Mun-hee); Jun-ho (Kong Hyeong-jin), his spoiled best friend, is constantly picking fights with a girl who he has a crush on. While the two boys eventually turn their shared adventures to good, you don't sense that either has grown by their experiences or even takes the life lessons into adulthood. To the contrary, the final monologue has to do with forgetting what happened. I'm likely to do the same.

Critic's advice: If you are a fan of animated films and you do watch My Beautiful Girl, Mari, choose the Korean soundtrack with English subtitles. The acting is infinitely better.

Five Senses of Eros: Speak No Hot Sex, See No Hot Sex, Hear No Hot Sex

Memorable short films? I don't know many. Memorable short erotic films? I don't know any. The enervating anthology Five Senses of Eros didn't change that fact either, especially since there's actually not an arousingly erotic short in the bunch. The opener, Byun Hyuk's "His Concern," is a grating voiceover accompanied by images charting the first stage of a romance resulting from a chance encounter at a train station. (She's way too good for him even if he is played by matinee idol Jang Hyuk.) Number two -- Hur Jin-ho's "I'm Here" -- isn't much better: a twee 20 minutes of a husband (Kim Kang-woo) and wife (Cha Su-yeon) playing hide-and-seek even after she ends up dying of something or other. (This woman likes to spoon even when she's gone!)

On to the third mini movie "33rd Man" which gets more pornographic by kicking off with a naked humping couple undone once the ghost (Kim Gyu-ri) appears. She's not really a spook, mind you, she's simply an actress on a shoot with a frustrated director (Kim Su-ro) and an experienced leading lady (Bae Chong-ok) who oddly enough happens to be a bisexual vampiress. By film four, things get weirder and dykier. With Min Kyu-dong's "The End and the Beginning," now we've got a bitter, horny widow (Eom Jeong-hwa) who decides to shack up with the magician-girlfriend (Kim Hyo-jin) who her hunky husband (Hwang Jeong-min) was banging when he got killed in a car accident. (Just wait until she finds those S&M videotapes.)

Last and least erotic if most interesting is Oh Ki-hwan's "Believe in the Moment," a fragmentary little flick about six incredibly edible young things who confusedly swap partners as they struggle to find out the meaning of intimacy. Lots of kissing! No nudity! I've actually seen previous films by many of the writer-directors featured herein but I don't feel that any of them qualify as an auteur just yet. This project probably appealed to them as something to do before they got to work on a more serious project. Maybe they're auditioning actors. Maybe they're testing out cinematographers. Maybe they're trying to flesh out an idea about carnal desire or the eros-thanatos connection or a dream they once had but don't remember too clearly anymore. Maybe that's it. But only maybe.