KPop Demon Hunters: Gonna Be Golden

Serious question: Why hadn't I heard about the famous names associated with the global sensation that is KPop Demon Hunters? Why wasn't my social media feed flooded with mentions of Daniel Dae Kim (Lost), Lee Byung-hun (I Saw the Devil), and Joel Kim Booster (Fire Island)? I realize they're not the point — and certainly not the stars — but I might've streamed this animated musical sooner had I known the talent providing the voices to the supporting cast. I'm loyal to actors I like that way. And since nobody did clue me in, I'm awfully late to this Netflix and chill party. Well, better late than never.

For KPop Demon Hunters justifies its status as the most-viewed original film in the history of Netflix and you won't have a hard-time understanding why its break-out tune "Golden" has been nominated for a MTV Video Music Awards in the category, Song of Summer — Korean lyrics in tact. It's plot is pure popcorn: Three gal pals (Arden Cho, May Hong, Ji-young Yoo) who are rockstars by day, demon-slayers by night find saving the world getting harder when their enemies take the form of an impossibly irresistible boy band, helmed by a dreamy lead singer (Ahn Hyo-seop). Troubled pasts, forbidden romance, catchy tunes, a three-eyed magpie, a clumsy tiger, and some seriously tested loyalties... KPop Demon Hunters has all that while it telling a sing-a-long tale of redemption. You're my soda pop. My little soda pop.

A Story of Hong Gil-dong: Steal From the Rich, Give to the Cartoonist

Hong Gil-dong is one of those tried-and-true stories that has been inspiring Korean filmmakers for multiple generations. The 2006 version starring Lee Beom-su, The Righteous Thief, updated the beloved Robin Hood tale to contemporary times via a likeminded descendant of its well-known hero. Twenty years before that, a more traditional North Korean variation served up the fable as a martial-arts crowd-pleaser. Another two decades before that, an animated interpretation recast the legend as a Disneyesque fable. What a difference 40 years make!

Per usual, the earlier incarnation of Hong is 100% about robbing the 2%. But unique to the cartoon are obstacles like a trio of rockabilly skeletons, a fanged bat with a cherry red uvula, and a dragon who flies to xylophone music. The connective narrative tends towards the dramatic while the visuals tend towards the comic. These two worlds meet on occasion but overall, writer-director Kim Hong-joon's A Story of Hong Gil-dong is an oddly-drawn curio, not an overlooked classic. This hour-long manhwa (the name for Korean anime) has primarily archival relevancy; less so, artistic.

Kongjul & Patchui: Cinderella Minus a Stepsister

My boyfriend was leaning towards gay romantic dramas. I was feeling action flick. What's the compromise? A puppet fairy tale told in stop-motion animation! How lucky we were to stumble on Kongjul & Patchui, a Cinderella variation with one nasty stepmother, one narcoleptic stepsister, and one heaven-sent helpmate with magical powers. The Korean fable also incorporates a sinister shaman, a talking lotus, and a band of good-natured animals as skilled as gymnasts as they are as an orchestra. These additions aside, the basic rags-to-riches story remains the same as the Grimms' "Little Ash Girl," right down to the magic slipper.

Like her princess-in-waiting counterpart, Kongjul is faced with Herculean tasks that get accomplished thanks to four-legged friends: When stepmomma insists she plow a field full of rocks, a telepathic bull materializes out of nowhere to get the job done. When that same stepmonster orders Kongjul fill a huge jar despite its sizable crack, a suicidal frog jumps to her rescue. Beyond this furry support system, Kongjul also has a powerful ally with supernatural powers. (Exit Fairy Godmother. Enter Buddha's emissary.) I was pretty sure a happy ending was ahead but like the claymation mouth of Kongjul's step-sibling Patchui, this movie felt like it could go anywhere.

Pinkfong & Baby Shark's Space Adventure: Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo

With lyrics like "Wow wow wow wow, yoo-hoo-hoo" and "Good, good, good, good, good to see you," only a moron would expect Pinkfong & Baby Shark's Space Adventure to deliver a deeply considered story. What Byeon Hee-sun's animated feature is concerned with instead is keeping ADHD kids happily occupied with hyper-peppy tunes accompanied by cheerily kooky visuals. Pinkfong and best friend Baby Shark may ostensibly be pursuing fragments of a star decal that fell of their flying saucer (and landed on themepark planets Dino, Spooky, Jungle, 8-Bit, and Ocean) but what they're more worried about ia keeping your eyes and ears from mstraying from their supersaturated environs. Animals and creatures will dance for the slightest reason! Keep watching, keep singing along!

As for the catchy recurring tune "Baby Shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo" — which has equally inane verses for every member of the shark family: Baby, Mommy, Daddy, Grandma, and Grandpa — that song culminates unexpectedly with fearful fishes fleeing to the lyric "Run away doo doo doo doo doo doo." So while other melodies forgettably reword kiddie standards like "I'm a Little Teapot," "Old McDonald Had a Farm," "London Bridge Is Falling," and "La Cucharacha," this main theme has a dark undercurrent. A shark quipping "I think all of this polution is making me miserable" also has its shadowy side. Is the medium the message?

The Tayo the Little Bus Movie: Mission Ace: Dude, Where's My Car?

"At the hands of careless humans, our wheels came off and our bodies were smashed into walls countless times," says Bella (Jeon Sook-kyeong), the queen luxury car in Ryu Jung-woo's and Paik Anna's animated children's pic Tayo the Little Bus Movie: Mission Ace. She's right of course. We humans are notorious for mistreating dolls and matchbox cars, rubber ducks and stuffed animals. The three-wheeled, handheld hatchback and the one-eyed, unstuffed teddybear are as representative of childhood as bibs, bonnets, and baby booties. If these damaged toys could talk, no doubt they'd have a strong word or two about their thoughtless owners.

Insert Counterargument Here: Now just one second! Not everyone is so disrespectful!

And yet... Duri (Chong Hye-ok) has forged a real bond with his flashy, red mini-sportscar Ace (Kim Yeong-seon) even if his negligence has accidentally landed his plaything abandoned on a city street. So is the retrieval of this beloved racecar really enough to substantiate an entire feature film? Not really. A big-screen spin-off of the Tayo series, this 45-minute cartoon drags despite its abbreviated running time and has only one major message to impart: The toys that you'd associate most strongly with mankind (pro or con) are the ones most likely to be deadly forces of annihilation!

Seoul Station: These Undead Are Dead to Me

Without a doubt, Train to Busan was a great horror movie, a great Korean movie, and just a great movie. Nevertheless I was trepidatious about watching its animated prequel Seoul Station which chronicles the day before the action in the live-action film. Sure, the writer-director is the same (Yeon Sang-ho) but "cartoon" movies, like superhero movies, often get on my nerves because the characters tend to be two-dimensional and the portrayal of women is as a rule offensive. Sadly, my grievances were unchallenged by Seoul Station which features a series of cardboard cut-outs who walk around looking like they've got diaper rash, and sweat what appear to be beads of rice or sleeping maggots. Visually, aside from the hordes of undead running around with bloodsplattered shirts, missing eyes, and varicose veins, Seoul Station isn't much to look at. And the storyline in which the primary female character (Shim Eun-kyung) is a prostitute with daddy issues didn't draw me in either.

With neither eye-candy nor a gripping narrative, I started to pick out holes in the plot. Like is there really only one hospital in Seoul? Would the cops really focus their attention on shooting non-infected people before they got to the zombies themselves? Do shattered car windows eventually just turn into empty windows? Are most Korean bathrooms built with windows that can be easily removed by hand without tools? If you break a window and then climb through, can you really walk right in with bare feet without worrying about broken glass? Is the best way to locate a single person in a giant city to go to the top of a high bridge and look around? If you were in a car and there was a struggle for the steering wheel between three people and you were the driver, would you continue to keep your foot on the gas pedal? And finally if separately, are all animators horny, lonely men who have issues with women and so they put the one female character of note in a dress that's so short that her spotless white underwear keeps appearing? Someone get those guys a date and hire someone else for the job next time.

Leafie, a Hen Into the Wild: Cartoon Truths

When we first meet Daisy, the awkward but cute, eager-to-please chicken who's caged with hundreds of her kin, all collectively forced to eat the same slop day after day while churning out eggs, she's understandably miserable and in the midst of a hunger strike. She hates the farm. She wants freedom and the great outdoors. She's not about to buy into the tripe tweeted out by one especially annoying little bird out to sell her on the advantages of captivity. She's not that dumb! As metaphors go of being a slave to the system, Leafie is anything but subtle. But thanks to a near-death that gets her dumped in a ditch with other bird carcasses, Daisy's dream becomes a reality. Yet Oh Seong-yun's animated feature is not an upbeat tale about freedom. Daisy's life on the outside is hard. She's ostracized for being different (a barnyard animal!), ends up adopting a duckling (another species!), and is considered — frankly — too loud by her fellow creatures.

Does all this rejection and readjustment ever have her feeling nostalgic for her chicken coop days? Hell no! Freedom is rough but nothing is as bad as living an existence completely dictated by somebody else's demands. So she struts around with a perpetual cold. So she can't stay in one of the nicer neighborhoods. So she's living under the threat of a one-eyed weasel salivating for her and her kid. Anything's better than life in the pen. And that includes death!

Korean Film Caveat: The Netflix version (renamed Daisy) does not provide the option of hearing the original voice actors (who include Moon So-ri and Choi Min-sik, for God's sake). I suppose the demand for children's cartoons in Korean with English subtitles boils down to one person. That's right. Me. Yet there may be a much wider market for Leafie which would include parents eager to turn their kids into vegans. This film might should do the trick.

Mug Travel: Curing Agoraphobia in Children

Sam, the blue-eyed, big-headed, breakfast-craving little boy in the animated kiddie pic Mug Travel — a.k.a. My Friend Bernard — is terrified of everything. I mean everything! Heights, yapping dogs, monstrous shadows, polar bears, flying cups, water dragons, falling candy jars, escaping songbirds, et cetera. Writing out this list, I realize that he has every reason to be scared of some of those things. (Who wouldn't run like mad if a crazy penguin started coming at you making weird noises and flapping his wings?) But in this cartoon, we're led to believe that being freaked out way too easily is something that Sam is going to need to get over. The therapeutic process outlined by writer-director Lim Ah-ron includes soaring through the air in a spinning teacup, being abandoned in the middle of an arctic wilderness with no thermal underwear, and being transported to a desert without a thermos or a camel or a cellular phone. He may have a magical talisman to help him but he's still going to need to fall from plenty of high places to get the cure.

By the end, once his re-education is complete, that dog that used to terrorize him across the neighborhood will be licking his face with appreciative affection. And while I'm easily moved by the bonding between boy and canine, I'm still not game to recommend this animated flick to anyone as a good family film. The stereotype of the female penguin as a vain creature and little more than a love interest, in particular, is inexcusable at this point in history; the squeaky, preverbal noises made by characters, both human and not, is likely to drive adults up the wall. There's something bizarrely right about having the helpful Santa encountered in the beginning be replaced by a beardless man who looks like a recovering junkie ringing the bell for the Salvation Army at the end since this movie is, if nothing else, a total trip. But as trips go, it's not neither the most hallucinatory nor the most surreal. In short, there are much better Korean cartoon films for kids out there like Doggy Poo or Wolf Daddy, both of which have better animation as well as storytelling than this. Watch one of those instead.

Aachi & Ssipak: The Butt of the Cartoon Joke

A little bundle of energy with a big shock of red hair... That's Aachi. He's the brains of the operation. Tall, bald, and muscular with an impossible V-shaped back that narrows to a waistline slimmer than his neck... That's Ssipak and he's the brawn. Together, they're hoping to find a way to strike it rich and live a Life of Bling (or at least score a shipload of the deliciously addictive Juicybar popsicles).

Yet "making it" in Jo Beom-jin's hyperviolent cartoon of a fecal-focused dystopia is as hard as it is in the future as it is in our equally shitty times. There are still so many obstacles: a porn auteur who keeps double-crossing them, a dictatorial police chief who's never heard of the Geneva Convention, a robocop that kind of looks like Ssipak but is stronger, faster, and more heavily munitioned, some random disgruntled citizens who always seem to exit the port-a-potty angry, and a gang of gun-wielding diaper babies who wear their nappies on their heads and sometimes talk like a chorus.

Fortunately, Aachi and Ssipak strike a goldmine with Beautiful, a curvy blue-haired vixen who finds herself the sudden hostess of a magical anal ring that can transform poop into tens of thousands of Juicybars. A Vegas-like display of pimp-fantasticness follows but can these three stay on top when the entire world is so set on getting their hands on Beautiful's beautiful, lucrative ass?

It would take a miracle just to survive. But since this is a cartoon, the impossible is not unlikely. If Aachi and Ssipak can survive machine guns, grenades, knives, hand-strangulation, bombs, motorcycle crashes, concussions, multi-story falls, and other near-death encounters, then certainly they can overcome something as insignificant as everyone else in the world.

Dino King: In Olden Days, a Glimpse of Stalking...

Whether you'll make it through the kids' flick Dino King has a lot to do with your tolerance for a single, uninterrupted monologue with lines like "Wow! These are Pukyongosauruses. These 65-foot tall massive zorbots live alongside many blah, blah, blah..." and "Even my family steered clear of Torosauruses which had horns over three feet long." Yet despite all the information packed into this full-length feature, I wouldn't classify the movie as educational because the official classifications go by so fast and the only names that really stick are Speckles, (our hero, a Tarbosaurus), One-Eye (referring to a bad-tempered Tyrannosaurus), and Blue Eyes (an orphaned girl Tarbosaurus who serves as the Speckles' love interest) but if you've got a kid who already knows all about dinosaurs, s/he'll probably be into seeing all the various extinct reptiles zoom by in animated 3-D. I particularly enjoyed the velociraptors with the punkrock hairdos. (At least I think they were the velociraptors!)

As to the animation, it's at once real and unreal. The creatures are detailed, scaly, with naturalistically scary teeth in particular. But the creatures look more like expensive rubber/plastic dolls that have been animated than honest-to-God dinosaurs. The realest part of the animals are probably the teeth which do make me wonder how much kids who don't already obsess over dinosaur will enjoy the flick. The scenes of hunting feel cold-blooded, the life-death cycle of Speckles' friends and family can be merciless too. Even the fact that the only voice we hear is Speckles himself -- albeit both as a child (annoying) and an adult (cloying) -- can feel a tad sad. Imagine a world without any conversation! But Dino King isn't grim in the least. It's neither warm, nor cold; exciting, nor dull. There's no ice age to follow the drought these prehistoric beasts must suffer but there's not much joy to be found at the hot spring they come up either.

Please note: The movie was intended to be enjoyed in 3-D but I was not privy to that multidimensional experience.

Wolf Daddy: 10 Offbeat Minutes Trigger 10 Earnest Questions

1. What happens to a ticklishly quirky cartoon made by someone who doesn't go on to become world famous?
2. What exposure do a few laurels -- like a Hiroshima Award, a Korean Animation Award and a Tokyo International Anime Fair Award -- bring to an animated short and its creator in the long-run?
3. Who ends up watching a kooky mini-movie like Wolf Daddy after it's made the rounds of the festival circuit and is no longer new or even recent?
4. Are students who attend a university (like the Korean Academy of Film Arts, perhaps) where the animator (like Chang Hyung-yun, for instance) went to school shown works by said alumn in classes teaching animation as a craft/artform?
5. Or, more likely, are these small works of cinematic art simply languishing on YouTube and waiting for someone to type "short, animation, Korean, movie" into the search box field in order to be seen again by an audience of one?
6. How often would someone Facebook like, tweet, blog or email a link for a movie like Wolf Daddy?
7. Wouldn't it be great if alongside kiddie cartoons like The Backyardigans and SpongeBob SquarePants or even more grown-up fare like The Simpsons and South Park, television programmers threw in the occasional art house hit, even one with subtitles like Wolf Daddy?
8. Couldn't the best of the art form of animation find a place on the boob tube as late nite filler for insomniac stoners?
9. Wouldn't people get a kick out of the WTF narrative of Wolf Daddy if they stumbled upon it?
10. Can't you just see fans of Adult Swim and Nick Jr. alike getting a chuckle out of this story about a writerly beast who finds himself suddenly parenting a little girl, a turtle and a rabbit -- with the help of a deer he almost eats?

The Story of Mr. Sorry: No Apology Needed for Good Animation

To the ever-expanding list of kooky movies about strange vocations -- Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Air Guitar Nation, The Fluffer, Ghostbusters, and Road Trip: Beer Pong among them -- you can now add The Story of Mr. Sorry. This hour-long animated feature about a professional ear cleaner looks at one downtrodden drone's days slaving away for a large corporation devoted to the excavation of waxy buildup. As you might guess from his name, Mr. Sorry isn't very good at his job. In fact, he's a source of ridicule to his boss, his clients and his fellow employees. But everyone's got to make a living, especially when you've got a pet spider to feed and an agency (hired to track down your missing sister) to pay. Sound pitiable? You're right. Mr. Sorry is that. Poor guy.

Luckily for him, a mad scientist helps turn Mr. Sorry's career around. Whether that's good luck or bad luck though depends on your point of view. Mr. Sorry doesn't make friends or earn more money or find his sister when he becomes a "star" ear-cleaner. But he does gain access to the secret place inside people's heads, where their darkest, most intimate secrets are stored. Traveling amid these gorgeously realized dreamscapes of a gemlike palate, Mr. Sorry realizes that his own life may not be so tragic in comparison. There are worse fates than being abandoned, belittled, sentenced, and executed. Probably the most horrific fate is to be a guest on a TV show that lets the audience vote on whether you're destined for the electric chair. You'll see that play out in The Story of Mr. Sorry, too.

Cryptic and creepy, freaky and stunning, The Story of Mr. Sorry is a truly unique creation that's all the more impressive when you learn that it's the collective effort of five students from the Korean Academy of Film Arts: Kwak In-keun, Kim Il-hyun, Ryu Ji-na, Lee Eun-mi, and Lee Hae-young. I hope the future allows me to see the work of at least one of these talented guys again. A+.

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.

Doggy Poo: Fecal Matters

There's nothing misleading bout the title. Doggy Poo is an animated, absurdist short about the life of a piece of dog crap. We witness his birth on a country road, his belittlement by a lump of dirt, his philosophical education by a windblown leaf, and his eventual self-sacrifice to a seductive dandelion. (I could have done without the further debasement by the chatty mother hen in the middle. The life of a piece of shit is hard. I get it.) As to the turd himself, he's a tearful creation with his little black eyes always ready to let loose the waterworks. (Question to the creators: Shouldn't a piece of poop weep urine?) Some of the animation is quite nice, although I would have preferred to see doggie doo that could move. As to the voices, since this movie was only a half hour long, I thought that I'd check out the dubbed version as well as the Korean. Sad to report that even with cartoons, the English-language soundtrack is inferior. Listening to these American actors doing "funny" voices makes you wish that they had to eat the characters they were bringing to life post-recording. Weirdly, a song at the end of the movie is translated neither in the subtitles nor in the Americanized dub. I'd say that's some seriously unfinished shit.