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.

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!

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.