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.

Daisy: She Loves Him Even Though He's Not Really Him

Are director Lau Wa-keung and his trio of screenwriters aspiring for super-heightened-naturalism with his romance-turned-spy-caper Daisy? Their movie sure takes the old maxim "Truth is stranger than fiction" at face value. For with nary an ironic wink or a melodramatic scream, this one keeps getting stranger and stranger as its story gets more and more complex. How did this happen? On their own, the characters are plausible if incompatible.

First up is Hye-young (Jun Gianna), a street artist who paints daisies as her humble homage to Van Gogh's Sunflowers. She lives with her grandfather at an antique shop in Amsterdam, favors the knit hat and layered clothing that proclaims "Bohemian," and sketches charcoal portraits in the town square despite having access to an enormous warehouse for painting oils and a date set for her (first?) solo gallery exhibit. If she lived in Paris, she'd smoke Gauloises; if she lived in NYC, she'd have needle-marks. You know the type.

Next up is Jeong-woo (Lee Seung-jae), an Interpol cop who's committed to busting crime rings at any cost. He's what you might call a noble opportunist. And so he uses Hye-young as a cover for monitoring drug trafficking. Then he seizes his chance to seduce her when she mistakes him for someone else. He's not a cad per se. But it feels as though he's in an espionage pic, not a romance, even after he confesses all after she's lost her voice from a gun shot wound that he blames on himself. (Since she can't speak, it's hard to say whether she accepts his apology.)

Finally, there's the assassin (Jung Woo-sung): Jeong-woo would love to catch him; Hye-young would love to marry him. Except for one thing... He's neither the target of Jeong-woo's investigation nor the lover of Hye-young's dreams. He's one of those stalker-boyfriend-criminal types, the guy who watches his prey clandestinely, courts her secretively, coerces her into a relationship by making her get into his car when she's mute, then ends up causing her death inadvertently. An ideal he is not. And then there's his profession: killing people. Need we say more?

For a good long while, Hye-young believes Jeong-woo is the secret admirer who's actually the assassin then she thinks that her lover-assassin has killed her lover-impostor. She's wrong on both counts. If she hadn't forfeited learning sign language and opted to spend the rest of her life communicating through index cards with common phrases on them, maybe she would've figured out her reality faster. Maybe she wouldn't be dead. And Jeong-woo wouldn't be dead. Maybe the assassin wouldn't be single either and left with a painting now splattered with his loved one's blood.