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Anonymous.
Rob_Hugo@PortNWIt just came to my attention that there was a review recently on the asia arts page about a new korean animated film, "Sky Blue" , i think. although i don't know much about the film itself, the topic itself interested me mildly.
for one thing, last quarter we read a few readings related to the monolithic spread of korean cinema and its dominance in asia. it's quick spread of popularity fascinated critics and many wrote articles (which we read) about why they were so popular and why it spread relatively quickly. korean media, hence, caught my eye more readily than the other adjacent articles.
what this article discussed was how Korea was uptaking a new animation project (to uptake the challenge of competiting in other genres). (just a quick note, i was surprised by the author's notion in how korea was a prime leader in international cinema in asia, and won credentials worldwide; i knew they were good, but not this good). the animation project brought about to compete with Japan, the so called "master of animation" due to the genre , " anime" , which has become extremely popular in even the US (as i'm sure you all know..) =]
This new project has been released and reviewed. supposedly, it did extremely well in terms of its visual presentation, with awesome computer graphics and impressive in the technical aspect. in terms of competing with Japan, however, it still has a long way to go. lacking emotional depth, the storyline was blunt and lacked the intuition necessary to earn much recognition. in addition, the influences are mainly drawn from anime and other sci-fi elements (such as star wars). in other words, originality is not a strong point in this film. korean-ness is merely " scattered in the film" in the form of random objects (for ethnic pride).
still the technical achievements made by the korean artists cannot be overlooked. and (though i'm not sure) this may have been one of Korea's earlier projects. perhaps they are still in their incipient stages.
Anonymous*echem* well, not so sure about your title there, but . . .
To some degree, yes, Korean animation is still developing, and isn't anywhere near being as well established, diverse, or developed as Japanese animation. But that doesn't mean they haven't already produced some marvelous works. While I have mixed feelings about Oseam, I fell in love with Mari Iyagi (My Beautiful Girl, Mari) which was original both in terms of storyline and animation style. And, because at that time nobody had any interest in the Korean animation industry, it was able to develop in its own way, and took everyone by suprise when it turned out both to be a domestic hit and a critical success abroad, even garnering top prizes at various international film and animation festivals. It was a distinctive and moving work, and was generally a superior work because it didn't try to conform to anime conventions.
I suspect that Korean animation will get better in the next few years as more and more students of arts and design schools, including some devoted to animation, graduate and more people start working in the field. Of course, many of them are already heavily influenced by Japanese animation styles, and frankly I expect that at least for a few years they'll still be generic copies to some extent. But I'm very optimistic that Korea will develop it's own style and form until it reaches similar levels of sophistication to the rest of the film industry.
Let's also remember that many "american" animated shows are in fact animated in Korea, such as the Simpsons.
In the meantime, Sky Blue was a bit of a dud. Yes, it was pretty, but it was also derivative. The technique was a mishmash of lovely backgrounds and boring character design and animation, but the biggest problem was an under-developed story, and that's what really brought down my opinion of the film. A better story would have made derivative character design much less important, and would have garnered the movie a much more positive review.[Edit by="jflinn on Apr 14, 9:08:56 AM"][/Edit]