My Beautiful Girl, Mari and the rebirth of Korean animation

By Darcy Paquet

Darcy Paquet is founder and webmaster of the site KoreanFilm.org. Currently he works as the Korean correspondent for trade magazine Screen International and as English Editor for the Korean Film Commission.

For years, the South Korean animation industry has been largely overlooked in its home country, overshadowed by the dazzling contributions of its neighbor Japan, and in recent years by the emergence of increasingly popular live-action Korean films. The few animated features produced in Korea during the 1990s have had trouble securing wide theatrical releases, despite the fact that animated Hollywood films have been consistently among the highest grossing films of the year.

This has not always been the case. Korea's first animated feature, Hong Kil-dong, based on a popular folk tale about a man who steals from the rich to give to the poor, was a tremendous box-office hit upon its release in 1967. The film's director Shin Dong-hun based the movie on a four-year old comic strip drawn by his younger brother, reportedly assembling a team of 400 people to assist in the making of the film. Although Hong Kil-dong is said to have drawn over a million viewers nationwide, the vast expense involved in making the film meant that profits were low, and only a few further titles were produced by the end of the decade.

In the mid-1970s, local animation experienced a revival with the introduction of theatrical screenings for children during the school holidays. In contrast to the elaborate productions of the late 1960s, this new breed of animation typically employed a crew of only 5-6 people and were produced as inexpensively as possible. The films' plots tended to fall within the genres of science fiction, anti-communist propaganda, and sports films, with many thematic elements lifted directly from Japanese films (banned by the government in retaliation for Japan's 35-year colonization of Korea up to 1945). Despite the degree of plagiarism involved, the films were praised for their technical skill and the creativity with which they were adapted to suit Korean culture.

However by the mid-1980s the industry began to be criticized for a lack of creativity, and audiences turned to other forms of entertainment. In total, it is estimated that 80 feature films were produced between 1967 and 1986, over half of which are now lost due to a lack of preservation. With the whereabouts of Hong Kil-dong still unknown, the oldest extant animated feature is now Hopi and Chadol (1967), the second film by Shin Dong-hun.

Korean animation has remained unpopular with local viewers ever since, despite the efforts of business and government to revive the industry. However, throughout the 1990s a number of changes have occurred in the industry which may have set the stage for an upcoming rebirth of Korean animation.

One of the most far-reaching changes has been the establishment of South Korea as a center of outsourcing work for foreign animation studios. In large part this was instigated by Nelson Shin, a Korean animator who moved to Hollywood in the 1970s and became a key figure at Warner Bros. and Marvel Comics. In 1985, Shin returned to Korea and established AKOM Production, which eventually acquired contracts for The Simpsons, Batman and other high-profile animated series from around the world. With AKOM eventually employing over 1000 animators and other companies forming to follow its lead, a new generation of manpower became highly trained in the technical (if not the creative) aspect of animation.

In recent years, other countries such as China and Vietnam have emerged as more cost-efficient alternatives to Korea, and local companies have turned to producing their own works. Since the late 1990s, a large number of television series and feature films from these companies have entered production, the first of which are just starting to emerge.

At the same time, a large number of academic programs in animation began to appear throughout the 1990s, spurred on in part by the Korean government. Students and graduates from these programs have made large strides in establishing a wave of independent short animated features which are showcased at local festivals like Indieforum and the Busan Asian Short Film Festival, and often picked up by overseas festivals. In this manner, independent animation has established itself as a separate line of development from the films produced by large companies.

My Beautiful Girl, Mari, released in January 2002, can be seen as the first high-profile feature film to emerge from this second line of development. Director Lee Sung-gang, who majored in psychology at Yonsei University, is founder of the independent animation group Dal. A large number of his short animated works have screened at festivals such as Annecy and Melbourne, and he also directed the animated sequence in Jang Sun-woo's Timeless, Bottomless, Bad Movie (1997). After meeting producer Jo Seong-won at an animation conference in 1998, the two agreed to shoot a feature film in hopes of bringing Korean animation back into the spotlight.

Targeted more at adults than children, My Beautiful Girl, Mari centers around a boy named Namoo in a seaside village who is struggling with feelings of loss. Following the death of his father (alluded to in a flashback midway through the film), Namoo worries about his grandmother's health, frets over his mother's dating another man, and then learns that his only friend Junho will move to Seoul at the end of the summer. In the midst of his worries he takes to exploring an old lighthouse with his cat Yeo. There he discovers a strange marble with light inside that, when he touches it, transports him into a world of fantasy.

Namoo's fantasy world contains massive and strange flora, clouds which can support a human's weight, a tremendously large dog and a mysterious girl named Mari. Namoo's forays into this world are brief, but he becomes captivated with Mari, and his contact with her seems to give him respite from his earthbound worries. When towards the film's end the village is threatened by a storm, Namoo turns to Mari for help, in a scene which ruptures the divide between the realistic portrayal of the village and the fantastic world of Mari.

This entire story is framed in the recollections of the elder Namoo, who begins to reminisce after spending time with Junho in Seoul. In bookending his story with the grey landscape of Seoul, the director places a strain on the credibility of the fantastical scenes. Thus, a tension is created between "believing" and "not believing" in Mari's world, which remains up to the film's very last scene.

Much of My Beautiful Girl, Mari invites psychological analysis (after all, the director, who wrote the story himself, majored in psychology). In some ways, Namoo's excursions into fantasy seem to represent a sexual awakening. Namoo scarcely hides his feelings for Mari, who bears a strong resemblance to a female classmate of Namoo's who has a crush on him. One night after falling asleep Namoo's entire room seems to be filled with water, after which he has another glimpse of Mari's world. Upon waking, however, he discovers that he has had a wet dream. At the same time, Namoo reacts angrily when a family friend becomes romantically involved with his mother. The fantasies with Mari may represent a Freudian restoration of the mother who is about to leave him for another man.

My Beautiful Girl, Mari, the first of several high-profile Korean animated features which will debut in the coming years, employed several strategies to attract local viewers back to animation. Firstly, it secured the talents of well-known actors to dub the voices of the adult characters: Lee Byung-heon (Joint Security Area) voices the elder Namoo, while so-called "national actor" Ahn Sung-ki (Musa) played the role of the mother's new boyfriend. For the children's voices, real child actors were used rather than adults, going against industry tradition.

The film also secured financing from I Pictures, a major investor, with the help of one of Korea's most powerful producers, Tcha Seung-jai. This allowed the film to do extensive advertising and to open on a larger number of screens (18 in Seoul alone). Nonetheless, after its release on January 11 the film performed under expectations, and theaters quickly replaced it with other titles. The filmmakers' hopes of opening a new commercial path for Korean animation seemed to have failed.

Nonetheless in June, the film was chosen as the first Korean film ever to compete at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France, the world's most prestigious festival for animation. At Annecy the film received a strong response from critics and audience members alike, and it was awarded the festival's Grand Prix. The prestige of this award generated considerable publicity in Korea, leading to a small re-release in several theaters.

"It has taken a long time for live-action Korean films to become popular," says the film's producer Jo Seong-won. "It has taken a lot of work, and there have been successes and failures along the way. The same will be true of animated films, but I have great confidence in their potential."

Although the film has had less commercial impact than originally hoped for, My Beautiful Girl, Mari has broken new ground for the industry artistically, and earned a high profile award which should make it easier for similar films to be made in the future. As a representative of a new movement in independent animation, the film has also hopefully opened a path for auteristic works to find an audience. While the rebirth of Korean animation is still in its infancy, My Beautiful Girl, Mari has provided a multi-faceted and thoughtful addition to what will hopefully become a new, diverse movement in Korean animation.