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My Beautiful Girl Mari
South Korea is known for many things in the media world: its television dramas, its pop-stars-turned-actors like Rain, and even, slowly, its manhwa. But animation isn't one of them. For a whole raft of historical and economic reasons, good quality feature-length domestic animation never really took off in South Korea. Which is a shame, because when you see the occasional gem like My Beautiful Girl Mari, it really makes you wonder at the potential of a kind of animation that's not quite Ghibli and not quite Disney, but occupies a third (or multiple!) space in between.
My Beautiful Girl Mari. (Mari Iyagi) Dir. Lee Seong-Kang, 2002.
My Beautiful Girl Mari is a coming-of-age narrative with a fantastic twist. It opens as Kim Nam-woo, an office worker in present-day Seoul, receives a visit from his old friend Jun-ho. Jun-ho gives him a small box, and even without opening it, Nam-woo is set to reminiscing about his past, and especially one particular summer of his childhood in a small fishing village. It is in many ways the last year of his "childhood": his father has died, his mother is becoming involved with a new man, his grandmother is ill, and his shy and oft-bullied best friend Jun-ho is moving away to attend high school in Seoul. Seeking refuge in their idyllic surroundings, the boys spend their last schooldays together swimming in the ocean and browsing in the local book shop. The characters are rounded in almost literary ways, and deal with issues of growing up that are familiar and realistic.
But here's where the fantasy element enters. While browsing in the book shop one day, Nam-woo finds a mysterious marble with a figure, like a fish or a woman, flashing inside. When he takes it to an abandoned lighthouse by the sea, the marble seems to allow Nam-woo (and his cat Yo) access to another world. It is a place of solid clouds, immense forests of tangled foliage, and a beast like a puppy bigger than an elephant who bears a girl with white hair, all covered throat to feet in white fur. She is Mari, and she is there, and then gone. Nam-woo wakes up from these visions confused. Is it a dream or a reality? As the film unravels, the alternate world itself is almost too symbolic of his psychological state to be real, especially in how all everything is always slipping weightlessly away as Nam-Woo struggles with feelings of abandonment. But it's also too real in its effects on his life to be just a delusion. It is poised on the delicate edge between. Mari herself isn't the focus of the film -she has very little subjectivity of her own- but she's the encapsulation of it all, the perfect image. Not quite an object of desire or a saviour or even a person per se, she's a living symbol of liminality.
In its art style, too, Mari presents another option for cel-style animation somewhere between the classic Disney look and the anime (especially Studio Ghibli) look. The backgrounds are done in lush CG, with the kind of near-photorealistic effects and moving camerawork you see in high-budget anime, particularly in the opening credits which follow a seagull through the skyscrapers of Seoul in the snow. But the characters themselves have quite simple features, without a lot of depth, detail, or even black outlines. Actually, the closest I can think of in terms of character design is Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, but it's not the same as that either. Simply put, it's "world animation." And it's great to see something different!
When people do talk about Korean animation, My Beautiful Girl Mari is usually cited as the most high-profile, successful Korean animated works. It was the Grand Prix Winner (best feature film) at Annecy in 2002, and I've occasionally seen it mentioned on anime boards asking about Korean animation. But if I wasn't pretty deep into the animation/anime world, I doubt I'd ever have heard of it. Is this the fate of non-America, non-Japanese animation? I think it's a pretty good movie. It is slowly paced, yes, and lyrical in ways that border on saccharine sometimes, especially the giant fuzzy puppy Mari rides around on. It's not super-progressive politically. But it is an interesting story, well-told, well-animated. And almost no one knows it outside Korea. That's why I thought I'd boost it today!
My Beautiful Girl Mari. (Mari Iyagi) Dir. Lee Seong-Kang, 2002.
My Beautiful Girl Mari is a coming-of-age narrative with a fantastic twist. It opens as Kim Nam-woo, an office worker in present-day Seoul, receives a visit from his old friend Jun-ho. Jun-ho gives him a small box, and even without opening it, Nam-woo is set to reminiscing about his past, and especially one particular summer of his childhood in a small fishing village. It is in many ways the last year of his "childhood": his father has died, his mother is becoming involved with a new man, his grandmother is ill, and his shy and oft-bullied best friend Jun-ho is moving away to attend high school in Seoul. Seeking refuge in their idyllic surroundings, the boys spend their last schooldays together swimming in the ocean and browsing in the local book shop. The characters are rounded in almost literary ways, and deal with issues of growing up that are familiar and realistic.
But here's where the fantasy element enters. While browsing in the book shop one day, Nam-woo finds a mysterious marble with a figure, like a fish or a woman, flashing inside. When he takes it to an abandoned lighthouse by the sea, the marble seems to allow Nam-woo (and his cat Yo) access to another world. It is a place of solid clouds, immense forests of tangled foliage, and a beast like a puppy bigger than an elephant who bears a girl with white hair, all covered throat to feet in white fur. She is Mari, and she is there, and then gone. Nam-woo wakes up from these visions confused. Is it a dream or a reality? As the film unravels, the alternate world itself is almost too symbolic of his psychological state to be real, especially in how all everything is always slipping weightlessly away as Nam-Woo struggles with feelings of abandonment. But it's also too real in its effects on his life to be just a delusion. It is poised on the delicate edge between. Mari herself isn't the focus of the film -she has very little subjectivity of her own- but she's the encapsulation of it all, the perfect image. Not quite an object of desire or a saviour or even a person per se, she's a living symbol of liminality.
In its art style, too, Mari presents another option for cel-style animation somewhere between the classic Disney look and the anime (especially Studio Ghibli) look. The backgrounds are done in lush CG, with the kind of near-photorealistic effects and moving camerawork you see in high-budget anime, particularly in the opening credits which follow a seagull through the skyscrapers of Seoul in the snow. But the characters themselves have quite simple features, without a lot of depth, detail, or even black outlines. Actually, the closest I can think of in terms of character design is Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, but it's not the same as that either. Simply put, it's "world animation." And it's great to see something different!
When people do talk about Korean animation, My Beautiful Girl Mari is usually cited as the most high-profile, successful Korean animated works. It was the Grand Prix Winner (best feature film) at Annecy in 2002, and I've occasionally seen it mentioned on anime boards asking about Korean animation. But if I wasn't pretty deep into the animation/anime world, I doubt I'd ever have heard of it. Is this the fate of non-America, non-Japanese animation? I think it's a pretty good movie. It is slowly paced, yes, and lyrical in ways that border on saccharine sometimes, especially the giant fuzzy puppy Mari rides around on. It's not super-progressive politically. But it is an interesting story, well-told, well-animated. And almost no one knows it outside Korea. That's why I thought I'd boost it today!