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.

( Mari's alternate universe )