Reviews & Ratings for
우리별 일호와 얼룩소 (2014)

Okay, so in this film, people suffering from heartbreak are being turned into cartoonish, anthropomorphic animals of the lousiest kind possible by a cursed smog, while a wizard named Merlin is turned into a roll of toilet paper who appears whenever somebody "needs" him. The closest anyone can get to transforming into something awesome is a satellite that turns into an Astro Girl after falling in love with an aspiring musician who looks younger than he is and owns a surreal dog but has been turned into a milk cow (which means he can be milked). They must stop a giant, walking incinerator from consuming every heartbroken person, as well as a guy who transports through mirrors and plunges out their livers. Rarely have I seen an animated film that doesn't care.

I mean, come on, this is Korean animation. I've been intrigued by the last two Korean animation films I've seen, Yobi the Five-Tailed Fox and The House (The Nut Job is too Hollywood to count), so I knew just what to expect from this. While it's no better than other animated films I've seen at the LFF, there is freedom written all over this movie. The editing is clearly nothing extraordinary, with lots of commercial break fade-outs. Much of the animation looks like it came from last decade, or worse, the 90's. But the whole thing overall is enough fun to overcome these problems. Numerous jokes will also appeal to a mainstream audience, if not the whole premise, and while there is toilet humour (always a call for Merlin), Koreans are obsessed with it more than any English-speaking country so it's nothing to get too angry about.

This and Monsters 2 are my guilty pleasures of the LFF. Perhaps this whole experience of going to the London Film Festival is making me like everything, but take it from me, it's a better experience than giving Michael Bay more money. This movie has explosions and stupidity and doesn't care what you think, but it's cute and doesn't care about money either. It's just a love story in which its two title characters are having difficulty in telling if they are made for each other for not, but the point is that their lives have both been changed by strange, identical dilemmas, so they bond together and embrace their weirdness, which is exactly what Korea is doing here. Go right ahead.