I was gonna do a review of the new Ghost In The Shell anime series by Science Saru, but i’m gonna reserve a full lenght dissertation for something else, and while i’m feeling the upcoming Neuromancer TV series, that is dropping in January 2027.
So instead lets give a look to something else in the cyberpunk sphere, something that’s not often talked about and not even Japanese, with Moon-saeng Kim’s Sky Blue (AKA Wonderful Days), a 2003 South Korean animated film, which i’m fairly sure won’t ring any bell.
After all, i heard about it…. by not actually hearing about it, but instead discovered it while browsing online for cheap anime UK DVDs in a pre-Brexit situation, and one i kept stashed away in one of big ass disc cases for an occasion such as this.
I must say, maybe it is 20 years of aged hindsight, but the 2000s might have been a more interesting period for animation than most care to remember, because there were directors even in South Korea interested in adult animation and experimenting with the new technology…. to mixed results.
FIY, i watched the UK DVD version by Tartan Video, which has only an acceptable english dub, and includes only the 86 minutes long theathrical cut, not the director’s cut which is 95 minutes.
The plot is fairly standard, opting for the “big walled utopian city” story, which was made to preserve humanity as widespread pollution led to the downfall of civilization everywhere else, forcing everyone outside of the city of Ecoban to basically revert to the usual skullduggery and Fist Of The North Star/Mad Max thug fashion, while also being pelted by costant toxic rain.
Due to Ecoban needing carbonite to power the city energy source, the city residents end up hiring the people living in the wasteland outside to mine carbon, dubbed “Diggers”, even if they detest having to rely on these, leading to mutual distrust and tension arising, which makes the job of Jay, a citizen of Ecoban working as police harder, even more when a mysterious figure from her past emerges, Shua, making old wound resurface, and trying to hack-destroy Ecoban energy reactor, which leads to the “Diggers” mounting a rebellion against the city army, while Shua has a plan to resolve the crisis once and for all…
I’m gonna be honest, while not bad, the plot of Sky Blue is slightly generic and also nebulous at times, as 1 hour into this 86 minutes film, i wasn’t even sure quite sure what was the hero’s plan and how it would work, and in the finale the plot is kinda up in the air, with vibes instead of resolutions that adhere to some previously established logic.
Again, maybe the director’s cut (which is 10 minutes longer) explains some things better, because at times i’d felt like i accidentally skipped some scenes, but no, some characters do just appear and have no proper introduction, like the random little girl taken in by the rebel hero, she just shows up in a scene, we’re never explained why she matters or if she important or not… but then the same can be said for the old inventor-scientist that also just appears in that scene and is implied to have helped the rebel guy with his research for a fix of an error in Ecoban’s energy system.
The worlbuilding suffers some similar issues, as in, it ain’t bad, and there is some interesting mixture of styling in this cyberpunk eden city, which has the usual asian influences, the council room with big stone looking techno thrones, but also a sort of museum with religious glass stained windows and even a replica of Klimt’s painting The Kiss, we get a good look at the wasteland apocalyptic slums where everyone else lives, we see the systemic abuse of powers against the “Diggers”, but for example we never see how is civilian life in Ecoban, we always see the police or enforcers or the bigwigs that control the city.
It’s frustrating because despite this, the plot is interesting enough to make you care, even when it opts for cyberpunk aesthetics but strangely lacks cyborgs, augmented humans, there’s not even a hyperconnected virtual world, curiously, which i assume is to focus on the pollution themes… but even these aren’t fully explored.
Characters have also fall in familiar archetypes, with well oiled dynamics like the rebel guy also being a childhood friend of Jay, but also of Cade, an Ecoban officer whom with he has a friend-rival dynamic, fueling a small romance subplot as well, while the rebel guy has also a sort of foster found family thing going on with an orphan child he took in as a little brother, and the hot headed delinquents of the wastelands which also have their good reason to resent Ecoban.
Despite this sounding very typical, curiously the character drama works actually better than you’d wager, even making me surprisingly care about the comic relief-ish cowardly punk character at a point, so it’s doing something surprisingly decent, which is frustrating because you can see how it could have been straight up good if we spent a bit more time with these people, or we learnt more about their motivations, outside of the protagonists.
Again, as with the plot, while it’s better than the sum of its parts, the script feels unripe, rough, and admittely this is also the first movie Kim Moon-saeng wrote and also the first he directed, and you can kinda tell, as sometimes you feel like some scenes exists mostly because they look and sound cool, more than actual necessity… but admittely these do look good, help with the pacing and there are some good action scenes, so overall you don’t really mind too much.
About that, Sky Blue it’s undeniably a pretty damn good looking movie, which uses a blend of traditional cel animation, CG, and real background shots processed to look like computer graphics, and the character designs do indeed look like a South Korean produced animation of the day, as they have their own style that sits between anime and “USA-nimation”, and honestly the cel animation is pretty dang good.
i feel like they learned a lesson by watching the very similarly styled mixed media experiment of Final Fantasy The Spirits Within, which released 2 years prior, as in, obviously they didn’t have the budget to even pull off that level of photorealism, but i guess they noticed how uncanny the humans looked regardless in spite the huge budget and technical wizardry it was for 2001, so instead they kept the characters animated in traditional cel style and integrating them into CG background, machines and enviroments.. which still has the issue of the styles not meshing together, the CG for the time is good, and even if they did an admirable effort, at times the CG textures do stick out notably against the character cel animation, which is still better to look at today.
Still beats most of the 3D CG anime series that came out in the last decade.
Overall, Sky Blue is a very solid animated film debut, which despite a plot that often kinda takes a backseat to scene that look cool, running on vibes more than logic or properly explained resolution, manages to be far better than the sum of its parts, like characters that feel a bit too familiar yet don’t come off as the boring cliches they might sound like, and it manages to compensate some other issues, plus while some of the stylistical choices do not hold up amazing, it still look pretty dang good, making for one of those animated sci fi movies that are almost good, just held back by being first time efforts by their creators, yet still being more than just “decent”.
So i feel bad to report that after this director Kim Moon-saeng just did two short films, Tree Robo in 2005, and The Flower Of Sabi in 2010… but according to IMDB he is also working on something called I Am The King, which is supposedly currently in production.
Also, if and when i happen to see the Director’s Cut, i will update the review here with a little addendum.
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