Jason says: “You can
do absolutely anything with animation, so why not do a story about a
satellite that falls to Earth, turns into a girl, and falls in love
with a boy turned into a Holstein milk cow by a broken heart? And
then, once you’ve established the premise, things can get really
strange.
“Yes, the title is pretty literal, and it doesn’t even take into
account how KITSAT-1 takes human form after crashing into The
Incinerator, a massive walking furnace that ways transformed people, or
that a bounty hunter is trying to find the transformees so that he can
harvest their livers to sell to others in the same fix. Or that
the dairy cow, a musician named Kyung-chun, is protected by Merlin, a
wizard who is now a walking, talking roll of toilet paper for reasons
he’d rather not explain. Things are weird.
“A lot of the time, things seem to be weird for no reason other than
director Chang Hyung-yun thought it would be funny if one thing looked
and acted like another thing, and then he kept fishing with those ideas
and wasn’t too terribly concerned with how they came together or
whether or not they did. It’s not completely haphazard, where
someone watching it would be thinking that it was the other way three
scenes ago, but he’s absolutely not going to spend as lot of time
explaining something that the audience doesn’t really care about while
letting some plot threads dangle or skipping things that connect
certain pieces of the story. It might be nice of he added a
little heft to the constant metamorphosis or how Hyung-kun is
frequently a man turned into a cow disguised as a man, but most of the
time, he’s content just to be eccentric for its own sake.
“That eccentricity is well worth seeing, though. The animation
may not exactly be top of the line – it’s fine, just not the sort of
work one will confuse with Japan’s best cel-based studios – but Chang
and his team draw a lot of things that are just fun to watch.
There’s a warthog witch who dispatches extra snouts to find things that
are hidden, for instance, and a dog that does the dishes. Il-ho
has tickets in her feet and seems far more comfortable maneuvering that
way than walking, and there’s a lot of weird fun with Hynug-kun’s human
costumes (fragile, as they’re made of Merlin’s paper).
“The entertaining group of characters ties it all together. Il-ho
is certainly kind of stiff in her not quite humanity, but seldom in
such as mechanical way as to seem robotic. The voice acting by
Jung Yu-mi makes her assertive even when she’s stumbling, while the
animation makes her cute but also very much alien. Hyung-kun is
fun too; with both his body language and Yoo Ah-in’s voice working in
both the very different human and bovine forms, and the personality of
this struggling musician is just the right side of whiny and entitled
to be worth pulling for. Merlin’s the sort of animated character
that gets used as a prop half the time, but he’s funny with plenty of
wounded pride.
“It doesn’t all completely come together into a great movie, but it’s
almost always fun and surprising. If nothing else, it’s an
animated movie that one has seldom seen the likes of, worth satisfying
one’s curiosity. 3.5 cats
“Seen 19 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival:
AXIS, HD)” |
