Verdict
Summary
The first feature-length animated movie from South Korea, Hong Gil-Dong is a delightfully quaint and charming adventure with an antiquated animated style and a simplistic storyline, but I was consistently engaged with it and found myself drawn into its mythic, Robin Hood-type plot.
Plot:
A prophesied bastard son of a lord becomes the savior to an oppressed people in South Korea.
Review:
A soothsayer visits a wealthy baron in South Korea and whispers in his ear that his young illegitimate son Gil-Dong will be a blight upon his house and will bring evil to the village. Amazingly, the lord takes this to heart and banishes his honest, good, and true son out of his house and warns him to never return. Gil-Dong, who loves and respects his father, does as ordered and wanders around the village and beyond and sees for the first time how corrupt the government is and the terrible way the people of South Korea are treated, constantly being taken advantage of by the tax collectors, bankers, and sheriffs of the region. He immediately takes a stick and uses it to beat the crap out of the evil lawmen, and encourages the oppressed people to take back what’s theirs. A long-faced magistrate realizes that this boy will be a thorn in his side unless he kills him, and he chases him out of the village, but not before Gil-Dong picks up a scrappy sidekick named Chadol Bawi, a street urchin who tries robbing Gil-Dong, but instead pledges loyalty to him when he realizes that the older, wiser boy is not just an easy mark, but a force of justice. The two boys retreat to the mountains where they’ve heard of a wise wizard who can teach them temperance and the ability to glide on clouds, but first the wizard teaches them to wash floors and clean up his hovel, which they do with gusto. When it’s time for the boys to leave, they’ve gained some wisdom and special powers, but their return back to civilization is fraught with some peril, as they encounter tigers and bats, and then the evil magistrate who has brought with him an army to hunt down Gil-Dong. Fortunately, because the wizard long harbored hope for a strapping hero such as the boy he just released back into the world, the hundreds of poor people living in the mountains rise up and join Gil-Dong and Chadol Bawi in their war against the evil magistrate and his corrupt army.
The first feature-length animated movie from South Korea, The Story of Hong Gil-Dong is a delightfully quaint and charming adventure with an antiquated animated style and a simplistic storyline, but I was consistently engaged with it and found myself drawn into its mythic, Robin Hood-type plot. The animation has a lot of repetitious action sequences where certain figures will “act” on a loop (lots of figures running around in circles or exact hand and leg movements), but that was the cost-cutting style of older animation. That sort of thing doesn’t really bother me, but it’s definitely noticeable. The South Korean style of color and animation is simple, but never boring to look at, with character designs that are distinct and interesting, and the movie is honestly pretty action packed. I had a good time with this, and fans of early anime should take a gander at it. Directed by Shin Dong-Hun.
SRS Cinema has just released a remastered full-frame Blu-ray of this one, and there’s a special feature about the impact the movie made when released, plus a bunch of bonus trailers.
