Wonderful Days (2003)

Director:

Moon-saeng Kim

Writers:

Michael Keyes (writer)
Moon-saeng Kim (writer)

Release Date:

17 July 2003 (South Korea)

Genre:

Action | Fantasy | Animation | Sci-Fi

Tagline:

A fantastic journey to the future begins

Plot:

Civilization has been destroyed by war and pollution, but the survivors have built the last city of Ecoban...

Plot Keywords:

Carnival | Manhwa | Criminal Gang | Blue Sky | Hologram

Awards:

1 win & 1 nomination

Cast

Marc Worden	...	Shua (voice: English version)
Cathy Cavadini	...	Jay (voice: English version)
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Joon-ho Chung	...	(voice: Korean version)
David Naughton	...	(voice: English version)
Bob Papenbrook	...	Goliath (voice: English version)
Jamie Simone	...	Dispatcher (voice: English version)
Kirk Thornton	...	Cade (voice: English version)
Karl Wiedergott	...	Moe / Digger Foreman
Hye-jin Yu	...	(voice: Korean version)
Ji-tae Yu	...	(voice: Korean version)

Also Known As:

Sky Blue (USA)

Runtime:

86 min

Country:

South Korea | USA

Language:

Korean | English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby SR (US version) | DTS | Dolby Digital | SDDS

Certification:

Australia:M | Finland:K-11 | South Korea:All | Germany:12 | UK:15 | USA:Unrated | Ireland:15A | Singapore:PG

Company:

End Game Productions Inc.

Quotes:

Jay: How long is it been raining? Forever. Not forever. No. For a 100 years. They say billions of people once lived on the earth. And the temperatures rose. The great cities fell. And this rain came. This terrible toxic rain. Our ancestors saw it coming. The catastrophe...

A triumph of visuals hampered by a failure of storytelling

"Wonderful Days" strives for so much, it's almost a tragedy that it actually achieves so little. The problem with the film isn't that the plot is thin, nor is it that we've seen these ideas before. The term "variations on a theme" exists for a reason.

Rather, the problem lies with the poorly conceived story and characters that get left out in the cold with horrible dialogue and about as much depth as a kiddie pool.

The opening, for instance, tells us of a gigantic, man-made refuge known as ECOBAN, which is owned and operated by the ruling class. ECOBAN runs on pollution, which of course means that ruling class prey on the beleaguered proletariats to create more pollution to sustain ECOBAN. We are, of course, never told -how- ECOBAN manages to transform pollution into a power source, nor are we told why anyone smart enough to build something like ECOBAN would want to create something that necessitates -more- pollution. I presume it is to keep the upper class fed, but seeing as they already had the resources to build something like ECOBAN in the first place....

But I digress. The point is that ECOBAN exists as nothing more than a plot contrivance to set up some admittedly fantastic visual sequences later on. But you wouldn't know that from the way the movie treats it. Given the background, I would gather that ECOBAN was meant to be a symbol of the upper class' greed and arrogance. That's all well and good, but the very idea of ECOBAN is so implausible and the story thread so inadequate that it quickly becomes nothing more than a neat-looking playground.

This is not the film's only shortcoming. The characters are woefully underdeveloped and uninteresting, so much so that right after I watched the film, I could barely remember their names. When they're not fighting, leaping, driving, or shooting, they're spending most of their time occupying the frame, doing and saying things of absolutely no consequence. New friendships and alliances pop up literally out of nowhere, and some characters disappear and reappear as if the writers had forgotten about them and then remembered just 15 minutes before deadline.

It goes without saying that the animation is great. In general, the CG meshes with the 2D animation quite well, and the action sequences are frenetic and imaginative. While the filmmakers might be brilliant action choreographers, however, they are not writers. Not here, anyway.