My Beautiful Girl Mari - Anime Jump
- Anime Jump
- Mike Toole
- 08/27/05
- click here
"...visually stunning and unabashedly sweet and dreamlike..."
"My Beautiful Girl Mari is a cinematic jewel..."
I think someone out there is trying to make me look bad, because less than a week after I drafted a review of
Sky Blue moaning about the lack of style and substance in South Korean animation, I get hit with
My Beautiful Girl Mari, a movie that is
older than
Sky Blue (it's from 2002), but better--
so much better! Director Seong-kang Lee had already won a bushel of awards for his short animated films when he set out to create
Mari, and the results only fall somewhat short of downright spectacular. Here is a movie that is visually stunning and unabashedly sweet and dreamlike, a lazy summer daydream rendered in amazing clarity. Just the first two minutes of
Mari alone are better than any South Korean animation I've ever seen, as Lee depicts the aimless flight of a seagull in winter, eventually settling on Nam-woo Kim, a terminally bored office worker who's preparing to say goodbye to an old friend. As we'll learn, this is his second time doing so.
The bulk of
Mari is told in flashback, as Nam-woo remembers his childhood in a tiny seaside town. As the young boy moves through middle school, he can't shake persistent feelings of abandonment. His father is long dead, perished in a boating accident (like most men in the town, he was a commercial fisherman). His ailing grandmother is untroubled by her own mortality. His mother is distant and wrapped up in courting a local bachelor, whose best efforts to befriend Nam-woo get brushed off. He takes care of a stray cat, Yo, who is amiable but prone to running away at will. Worst of all, his best friend, Jun-ho, is getting ready to move to Seoul to go to a nice private school.
We get these details of Nam-woo's life very slowly, and director Lee is unafraid to let the viewer learn things by observing small details and picking up contextual clues. He's more concerned with setting the mood of
My Beautiful Girl Mari, of coloring a richly textured picture of childhood's important things-- good friends, seaside bike rides, a special hiding place in the rickety old lighthouse, and that first crush. Nam-woo takes refuge in these things when he's upset, and in doing so sets himself adrift in his own dreams; an odd marble with a human shape inside turns his imagination loose, and he muses about floating through a rich, cloudy blue sky, past an impossibly tall, green bamboo forest, seeing exotic animals and a strikingly beautiful, silver-haired girl who floats tantalizingly just out of his reach. As his life continues and his troubles don't go away, he gives the girl a name: Mari.
Of course, Nam-woo worries for his friend Jun-ho as much as for himself: the boy is secretly terrified of going to Seoul, frightened of losing his own fisherman father to the sea, and enamored with classmate Soog-yi, who rebuffs him in favor of the uninterested Nam-woo. But eventually the boys will have to say farewell and let go, and coping with that is really what
My Beautiful Girl Mari is all about. Nam-woo's problems with eventually, inevitably take care of themselves; Mari is just something for him to focus on, to keep the bad thoughts at bay as summer winds down. After it all, he'll say goodbye to her, as well.
I cannot stress enough how visually impressive
My Beautiful Girl Mari is; it does not resemble traditional Japanese animation, or western theatrical animation, or much of anything I've seen before. The designs and scenery are clean and sharp, the colors soft and vivid, and the animation's digital shine makes Nam-woo's dreams and real life blend together effortlessly, almost disconcertingly so. This quality is reinforced magnificently by Byung-woo Lee's musical score, a deceptively simple affair colored by gently echoing guitars and synthesizers. The quietly compelling animation, dreamlike music, and subdued acting from the likes of Byung-woo Lee (
Joint Security Area) and Sung-kee Ahn (
Musa the Warrior) all combine for a pretty mesmerising experience.
My Beautiful Girl Mari is a cinematic jewel, but not a flawless one. Like I said above, director Lee is a stickler for details, and he expects his audience to be as well-- so be prepared to pay plenty of attention to the characters' faces, their quiet conversations, their small asides and brief flashbacks, in order to get all of
My Beautiful Girl Mari's story. Along with that, the film's climax is perhaps a little
too obvious and sentimental, and Nam-woo, after bidding Jun-ho farewell as an adult (the men reunited, but Jun-ho is keen to continue his studies, reinforcing the film's theme of inevitable separation), says what we expect him to say. Still, though,
My Beautiful Girl Mari is a wonderful, quietly magnificent film about letting go. It is sinful to me that
Sky Blue got a splashy launch at Sundance, yet this movie went almost totally unnoticed. If the South Korean animation industry is taken up by directors of Seong-kang Lee's quality instead of the producers of
Sky Blue, it's going to be just fine.
Posted on Saturday, August 27, 2005 (Archive on Tuesday, September 27, 2005)