Seoul Station

After watching the South Korean zombie thrillride Train to Busan, I looked up the director, Sang-ho Yeon, and learned that his early career consisted not of live-action thrillers but of animated dramas that took on serious issues. I then watched Seoul Station, which is an animated feature about the same zompocalypse that seems to be a bridge between those early films (which I still haven't seen) and Busan, mixing zombie action with a serious message about the plight of the homeless.

Apparently made before Busan but not given wide release until that movie's success, Seoul Station begins with an injured homeless person staggering through the city. A homeless friend can't get help from the harsh world, the homeless guy turns into a zombie, and all hell breaks lose.

The action is constant and the characters are interesting if not generally likable. It's got some interesting twists and takes a dim view of the police. The animation is fine and possibly motion-captured but not much of it is memorable.

It's really a good movie, and at some point I will check out Yeon's other animated films. I'd recommend it.

After a homeless person a zombie virus spreads rapidly and a woman must reunite with her boyfriend while her father also searches for her.

From director Yeon Sang-ho, packed with social realism especially around gender, this is an animated prequel to Train to Busan. Seoul Station is refreshingly different from its predecessor. It's avoids stereotypes, has plenty of tension, atmosphere, has all the blood, guts violence you'd expect but also has a solid twist at the end.

Highly recommend.

Here's a tip when being chased by zombies and you go through a door....close the door behind you!!!!

The movie itself was good with decent plot. But the main character that it follows around was infuriatingly stupid and useless. By far one of the least useful people i have ever seen in a movie. They were put there solely to make drama and get people killed. Their complete inability to shut any door ever was by far the most frustrating thing to watch in any zombie movie i have ever seen. They just lack all basic skills.

If I am not wrong, Yeon Sang-Ho's Seoul Station was made earlier than Train to Busan, but it was not released because the studios feared it will be a disaster because animated feature films don't do well in Korea. But of course the massive success of Train to Busan changed all that.

Seoul Station is neither a prequel or sequel to TtB, but it uses the same father-daughter plot device to great effect. How the zombies apocalypse began is never told and the story zooms in on certain groups of people who are trying to survive in the zombie pandemic and the government locking down hard on the people.

ST (my local newspaper) gave it 4.5 and said it is the better of the recent two Korean zombie flicks. IMHO it is not. It doesn't push the envelope of the genre to anywhere new. In all fairness to it, neither did TtB. But what TtB managed to do awesomely right was it suddenly made the genre fun all over again. The energy was infectious and relentless as the motley crew was stuck in a fast train going to God knows what. I just love the amazing ideas the rag-tag team comes up with to move from one zombie-infested train car to the next. Seoul Station, on the other hand, just isn't that fun. The tone is much serious and ominous. Unlike having some good-looking actors we can ogle at in TtB, we get the disenfranchised of Korean society. By that I mean the homeless and the other people at the lowest rung of the social ladder. Yeon is obviously commenting on the Korean society and the narrative is not even subtle. He also explicitly implicates the government in its elitist way of running the country.

I like the bare animation style - the characters are drawn in hard lines and Yeon is adamant in portraying the unlikable characters in unlikable ways. There is no sugar- coating here. But the unlikable qualities give way to more interesting characters. I found myself getting sucked into the story as different pockets of people try to handle or escape their dire situations. Our attention is focused on the father and daughter who are trying to make their different ways towards each other in a city crawling with zombies. I thought the story is just moving towards the inevitable and was totally gobsmacked by a twist I didn't see coming. Even the irony of climatic setting hit me in the guts.

Seoul Station is a good companion piece to Train to Busan, but on its own it feels somewhat smaller in scale and less urgent.