Seoul Station

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.

While others not only boarded but also ride the Train to Busan (title of the live action picture), we also get this animated feature which plays in the same "universe" as the other movie. Having said that, you do get different characters in the starring roles and a movie that does indulge in what would happen if a zombie epidemic hit a city. Relationships between characters and story-lines begin to unfold, as much as some of the human psyche is.

It's a nice little add-on or spin off to Train to Busan, but it's not a must watch to get the other movie or vice versa. It's also very explicit with its violence as is the other movie and we get a lot of action scenes too. It does get a bit cliché here and there (father/daughter story) and has some minor flaws along the way. Even so it is more than entertaining to watch

A few years ago I saw the South Korean animated move The King of Pigs (2011). I was very impressed with this dark, compelling and adult work. The director of that one, Yeon Sang-Ho, has now released a new animated feature, which is a zombie film called Seoul Station. The story focuses on various small pockets of characters as they try to survive the zombie pandemic in different parts of their city. The characters are all disenfranchised members of South Korean society, such as the homeless and members of the sex trade. Therefore, like is so often the way with zombie movies, there is an underlying subtext to this one which looks at these social issues as well as the undead mayhem.

Like The King of Pigs before it, Seoul Station is typified with an animation style that is not afraid to make its characters look like actual South Koreans, which is something that Japanese anime often avoids. It's a factor that adds a nice sense of authenticity to proceedings, with downtown Seoul itself presented in an equally realistic manner. The characterisation is also very strong, with a set of people here who you really root for. This fact means that we are more invested in their plight and so the various suspenseful scenes then have considerably more impact. This really is impressively tense for an animated movie with some moments that are genuinely pulse-pounding. It's also not afraid to pull its punches and has one effective dark unexpected turn in its story which only adds to the horror already witnessed. By the end, you would have to say that it's a pretty nihilistic movie which doesn't provide too many comforting answers. But it's all the better for not being afraid to execute its material this way. All-in-all, this is yet another very impressive animated work from Yeon Sang-Ho and a great example of that very rare beast, the animated horror movie.

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.

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