Seoul Station

This film has been touted as the prequel to Train to Busan. Being a standalone film, however, would not have been successful, because animations, from my understanding, don't do well in Korea.

Anyway, I thought this animated film is excellent. Animation is good, the voice acting is over the top at times and, as the header states, it has a satisfying ending that pulls the movie together. I was invested with Hye-Sun and her boyfriend throughout their struggles to try and survive the night. If you liked Train to Busan, you'll like this.

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.

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.

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.

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.