Wonderful Days (2005)

the audience applauded

Simply A Masterpiece

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

If you like anime - pass by, because you will not find here any hysterically screaming teens, or girls, suffering from hypertrophy of the mammary glands, or pedophilia, or banal pretentious plot, no savoring of sadistic cruelty, no saucers-eyes, nor foolish dialogues. But you will see the melancholic aesthetics of perpetual rain - perhaps, Far East Asian, or possibly European, leisurely narrative pace and great music. Characters are terse, preferring to express their feelings in actions and hints rather than in dialogues. They do not need long speeches - they know each other and do not care about ignorant audience. Characters may not be fully fleshed out, but displayed well, without excessive caricature of Japanese animation.If you like anime, then you should know that "Wonderful Days" (or "Sky Blue") is not an anime, and certainly not a Japanese anime. The difference is felt both in style and in the cultural baggage and symbols - an Asian contemplation oddly, in the unique South Korean style, bonded with European culture. Here are Shua and Jay on the background of stained-glass window depicting Jesus Christ surrounded by angels, here are crosses in the cemetery, here are people in Venetian masks mingled with people in Asian masks, pacing in masquerade under an enchanting Asian music. The European Christian culture is seen in the "sovereignty" of the characters' personalities, chained not by collectivist Asian culture of shame but by internal Christian notions of good and evil, loyalty is given not to a group, but to what they think is right, characters are ready for sacrifices and redemption - even the most heartless and cynical of them.The drawing of pictures is marvellous, depicting gray melancholy atmosphere which suddenly, like sun appearing behind clouds, gives way to the bright beautiful images. All these are accompanied by wonderful music, the eternal rain and contemplative narrative pace. The fight scenes do not seem irrelevant - they are justified by the plot and are not too exaggerated. And the protagonist seems to have killed nobody. The plot is about sacrifice and redemption. About fidelity and love. It is also about that you can not build your happiness on the misfortune of others.So if you like anime, cyberpunk, Japanese culture, screams, tantrums and pretentious stupid stories, the "Wonderful Days" is not for you. But if you like South Korean movies, or if you did not saw or do not like them, but like animation, aesthetic pictures, contemplation, melancholy, beautiful feelings, romance, common sense, rain and good music, then perhaps you will be the best audience for this wonderful film.

"Wonderful Day" is mostly an exercise of style over substance: The plot has some interesting elements and a great atmosphere of melancholy...But sadly most of the story feels flat and forgettable (Despite some memorable and beautifully animated sequences) Kind of like "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within", except that this movie is a bit less boring and it have better characters.The animation and the designs were pretty good (Despite some brief moments where the expressions in the faces of the characters turn a bit awkward) but overall, the combinations of traditional animation, CGI and miniatures have an incredible looking appearance. The sceneries are beautiful and the movements of the characters are pretty fluid and well done.If only the plot were as good as the animation...Well I guess it could have been a much worse...This could have been something preachy or emotionless (Like "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within") Despite the boring and melodramatic parts of the story, "Wonderful Days" it's something worth watching, at least for the excellent quality of the animation.

Fantasporto 2010.Those who are regular readers of my comments know that i have a special appreciation for the theme of cinematic uses of space. Usually, most of the times, i mean physical built spaces, architecture. I plan on developing the theme, and in a near future hopeful get sponsoring to deepen my research and eventually get somewhere. In the meanwhile, i collect examples of films which clearly address the theme.The thing i've been noticing is that unlike other qualities you may find in a film, this space/image adequation is something that simply won't happen unless the filmmakers are conscious of it. In other words, in order for buildings to become either characters or spacial entities, there has to be a lot of thinking and awareness involved. Being an architecture might help, it certainly did help Meirelles in Blindness.Here we have a fairly interesting example of the theme. The story is absolutely uninteresting, dull and discardable except for what allows the architecture connection to show: everything revolves around one building, the ECOBAN, where the bad guys have their fortress from where they control the surrounding world of the film. the sequence during the credits is powerful in how it synthesizes this concept: the hero rides his motorcycle through the road, and enters this building. It's interesting to understand this building: it has a central plant, we actually even see a virtual model of it, inserted in the film!, when the bad guys discuss the security of ECOBAN. from that central round core (with an interior that uses Wright's New York museum) we have several huge accesses, several long corridors that connect the core to the world. Those corridors great structures that mix Gothic bows with more bionic freely designed structures, one inside the other. It's one of this corridors that we see the hero ride through, in the initial sequence. So that first essential scene has him reaching the inside of the building. That's the most spatial sequence of the whole film, and it makes the experience worthy, even though the rest of the shots are usually uneven (with a few exceptions). It's useless to say the the final solution to release the world from tyranny is found at the centre of the building.So, we have a story folded into a building, making the building a character itself. that building works in its conception as the metaphor (symbol) of what it represents in the story. So it's Storytelling mapped into architecture. That's really interesting. Everything else in this film fades compared to this concept. More than that the story is strangely inefficient. I don't know how we can have the cleverness of making architecture a character to support such an unclear narrative. It's like there were different people working on different aspects of the project.The production, and visual aspect is quite good, as in fact pretty much anything that comes out of South Korea.My opinion: 3/5http://www.7eyes.wordpress.com

I really didn't find anything remarkable or salvageable from what is essentially a terrible anime. I think everyone can agree that the plot is flimsy, unoriginal and uninspired, but for me there wasn't even anything worth appreciating visually.As an anime fan I find myself increasingly perplexed with numerous studio's obsession in integrating CGI with traditional animation. If I wanted to see CGI I'd go and watch an action movie or a 'cinema of attractions' piece such as the new 'King Kong' - that is marketable largely for its use of CGI. When I go to see animation i expect to see at least SOME hand-drawn imagery... it's not that the use of CGI in animation doesn't work; the 'Ghost in the Shell' TV series or 'Blood: the last vampire' is an example of when it works - used occasionally and effectively.'Sky Blue' however is a hackneyed attempt at visual beauty. The 2D animation is detailed, yet horrendously jerky and sparse - CGI is used whenever it can - whether it be a gun that a character is holding or a vehicle speeding across the screen. It seems that the studio has used CGI simply to cut down on production time, (CGI is quicker to render than painstaking hand-drawn cells). Apparently this film took 7 years to make... looking at the badly rendered CGI and atrociously animated characters, this is incredibly hard to believe. The problem is that apart from the beautifully rendered STILL backgrounds, most of the CGI looks rushed, cheap, and does not blend at all well with the 2D animation.The English dub is awful, the lead male's voice is so forced... no-one should have to try that hard to sound cool.An utter disappointment. I do not recommend this.