Ask John: Is Wonderful Days a Threat To Japanese Animation?

Question:
I just the Korean made film Wonderful Days and was totally blown away. Could the Japanese anime industry see this kind of quality film as a threat to their long lived monopoly on theatrical anime, or could it serve to simply help raise the bar on quality standards?

Answer:
Wonderful Days is in something of a strange situation. While much of the film is attractive looking, the movie was critically panned and flopped during its Korean theatrical release, earning back only a fifth of its production costs. The film is also not officially available on DVD in Japan or America. While Wonderful Days may have good animation and attractive background & set design, its writing has been justifiably called weak and amateurish. And even director Moon Saeng Kim has publicly admitted that he placed too much priority on the look of the film and didn’t concentrate enough attention on the story or screenplay.

So Wonderful Days itself is not considered a threat to the Japanese animation industry, however Korean animation itself is. For the past five years or so, Japan’s animation industry has been increasingly outsourcing supplemental animation work to Korean studios to save production expenses, and out of necessity because Japan’s small animation industry can’t keep up with the demand for new anime. Animators in the Japanese industry have been known to say that Japan’s animation industry is in dire straits. And the Korean government has been taking proactive steps in the past few years to encourage the development of Korea’s animation industry. Korea does indeed have it sights set on surpassing the quality and output of Japanese animation in within the next few years. Right now, there’s no telling if that will happen or if the Japanese industry will continue to maintain or rise to the challenge of Korean competition. In fact, what we may see develop in the forthcoming years is a partnership between Korea and Japan’s animation industries. So far Korea has taken a back seat to Japan and served as cheap assistant labor on Japanese animation. But the development of Japanese-Korean co-productions like Geisters: Fractions of the Earth and the mostly Korean Bastof Lemon, and upcoming titles New Space Battleship Yamato and Shin Angyo Onshi suggest that we may see more of a merging of Asian animation than a future distinction between Korean and Japanese animation.