Dwae-ji-ui wang (2011) Reviews

• Deeply troubling and excellent South Korean animation

  Red-Barracuda2012-06-24

  The King of Pigs is certainly not an animated feature for kids. Despite the story being about the school life of a group of boys, this is a very bleak and disturbing story. It begins in the way that it means to go on with us being introduced to the two central characters. Both are now around the age of thirty, and both clearly have extreme issues. Jong-suk is a wife-beating journalist who has aspirations of becoming a novelist; while Kyung-min is a failed businessman who we are led to believe has murdered his wife just prior to the story beginning. The two men meet in a café and discuss their schooldays. They have never even spoken in fifteen years, since an incident at school. The rest of the story is told in flashback, returning to the men periodically and ending with them after a very surprising twist. The boys were the victims of systematic bullying. A hierarchal society existed where the weak were known as the pigs and the bullies, the dogs. The teachers actively encouraged the situation as a way of controlling the school in a brutal regimented manner. Only that it would have worked seamlessly was it not for a boy called Chul. This mysterious loner stood fearlessly up to the bullies and simply combated them with far greater levels of violence. He became the King of Pigs and was the saviour of the downtrodden. However, he had a real darkness within him, and a tragic family life. The film's trajectory hurtles towards a depressing conclusion. I found this South Korean animation very moving and involving. Unlike Japanese anime I have seen, this feature is not afraid to depict the characters with real Asian faces. The world the characters live in feels like a real South Korean place. This focus on realism is to the film's huge credit. This means that the carefully chosen fantasy moments that occur within the film have more impact, such as the dead cat that mocks the boys in hallucinations; it was an animal they brutally killed. It has to be said that The King of Pigs is a very dark and troubling story about bullying and the way it can shape lives forever. It's a cartoon that allows the viewer to think, it does not spell out the intricacies of its protagonist's inner minds. We are allowed to work out for ourselves much of what we see. It really is a cartoon that actually lives up to the adult label. Highly recommended.

• Animal Farms

  tieman642013-12-12

  "Americans remind me of survivors of domestic abuse. There is always the hope that this is the very, very, very last time one gets one's ribs re-broken." - Inga Muscio Grotesque and violent, Yeun Sang-Ho's "The King of Pigs" is a low budget animated feature from South Korea. Like a demented take on Orwell's "Animal Farm", or Golding's "Lord of the Flies" (to which its title alludes), the film watches as a gang of privileged kids (nicknamed the "dogs") repeatedly brutalise and bully a school's lower class students (nicknamed the "pigs"). Orwell's tale saw one pig rise and destroy his oppressors. In "The King of Pigs" we see a poverty stricken student, Chul Kim, stand up to his bullying school-mates. Rather than a romantic hero, though, Chul is portrayed as a violent psychopath. "We must become more evil than they are," Chul explains, internalising the hate directed at him and re-directing it, tenfold, at those who brutalise him. Virtually everyone in Yeun Sang-Ho's tale is understood as being either a victim or victimiser. Workers and employers, the rich and the poor, businessmen and prostitutes, students and teachers, men and women, bullies and classmates, humans and animals...they're all trapped in Yeun Sang-Ho's very rigid social hierarchy. Even those who seem to escape poverty ultimately find themselves back in financial debt, beholden to others. Capitalism as a form of psychic and literal violence, the film paints a world bound by the laws of competition, predation and psychopathy. "Money only follows the rich," Chul says, "you need to be a monster if you don't want to keep living like a loser." Whilst Yeun Sang-Ho's film portrays a very real, contemporary problem in South Korea – parental/social pressures and limited job vacancies have led to a rise in local bullying – all his films are works of social critique which portray a more global situation. In "Pigs" we thus see an expansive, social hierarchy based on wealth; the ruling "dogs" and the subservient "pigs". This regime, which infects all social institutions, is enforced by the oldest all the way down to the youngest. Through them, violence is perpetrated against those lower in the social pecking order: the rich against the poor, men against women and humans against animals, who represent the lowest rung on the ladder and the most vulnerable. "The King of Pigs" is blunt, unsubtle and pushes its ideas, themes and caricatures to every possible extreme. Women aren't only abused by husbands, but decapitated. Children aren't cruel to animals, but stab them repeatedly. Bosses don't underpay their employees, but beat and humiliate them in public. Like all good grotesque art, Yeun Sang-Ho deals entirely in extremes. Interestingly, the film's aesthetic limitations (low frame rate, small budget etc) only amplify its more grotesque aspects. The result is not only a film populated with freakish, disturbing characters, but one which taps deeply into a reality shared and suffered by many in our world. Elsewhere the film touches upon domestic violence, portraying it as a consequence of male disenfranchisement and male impotency (numerous studies have pointed to the correlation between male unemployment and violence toward women and children). Like an animated version of Pasolini's "Salo", every scene in Yeun Sang-Ho's film is drenched in overt brutality or quiet, unsettling angst. The film's nihilism, which only occasionally gives way to compassion, reaches its apex with Yeun Sang-Ho's final scene. Here the film pushes past the moral bankruptcy of late-capitalism to declare our entire species valueless. "Earth is covered by asphalt as cold as ice and by bodies colder that it is," a young killer muses. Yeun Sang-Ho's follow-up film, "The Fake", is equally misanthropic. 8.9/10 – Superb.

• Terribly effective anime film

  patryk-czekaj2012-10-27

  A haunting, hard-hitting animation about the problem of class struggle in South Korea and its disastrous connection to bullying. With its nightmarish art direction, it stimulates many radical emotions in the viewer, assaulting him with a most sombre tale of an atrocious past. Two men struggling with domestic issues of their own meet after 15 years and reminisce about their extremely difficult school days. Their childhood was gradually being destroyed because of the ongoing, enormous and brutal pressure from the rich kids who ruled the school-grounds and often resolved to in-class violence. The fact that everybody around pretends that this horrible activity didn't even exist only made the whole issue worse and caused the richer kids to be even more confident of their impunity. The boys' last and only hope was their brave yet ferocious classmate Chul. He proved to be the only kid who wasn't afraid to stand up against the terror and tried to fight back using even more violence than his oppressors. Without any help from the outside the three friends came up with a most shocking plan - Chul will commit a public suicide. Without any hope for a brighter future they though of this extreme scheme as they only means to notifying the impassive adults about the horrible incidents that occur behind the school walls everyday. Apart from evaluating the boys' decisions and presenting their differing viewpoints on the situation - and on what's about to happen - the film also reveals a grand mystery in its final act. The plot is inspired by the director's dream, where his two friends decide to commit suicide as a revenge act for all the evil that's happened to them in the past. The King of Pigs is a mightily dark and obscure anime, where horrible reality merges with confusing visions, only to deliver a stupendously convincing message to the Korean nation. Through the story of two men it shows that many childhood traumas have terrible lifelong effects. Memories are deceiving, but they play an important role in determining how people cope with their lives.

• Dark, unwieldy, profound

  Leofwine_draca2015-11-13

  THE KING OF PIGS is a darker-than-dark South Korean anime detailing that country's social hierarchy and its effect on bullying in high schools. It's an extremely depressing piece of film-making, with no happy endings or answers to the many questions posed throughout; at the same time, it's rather a profound piece of work, and one which pays off as completely rewarding to the viewer who invests his or her time in it. The story is a straightforward, high school-themed tale about a couple of poor kids who find themselves victimised by the rich older students. Into the chaos comes Chul, a guy who believes that one should become a monster in order to take down the bigger monsters. What transpires is never less than gripping, as it involves you in an increasingly dark and twisted tale. I wasn't too fond of the basic animation here, although it brings favourably to mind the likes of ANIMAL FARM (and LORD OF THE FLIES is an obvious precursor to this story). The voice acting is also a little shrill for my tastes, but despite all this, THE KING OF PIGS is electrifying viewing thanks to the compelling, unique storytelling.

• Depressing, brutal and yet realistic cartoon

  KineticSeoul2014-05-04

  This is probably one of the most depressing cartoons I have ever seen. The story at first may seem to be about bullying in middle school at the surface but it's way more than that. This movie is about humanity, shown in a realistic perspective. That some viewers that is in tune with Korean culture may agree with or part of it or at least understand it. It really is a messed up and yet realistic cartoon that is shown in a brutal manner. The story revolves around 3 middle school kids that feel that they will always be the underdogs no matter how hard they try. So one of the kids has the mentality of being vicious, malicious and evil in order to defeat the corrupt. In another words fight fire with lava. Now the kids portrayed in this movie who re being bullied may seem crazy to some, but it's understandable. This movie basically shows the ugly side of humanity and how the people that are suppressed deal with it. However I am not quite sure what the message of this movie is about because the theme basically seems to revolve around hopelessness. Is the message about fighting back, taking what you want from other people and vengeance, because the weak gets taken advantage of? Anyways this didn't have that emotional impact like what the director Sang-ho Yeon tried to convey, but it's still a gripping and attention grabbing flick. Not all Asian cartoon flicks can be like Hayao Miyazaki films with happy endings. 6.3/10