This Week in Anime

Webtoons and K-Dramas

Steve
Right you are, Coop. Media from South Korea certainly seems to be having A Moment in the West right now, although it's a moment that's been going on for possibly a decade at this point. People have been on the K-pop train for a while. Even here at TWIA, we've been dipping our usual Japanophile toes into Korean waters. Last month, you and Lucas taught me about KPop Demon Hunters. Before that, Lucas and I ate up some toxic webtoons and lived to tell about it. My horizons continue to expand.

This was an eye-opening experience for me. Like any aspiring film snob, I've seen and enjoyed a decent amount of Korean cinema in my time. However, the only K-drama I'd ever watched before these was, predictably, Squid Game. I didn't know what to expect. But I guess it makes sense to start with Imitation, because its critiques of the music industry felt familiar.

As with the Japanese idol industry, I'm sure most of it is boring and quotidian. But there's a good reason for Imitation to poke at the way it can be corporatized—even militarized, almost—and how that strips people of their humanity in search of profit. To that end, there's some biting black comedy in this. Like all of the suits, they treat a young girl's tragic suicide as primarily a business inconvenience. Imitation knows writers who use subtext, and it thinks they are all cowards.

The show knows its stuff. There's also the fact that three of the four lead actors began their actual careers in the music industry, as part of a boy/girl band, so you have the metatextual element, too.

I thought the same! And it's a reasonable assumption that was intentional, given that Jung Ji-so, who plays Ma-ha, was in Parasite. Which makes it even funnier when we cut away from the glamorous awards show to Ma-ha's slightly humbler concert venue.

All in all, I like that the romance angle mostly takes a backseat in this premiere, because it clearly has a lot of other things to say.

Show business. It's dirty work.

Overall, Business Proposal is the most cartoonish of the bunch. I mean that figuratively, but also literally. From set design to actual cartoon inserts, it's bursting with color in a way that sets it apart from the crowd. And stylistically, it's a good fit for the ridiculous rom-com shenanigans. It also shows ads for the source comic next to the heroine in one scene, which has troubling cosmological implications I'll choose to ignore for now.

It's the ol' swaperoonie with all of the ensuing misunderstandings and silliness we know and love. Still, there's nothing wrong with playing the hits, and Ha-ri makes for a charming lead, especially with her actress' readiness to mug for the camera.

I'm a big fan of the chairman, too. This guy's got a great face.

Genre-savvy grandpa is a sure sign that Business Proposal is equally sure of itself. Although this is probably the premiere where I was most aware of the hour-long runtime per episode. I think a straightforward rom-com is better suited for brevity, but that could just be me.

It's also possible we're both weenies whose attention spans are too used to 23-minute anime episodes where 3 of those minutes are taken up by the OP and ED. But who's to say?

At least none of these premieres felt like they lasted a lifetime. Although one of them did last multiple lifetimes.

Like any good reincarnation story, See You In My 19th Life features Truck-kun in a starring role. What a sight for sore eyes.

It has a vision—and a budget!—compared to some of our other samples. I can't tell you how happy I was to see them wreck the shit out of this car. That's cinema right there.

It also continues the trend of cynical social commentary. At first, Ji-eum's lifetime of experience only netted her fame as part of the cheesy variety show circuit. And her parents are deadbeats who immediately leech her earnings away anyway.

I wish the show spent more time on this angle, both to deepen this thematic exploration and because it's funny when a little girl acts like she's an old man.

Unfortunately, this is where 19th Life kinda falls flat for me. The reincarnation angle is interesting, but I don't buy the romance between Ji-eum and Seo-ha. She met him when he was a snot-nosed little rich kid, and the writing doesn't do enough to sell me on their relationship. Some of that is because it's hard to establish a compelling romance between two children, but it makes for a rocky foundation for the main plot.

My brain instantly went there, too. And overall, I think it's nice that the show uses water to signal their relationship. A little consistent visual language goes a long way. Even if it's not quite as far as I'd like here.

Dear Hongrang was the first of these K-dramas that I watched, and also the only historical drama of the bunch, so I had to throw out most of the expectations it gave me. Regardless, it certainly earns its keep on its own merits. You've got complicated familial politics. Wailing mothers. Weird demon ghosts. Dog. Lots going on.

Court politics, baby! On that note, I'll readily admit that I know pitifully little about Korean history, so it was really interesting to see the similarities and differences when compared to analogous court dramas from Japan and China.

Of course, the more some things change, the more others stay the same.

Everyone loves to hate a hysterical matriarch. Although I like that Hongrang is also pretty much an asshole when he shows up, in a different way that feels believable for someone who earned their keep as a sellsword. It's a good layer of friction on top of the central mystery.

The premiere keeps its cards close to its chest, though. It's more about establishing the setting and family dynamics than digging into what a creepy white-haired spectre has to do with anything. Which is fine. That's how they get you to watch more, after all.

Now, if you want more consistent ghosts and ghouls action, then look no further than Tomorrow, which is about a guy who gets roped into working odd jobs for the afterlife after a freak accident. Something about that sounds so familiar...

There are plenty of anime-related jokes and references we can make here, but that's not what Tomorrow is truly about. Tomorrow asks a far more pertinent question: what if Beetlejuice was a baddie.

I'm not joking. There are too many similarities. She shows up in that red sports jacket, like Beetlejuice's tuxedo at the end of the movie. She later wears a black-and-white striped shirt like his other outfit.

And this zipper mouth gag is straight out of Beetlejuice too.

Lots of death and suicide in these K-dramas! Fun! To Tomorrow's credit, though, its core conceit revolves around suicide. Ryeon is a former demon from hell who now co-runs an understaffed afterlife department (again, the Beetlejuice comparisons run rampant) tasked with stopping suicides on the surface. Unfortunately, her M.O. is more along the "scared straight" line of rehabilitative philosophy.

And I mean, fair's fair, if she threatened my life, I'd listen to what she had to say, too.

Tomorrow does an excellent job blending comedy into its serious subject matter. Like, Jun-woong finding out he lost a job to an executive's relative is played for laughs, but the show also understands the despair of job searching.

Tangent, but using a bendy straw in a can of beer is crazy tech. I'm going to be thinking about this.

That's real as heck.

Speaking of, every show here (minus Dear Hongrang) features designer clothing, but it's absolutely most conspicuous in Tomorrow. I'm a big fan.

Even the off-brand Gucci goes hard.

And as if there's not enough already going on, the last part of the episode introduces an arc about school bullying with Inception-style memory setpieces.

One of the funniest ways they could have established the date, for sure. Well, that and mentioning the president who got impeached, arrested for corruption, and sentenced to prison.

Incidentally, that could have something to do with the strain of cynicism we've seen running throughout these series.

Marry My Husband gives you no shortage of things to chew on. The first act is so over-the-top it almost feels satirical. Like, the husband and his mom make Cinderella's family look like soup kitchen volunteers. But when we go back in time, it clicks into place how Ji-won would have felt trapped.

I also think the main time travel mechanic is interesting. Ji-won can't change what happens, but she can change who it happens to. For instance, a wound she's supposed to get ends up on her hunky boss instead. It's like history is a zero-sum game, so she chooses to maximize her gains by pushing losses onto the people around her, most relevantly by setting Min-hwan up with Su-min and letting them be disasters together. It's an intrinsically cruel setup, and that's what gives it narrative and thematic potential.

It's a good kind of corny. The taxi driver, being some angel or something, was immediately obvious, and his being her dad honestly raises more questions than answers, but none of that really matters. The intriguing part is seeing how far Ji-won's morals will go. Down the line, is she going to make someone else have stomach cancer? Can she even do that?

At least we get the standard time travel stock market stuff out of the way in the first episode. Though seeing the Tesla logo in there gave me a good laugh.

As long as she cashes out before 2025, she's okay on that front.

Haha, I missed that. Clearly, a woman of refined taste.

Well, nobody's perfect.

I also dug this little experiment. And like all successful experiments, I have plenty of better-informed follow-up questions for my next foray into K-drama. Anime is still my forte, of course—ANN isn't getting rid of me that easily—but it's always valuable to have as wide a perspective and as cosmopolitan an art diet as possible. Plus, now I know Baddie Beetlejuice is real. That's its own reward.