Dino King: In Olden Days, a Glimpse of Stalking...

Whether you'll make it through the kids' flick Dino King has a lot to do with your tolerance for a single, uninterrupted monologue with lines like "Wow! These are Pukyongosauruses. These 65-foot tall massive zorbots live alongside many blah, blah, blah..." and "Even my family steered clear of Torosauruses which had horns over three feet long." Yet despite all the information packed into this full-length feature, I wouldn't classify the movie as educational because the official classifications go by so fast and the only names that really stick are Speckles, (our hero, a Tarbosaurus), One-Eye (referring to a bad-tempered Tyrannosaurus), and Blue Eyes (an orphaned girl Tarbosaurus who serves as the Speckles' love interest) but if you've got a kid who already knows all about dinosaurs, s/he'll probably be into seeing all the various extinct reptiles zoom by in animated 3-D. I particularly enjoyed the velociraptors with the punkrock hairdos. (At least I think they were the velociraptors!)

As to the animation, it's at once real and unreal. The creatures are detailed, scaly, with naturalistically scary teeth in particular. But the creatures look more like expensive rubber/plastic dolls that have been animated than honest-to-God dinosaurs. The realest part of the animals are probably the teeth which do make me wonder how much kids who don't already obsess over dinosaur will enjoy the flick. The scenes of hunting feel cold-blooded, the life-death cycle of Speckles' friends and family can be merciless too. Even the fact that the only voice we hear is Speckles himself -- albeit both as a child (annoying) and an adult (cloying) -- can feel a tad sad. Imagine a world without any conversation! But Dino King isn't grim in the least. It's neither warm, nor cold; exciting, nor dull. There's no ice age to follow the drought these prehistoric beasts must suffer but there's not much joy to be found at the hot spring they come up either.

Please note: The movie was intended to be enjoyed in 3-D but I was not privy to that multidimensional experience.

Wolf Daddy: 10 Offbeat Minutes Trigger 10 Earnest Questions

1. What happens to a ticklishly quirky cartoon made by someone who doesn't go on to become world famous?
2. What exposure do a few laurels -- like a Hiroshima Award, a Korean Animation Award and a Tokyo International Anime Fair Award -- bring to an animated short and its creator in the long-run?
3. Who ends up watching a kooky mini-movie like Wolf Daddy after it's made the rounds of the festival circuit and is no longer new or even recent?
4. Are students who attend a university (like the Korean Academy of Film Arts, perhaps) where the animator (like Chang Hyung-yun, for instance) went to school shown works by said alumn in classes teaching animation as a craft/artform?
5. Or, more likely, are these small works of cinematic art simply languishing on YouTube and waiting for someone to type "short, animation, Korean, movie" into the search box field in order to be seen again by an audience of one?
6. How often would someone Facebook like, tweet, blog or email a link for a movie like Wolf Daddy?
7. Wouldn't it be great if alongside kiddie cartoons like The Backyardigans and SpongeBob SquarePants or even more grown-up fare like The Simpsons and South Park, television programmers threw in the occasional art house hit, even one with subtitles like Wolf Daddy?
8. Couldn't the best of the art form of animation find a place on the boob tube as late nite filler for insomniac stoners?
9. Wouldn't people get a kick out of the WTF narrative of Wolf Daddy if they stumbled upon it?
10. Can't you just see fans of Adult Swim and Nick Jr. alike getting a chuckle out of this story about a writerly beast who finds himself suddenly parenting a little girl, a turtle and a rabbit -- with the help of a deer he almost eats?

The Story of Mr. Sorry: No Apology Needed for Good Animation

To the ever-expanding list of kooky movies about strange vocations -- Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Air Guitar Nation, The Fluffer, Ghostbusters, and Road Trip: Beer Pong among them -- you can now add The Story of Mr. Sorry. This hour-long animated feature about a professional ear cleaner looks at one downtrodden drone's days slaving away for a large corporation devoted to the excavation of waxy buildup. As you might guess from his name, Mr. Sorry isn't very good at his job. In fact, he's a source of ridicule to his boss, his clients and his fellow employees. But everyone's got to make a living, especially when you've got a pet spider to feed and an agency (hired to track down your missing sister) to pay. Sound pitiable? You're right. Mr. Sorry is that. Poor guy.

Luckily for him, a mad scientist helps turn Mr. Sorry's career around. Whether that's good luck or bad luck though depends on your point of view. Mr. Sorry doesn't make friends or earn more money or find his sister when he becomes a "star" ear-cleaner. But he does gain access to the secret place inside people's heads, where their darkest, most intimate secrets are stored. Traveling amid these gorgeously realized dreamscapes of a gemlike palate, Mr. Sorry realizes that his own life may not be so tragic in comparison. There are worse fates than being abandoned, belittled, sentenced, and executed. Probably the most horrific fate is to be a guest on a TV show that lets the audience vote on whether you're destined for the electric chair. You'll see that play out in The Story of Mr. Sorry, too.

Cryptic and creepy, freaky and stunning, The Story of Mr. Sorry is a truly unique creation that's all the more impressive when you learn that it's the collective effort of five students from the Korean Academy of Film Arts: Kwak In-keun, Kim Il-hyun, Ryu Ji-na, Lee Eun-mi, and Lee Hae-young. I hope the future allows me to see the work of at least one of these talented guys again. A+.

My Beautiful Girl, Mari: A Coming-of-Age Cartoon

I'll be honest from the get-go. I'm not a big fan of animated movies. And while I did get a kick out of Doggie Poo, a Korean claymation short that's literally about a piece of shit, that fecal fantasy appealed to my absurdist side, not my esthetic one. So if you're wondering how well Lee Sung-gang's My Beautiful Girl, Mari works as a cartoon feature, I'm not going to be able to help you that much. The artwork is very realist children's book: Unblemished people tend to face the viewer directly or in exact profile; the scenery is often static with moving elements. (Just because there's rain doesn't mean you'll see water running off the rooftops, too.) It can be lovely to look at but it doesn't exactly grab your attention. And the dream sequences are never as detailed as the events that take place in reality.

Is there a hidden message in that discrepancy? Perhaps. My Beautiful Girl, Mari is all about two adolescent boys who journey to a imaginary world accessed through a magical marble at the top of an abandoned lighthouse. That world, unlike their own, doesn't have faulty electric lights, ailing grandmothers or a bratty girl throwing a soccer ball at your head. In this alternate universe, a kind of junior Barbarella -- with a white shag cut, a white jumpsuit and a giant white dog -- silently communicates sympathy and bewilderment amid tethered clouds and zeppelin-shaped creatures that are like blowfish that fly in the air. Both boys are lucky to travel to this mini-cosmos since neither merits it based on good behavior. Nam-woo (Lee Byung-hun), the artsy one, is continually inconsiderate to his mom (Bae Chong-ok) and grandmother (Na Mun-hee); Jun-ho (Kong Hyeong-jin), his spoiled best friend, is constantly picking fights with a girl who he has a crush on. While the two boys eventually turn their shared adventures to good, you don't sense that either has grown by their experiences or even takes the life lessons into adulthood. To the contrary, the final monologue has to do with forgetting what happened. I'm likely to do the same.

Critic's advice: If you are a fan of animated films and you do watch My Beautiful Girl, Mari, choose the Korean soundtrack with English subtitles. The acting is infinitely better.

Doggy Poo: Fecal Matters

There's nothing misleading bout the title. Doggy Poo is an animated, absurdist short about the life of a piece of dog crap. We witness his birth on a country road, his belittlement by a lump of dirt, his philosophical education by a windblown leaf, and his eventual self-sacrifice to a seductive dandelion. (I could have done without the further debasement by the chatty mother hen in the middle. The life of a piece of shit is hard. I get it.) As to the turd himself, he's a tearful creation with his little black eyes always ready to let loose the waterworks. (Question to the creators: Shouldn't a piece of poop weep urine?) Some of the animation is quite nice, although I would have preferred to see doggie doo that could move. As to the voices, since this movie was only a half hour long, I thought that I'd check out the dubbed version as well as the Korean. Sad to report that even with cartoons, the English-language soundtrack is inferior. Listening to these American actors doing "funny" voices makes you wish that they had to eat the characters they were bringing to life post-recording. Weirdly, a song at the end of the movie is translated neither in the subtitles nor in the Americanized dub. I'd say that's some seriously unfinished shit.