Abstract
Wonderful Days (2003) was supposed to be the global breakthrough of Korean animation. After decades of government neglect and labor-intensive outsourcing work, the film aspired to show the world Korea's new technical prowess in animation, combining 2-D, 3-D, and miniatures in a new “Multi-Type Layer Animation.” Funded by the Korean government and Samsung's post–Asian financial crisis venture capital fund, the film also promised a new government-corporate Korean economic model in which creative labor and free-flowing finance capital would replace heavy industries and state planning. Instead, the film was a box office disaster commercially and critically, resulting in it becoming the last thematically complex, high-budget, feature-length Korean animation. What do these results tell us about the limits of its aspirations? This essay argues that the film's failure represents South Korean animation's defeat by American and Japanese monopoly capitalism. It then analyzes contradictions in the film's aesthetics and narrative to show the incompatibility of these countries’ postindustrial, ecoutopian ideology with persistent Korean manufacturing dependency and proletarian politics. The essay finally interrogates the consequences of Korean labor for thinking about transnational animation production beyond categories of success and failure determined by the nation-state and capitalism's global hierarchy of labor.
