Ranked #2042

Wonderful Days

At first I was afraid this was going to be like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within - a big let down, but I was pleasantly surprised by this high quality Korean animated feature.

Like both the Final Fantasy installments, which this is so reminiscent of, Wonderful Days takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where a group of humans are fighting for a better tomorrow - their wonderful days. One can tell that the plot is not a major aspect of the movie; there is very little background on the present events and little or no clarification of what is what. But that's not important.

The characters, too, are unexplored and their personalities have little significance. There is no motivation for their actions and random switches in beliefs. It's like a mega chameleon fest, where none of them know what their true colours are. Poor character development. But then again they're not important.

What drives this anime, and the reason why I give it an 8 after all it's shortcomings, is the absolutely brilliant animation and sound. To really enjoy this, you need to watch a good quality version of the movie. The cell-shading/CG artwork was fantastic and played its part perfectly in describing the darkness of post apocalyptic earth. I never thought cinematography was important for anime, but by god was it well done. Some of the "shots" coupled with some excellent music brought out the emotion which the 1-D characters could not provide. It is like watching Monet paint. Maybe that's a bit too much, but you get the idea.

If you're planning on watching this, don't go in expecting something extraordinary, it's nothing brilliant. But it was certainly enjoyable, if not interesting to see what the Korean animation industry is capable of. It's a very promising step... read more

I came across this movie while i was looking through some animes that were on sale. As it only was like 4$ I thought I’d buy it. I didn’t really expect anything from it, since it was Korean and all, but I was pleasantly surprised..

[5]Story: The story had potential, and had this been a series with at least 12 episodes I think it would have been really good. But as it stands we only have a movie and the 1.5 hours of playtime is not nearly enough to explore the desolated world we are introduced to in ‘Wonderful Days’. If you want to know the premise of the show, just read the Synopsis here on MAL, no need for me to go through it here. There really isn’t anything more to say about the plot. If you liked the premise you should have no problem watching the show and enjoying it for its other aspects, just don’t expect anything more than the premise..

[9]Art: The art is probably the very best thing about this movie, and this is what makes those 1.5 hours of your life worth the watch. It’s especially the backgrounds that amazes me and I think only Makoto Shinkai has done better (of the animes I’ve seen this far). The backgrounds are dark and depressing in tone and they seem very realistic. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been a sucker for flashy technology stuff, and this movie is no let down on that department. Flashy computers, elevators and whatnot, everything beautifully animated. Had to use my “drool-bucket” again. The thing that kept this movie from getting a 10 here is the characters. The thing with the characters is that they have a much brighter tone to them than the backgrounds, so they don’t really match up, if you know what I mean. Animations and all were fluid, so no problems there. This may be my personal taste though, and its nothing major anyway, but just thought I’d mention it.

[7]Sound: The sound is pretty good, but I’ve heard better. The sound is better than average, but it was only enough to get it up to a 7. I can’t say much about the voice acting really since I watched it in Korean. It just felt very different from Japaneese, and I don’t think I can give a very good opinion about it so I’ll just leave it untouched. I’ll just say though that the voice acting wasn’t disturbing or anything like that, so I guess I can say it wasn’t bad at least.

[6] Characters: The characters were much like the story, unexplored. Again I think it’s because of time constraints. Even though the characters doesn’t have any real development you can understand why they are doing what they are doing and so on. This score would have been lower would it not have been for the side characters which I think have some good personalitys that fit the setting of the anime and are appropriate to where the characters live (Ecoban/outside).

[7] Enjoyment: I enjoyed this movie quite a bit and I think it was well-worth my time. It’s a shame that such a good storyline was destroyed by time constraints though. All in all this was a pleasant surprise to see what the Koreans can do. If you just need something new, relatively short and artistically awesome, then watch this, you won’t be disappointed.
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