Geu Yeoreum

Since nobody has written a review for this yet, I’ll be the first. I tried to watch it a long time ago but could not find a version with English subtitles (Even with my VPN, the official version is not subbed) so I forgot about it for a while. I decided to give it another go and found a version with Google translate English subtitles, which was a bit hard to understand at times but I could at least get an idea of what was happening. It’s a shame that it’s not licensed outside of Korea, since it’s a good series.

The show is very down ... to earth and real, kind of like Aoi Hana. There’s no exaggeration, no dramatic music, and the characters feel like real people. It’s cute and wholesome and I think like it does a spectacular job of portraying what it’s like to be wlw in an environment where that sort of thing isn’t really accepted. The show also portrays loneliness and dissatisfaction in a painfully relatable way, I could really feel what the main characters were going through because they don’t spend much time telling you what’s going on, they show you instead. I think the producers did an amazing job at creating art that imitates reality so closely, and it’s kind of refreshing, even if [spoiler]the ending was disappointing (but that only brings it closer to reality, we don’t always get happy endings)[/spoiler]

The art is spectacular and so is the voice acting. The visual aesthetic they were going for kind of reminds me of violet evergarden, and the voice acting was mellow and soothing, without the soap opera-esque crying you normally find in these sorts of shows.

It’s a solid piece. 8/10

The Summer is an indie Korean film which follows the relationship of a young lesbian couple, from their school days to the beginning of their adulthood .

To begin with, the animation is really beautiful: I love the attention to detail and the lighting. Whilst I have some qualms about the film in general, I think it's really exciting for the Korean animation industry especially to see firstly this level of original animation and secondly to see queer characters represented in Korean animation.

The first 10 minutes of the film are like super slow if you feels like the sort of typical lesbians having sexual ... and romantic tension and both being too shy to make a move and then being angsty over it. When they finally do get together there is really cute and there are some very wholesome scenes.

Only one of the characters in the couple gets to narrate the film and I also feel like the film would have been richer if both characters in the couple could have narrated. The advertising of the film gives the impression that is going to be really wholesome but by the end of the film, it turns out it's a film where the character the main character spends a summer justifying why she wants to cheat on her partner - thus the name, 'The Summer'.

For me, the main character is pretty awful to her partner in the second half. In the first half it mainly focuses on them aty school and it's kind of cute but in the second half the main character goes to unniversity and her partner eventually tries to move to the city with her. Her partner who is the sort of sporty kind of butch lesbian who is initially quite cool really struggles when she transitions into adulthood because she doesn't come from a rich family and she has a sports injury, which means that she can no longer get a sports scholarship to university. She can't really afford to move to the city unless she gets a jo, which she does and she is a very put together person even though she's doesn't always talk about her decisions. She works really hard all day to study to become a mechanic and afford better living conditions for her and her partner which is the main character.

However the main character changes and that's natural when you move to the city and begin university you meet lots of new people, particularly within the lgbt community which is much larger in urban areas. The two began to drift apart, especially due to their class differences and then being in different stages of life. The butch partner doesn't always understand the importance of showing up on time and making sure she spends quality time of her partner, because her love language is acts of service and providing for her partner and playing a more stereotypically masculine role. She often fails to communicate her intentions or what she's going through which leads the main character to feel very frustrated to feel like she doesn't understand her partner and to feel like she isn't being cared.

But the main character is also quite self-centered sure, for example there's a scene where her butch partner finally comes to the lesbian bar that she loves and in that moment the main character gets embarassed at her partner turning up in their team mechanics clothing and being very obviously working class and she talks about the shame she felt. The main character never really overcomes out or fully apologizes for. It not long later she falls for a character who sports several visual symbols of wealth, for example expensive watch, and eventually breaks up with her partner to be with this woman.

Whilst my friends talked about it as like his sort of story about someone who's like naive and immature which makes a lot of sense I also felt frustrated that the narrative of the butch partner never really gets the same chance to show her side of the story, because Ifor her there's an expectation or a pressure as the more masculine presenting person to also fulfill that more so typically masculine role of providing. So even if she doesn't verbalize it, she's always thinking about how to provide for her girlfriend. It's frustrating that the main character doesn't understand this and she's really immature.

At the end it returns to seeing from when they were younger and one of the conversations they had- this could have been better if instead of showing the scene from the main characters perspective, they could have shown the scene from her partner's perspective, like in Aku No Hana.

Overall this wasn't necessarily a bad film, my dislike/disagreement is more personal than artistic. I think the studio and animators who worked on this definitely have a lot of potential and I hope they make more stuff in the future and that there's more queer Korean animation. It's definitely important that films like this can made so they can pave the path for more films about queer lives in the future.