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[HanCinema's Short Film Review] "Johnny Express": Mission Accomplished? + Video

In the spotlight this week: Kyungmin Woo's "Johnny Express"...

"Johnny Express" is a deadpan delight that follows the universe's 'delivery man of the year' on yet another successful(ish) mission. This short animation (5:29) is the morbid masterpiece out of "Alfred ImageWorks", a Korean-based studio operating out of the affluent Gangnum-gu district that struck a curiously cosmopolitan tone with its poker-face fatalism and apathetic anti-hero, "Johnny".

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Here's the company's own synopsis of what to expect from "Johnny Express":

It's 2150. There are all sorts of Aliens living throughout space. Johnny is a Space Delivery Man who travels to different planets to deliver packages. Johnny is lazy and his only desire is to sleep in his autopilot spaceship. When the spaceship arrives at the destination, all he has to do is simply deliver the box. However, it never goes as planned. Johnny encounters strange and bizarre planets and always seems to cause trouble on his delivery route.
 Will he be able to finish his mission without trouble?

Despite all the visible accolades and technological sophistication surrounding Johnny, he is, in fact, either having an extremely destructive day, or, more likely given his choice at the end of it all, a shockingly irresponsible and lackadaisical loser who puts in only the minimum amount of energy (and thought) into his job.

Delivering packages across the universe in the near future is not as glamorous a profession as one might imagine, and here it's depicted more like a  weekend paper route; for pocket money (to fund, in Johnny's case, a sad soda addiction; intervention is clearly required), which also helps to keep the kids from doing harm and breaking stuff ("This is why I can't have nice things!"-Universe).

Johnny actually has it even easier than painstakingly pedalling papers around an entire earth block(s). Johnny's spaceship's is completely automated, and grabs his lethargic (perhaps hungover) body and places him wherever he needs to be: "…all he has to do it simply deliver the box".

What this cute description doesn't say is that his next delivery is a microscopic parcel (+/- 34000X) to an atomic-sized citizen of a mini metropolis that, apparently and catastrophically, have never used "Johnny Express" before, or will ever again.

Imagine having to deliver an itty-bitty briefcase to bacteria living on an Epcot-sized sphere somewhere, but you don't know The Client and his entire civilisation are invisible to the naked (here, also droopy) eye. Caution and consideration seems wise in such cases, but Johnny didn't get to where he is today by being timid, thoughtful, or even honest.

The comedy found here seems to exists, indeed, in a galaxy far far away from what I've seen coming out of Korea in recent years. "Johnny Express" is terribly ironic, dark, morally twisted, and there's none of the typical K-comedy that usually permeates the country's more commercial creations. The jumps from Johnny's meso world to the micro (within the 'macro' of space itself) is effective and amusing: the film crash cuts, with great comical effect between the spacey silence of Johnny's oblivious stroll around the planet, and the familiar scenes of alien armageddon happening down below. Eisenstein would be touched and tickled.

I thoroughly enjoy animated shorts like this, and I think that as national cinemas continue to break boundaries we will find more and more filmmakers turning to shorter (animated) formats. There is no dialogue, and so there is no need for inherently divisive subtitles (bar the spaceship's English interface, and whatever can be read into the alien gibberish created), leaving only the visuals: the universal language of moving pictures.


It's short, cynical, and charming…enjoy!

 

 

 

- C.J. Wheeler [chriscjw@gmail.comKoreaOnTheCouch]


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