Seoul Station (2016): A Story for Males
After seeing Train to Busan a couple years before, I was excited to see Seoul Station. I thought it was odd that I didn’t see screenshots of the movie but only a cartoon that looked like a promotion of the movie, but when the movie started, I was delighted to learn that the entire movie is a cartoon.
I sat and watched, excited to see cartoons made by my own people beyond the Dooly the Dinosaur and Fly! Superboard that I had seen on TV. Seoul Station is the story of what happened before Train to Busan, though I’m not sure if it actually connects, or if it’s simply an earlier iteration on the idea of: What if there was zombies in Korea? The story starts by following two homeless brothers desperately seeking help, but soon we meet Hye-sun — the young woman who ran away from home and ended up with a pimp boyfriend, who is the center of this zombie story.
I wanted to like this film. It was animated. It was zombies. But by the end, I was hating it. The animation was good. The zombies were ok. But the way it had accessorized zombies onto the story of an exploited woman rubbed me all the wrong way. What I expected going into this movie was the problem of zombies making all of Hye-sun’s life problems miniscule compared to the high demand of surviving a zombie outbreak. Hye-sun had a very sick father, she was homeless (living in a cheap motel), and being chased by her former pimp. I hoped the zombies would attack her former pimp, that she would somehow find a great place to hole up, and that she might get a chance to see her sick dad one last time when he comes back as a zombie so that she may have some sort of closure and to be able to forgive herself for being unable to save her dad, since parents should be protecting their children and not the other way around.
What I got instead was a poor girl who did nothing but lean heavily on her useless pimp boyfriend Ki-woong. She demonstrated very little survival skills. She mostly cried because she couldn’t call her boyfriend, followed other people, or did as she was told. She somehow managed to escape being mobbed by the zombies but wasn’t able to outrun her former pimp who claimed she owed her money. She also doesn’t survive. She started in a bad situation and the movie ends with her in the worst situation. I’m quite sure this movie did not need to tell such a traumatic story about a woman to tell its story about zombies. Train to Busan was fun! It had Gong-yu playing the workaholic dad with a super smart but disappointed kid. It had Dongsuk Ma. It had Sohee. The women in Train to Busan were not subjected to rape or assault from men, which could be a movie on its own without necessarily featuring zombies. It was just people coping with a zombie outbreak while staying true to their character. Not Seoul Station though. Seoul Station was a drag.
Also, in spite of being animated, it didn’t seem to take advantage of the medium much by featuring fluid hand-drawn action scenes or zombies doing impossible stunts from impossible camera angles. Most of the characters movements felt very stiff. The setting was all places you can actually film at or build in a set. I wondered if it was animated to save on the cost of hiring actors and filming on site. It could had been a life action and had a very similar effect on the audience. There was a huge potential for Seoul Station — as an animated film — to do something other zombie movies haven’t done yet. It did nothing of the sort.
Zombie have been a niche movie genre in the US for decades, but in Korea it is a movie genre that’s only taken hold since about 2015. It’s a bummer that Seoul Station features a story that’s so hostile and unwelcoming to women. By making a woman’s trauma the central point of this zombie movie, it is — in a sense — establishing that zombies movies are a movie genre only for men, rather than leaving it open to anybody who wants to enjoy a movie about people dealing with zombies. It’s a damaging thing to establish for this relatively young genre, considering that the majority of the fans of hit TV series about zombies The Walking Dead is women, and women fans are probably why TWD was able to enjoy success for 10 long prosperous seasons.
I enjoy zombie stories and cartoons, but with the way this movie pushes out women viewers? I’m not a fan of that.
