Hammerboy is not from Japan, but from Korea. Is it a high-quality film like those that have recently come from places like Korea and China? All Hammerboy images © 2005 CharacterPlan. All rights reserved.

Hammerboy
2005, movie. Director: Unknown. 75 minutes. DVD, bilingual $9.98. Distributor: Central Park Media.

Well, I am sad to say that I really don't know where to begin with the review of Hammerboy. Unlike most of the anime that I am given to review, Hammerboy is not from Japan. Rather it is a movie that comes from Korea. Normally this isn't a bad thing, since high-quality film and animation have been coming out of places like Korea and China. Um, Hammerboy isn't one of them. As an animator myself, I have a unique perspective into the blood, sweat, and tears that it takes to produce an animated film. So though I really hate to openly dislike something, I have to say that Hammerboy doesn't exactly deliver.

There is a dirty little secret in the animation industry that most production companies both here in the United States and in Japan feign ignorance of so as not to share credit. When an animation is created, there are two types of drawings produced from the storyboards. The first type are "key frames," which are frames that show change in motion, such as a character moving from a run-cycle to a stop. The second type (and arguably the more important) are called tweens. These in-between drawings are the drawn frames between key frames that denote the smoothness and timing of movement. So, to put things into perspective, in an average movie, a scene will last somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-30 seconds. Movie-quality animations typically run at 24-60 frames per second. Since each frame is a drawing, at 24 frames per second a 15-second scene will need 360 drawings to produce that scene. Of those 360 frames, maybe three to five frames will be key frames and the rest are all tweens. Obviously then, the process of tweening an animation is one of the greatest expenses. So in order to help make animations more profitable, the tweening process is usually contracted out to companies where the labor rate is cheaper, such as, China, Korea, and India. In recent years a lot has changed in the film industries of China, Korea, and India and they've been transformed from being simply a source of cheap labor to become producers of first-rate films.

Is Hammerboy a homage to Hiyako Miyazaki or a blatant rip-off?

When Hammerboy showed up in my in box, I thought that it was going to be very interesting, as it is from an emerging cutting-edge film culture. Instead I got a movie that was downright difficult to follow. Hammerboy is the story of a boy named Mangchi, who lives in a small isolated fishing village with his grandfather. Life is peaceful and simple until, late one night, a girl crash-lands her plane off the shores of Mangchi's home. This mysterious girl turns out to be the princess from a far-off kingdom who is running from the men who attacked her father, the king. After making Mangchi feel sufficiently guilty, Princess Poplar persuades him to take her to find help. On the way, they are shot down by some ruffians and are sold back to the men who attacked the princess earlier. Hammerboy finds that he has a latent great echo power inside himself, and he must train himself to defeat the conspiring Moonk, who wishes to overthrow the rule of Princess Poplar and her father.

The first thing about this movie that stands out is that it is a blatant attempt to rip off one of anime's greatest creators, Hiyao Miyazaki. The relationship between Mangchi and Poplar, all of the flying, the oppressive evil empire, an enemy that turns into an ally -- all these things are common themes in a Miyazaki film. Only here these themes are executed with all the skill of a neighborhood play written by a fifth-grader. I have no problems with homages to creators who are influences in the community, but to try to create a story by directly copying someone infuriates me.

The next problem I have is that the shot-blocking seems almost random. A camera angle will show Mangchi getting tossed into a wall and then the angle immediately following will be over-the-shoulder and a few feet behind Mangchi. That doesn't make any sense, because the first shot showed a wall, but now the camera can see through that wall. Or a character will appear to be right in front of an enemy, but then be able to escape because, in the very next shot, he will be 20 or more feet away. Huh? Did no one storyboard this movie? Visually, this makes things incredibly confusing and difficult to follow.