Noted Korean television commercials director Moon Sang Kim realized his lifelong dream to make a quality feature like Sky Blue by first establishing an animation production company.

Sunmin Park is a producer/writer/director at Los Angeles-based Maxmedia, Llc., which has been coordinating the financing and production of theatrical features for international distribution since 1989. It was Korea’s Samsung Venture Investments Corp., which alerted Maxmedia to Kim’s project. Park’s participation included co-writing the screenplay and arranging for Tin House to conduct CGI camera tests at the Panavision studios in Hollywood, although all of Sky Blue‘s production was done in-house in Seoul.

Principal production began in 2001. The completed film was released in Korea in July 2003 under the title Wonderful Days. (Publicity has implied that there is a considerable difference between the domestic Wonderful Days version and the international Sky Blue version, although Park told AWM that the distinction is only a few frames plus more “international” music in Sky Blue.) It immediately became an international film festival favorite, playing at over a dozen festivals before its U.S. release. Kim has described his blend of multi-layered cinematography as combining the depth and reality of miniature sets, the metallic futuristic appearance of 3D CGI, and the comfortable familiarity of 2D cel characters to achieve a “Surrealistic” style of animation, as distinct from the “Hyper-realistic” CGI style employed in Final Fantasy.

Kim always knew that his movie would be a futuristic adventure involving ecological disaster, but the plot went through many rewrites. The final version is set in 2142 A.D., a century after humanity’s carelessness resulted in the collapse of Earth’s biosphere. The only survivors are a technological society in a magnificent enclosed scientifically-designed refuge city, Ecoban, and a small horde of refugees in the Wasteland just outside. The leaders of Ecoban have supported the refugees in return for their providing labor to mine the raw materials needed to keep Ecoban operational. After a century, Ecoban’s leaders have degenerated into an indolent elite class who have reduced the “Diggers” to slavery, providing no more than the barest minimum to keep them alive. The Diggers have finally grown angry enough to strike for better conditions, at the same time Ecoban’s machinery in use for a century is breaking down.

The central story is a Romeo and Juliet romance between Jay, a young woman in Ecoban’s security guard who sympathizes with the Diggers, and Shua, a young activist in the Diggers’ revolutionary movement who realizes that violence could destroy the shaky technology upon which all lives depend. Shua is secretly assisting Dr. Noah, a former member of Ecoban’s ruling council who believes that the technocrats should try to rid Earth of its permanent cloud cover of acid rain so the whole planet can be reclaimed, instead of trying to brutally destroy the Diggers. On a scene-by-scene basis, Sky Blue is a compelling story with believable characters. Yet the plot depends upon the Metropolis-like concept that Ecoban’s ruling council would support sadistic security Captain Locke’s plan to goad the Diggers into open rebellion, thereby justifying slaughtering them all to increase production. Huh?!

Appleseed is similarly visually impressive, but has a story even more riddled with holes. This April 17, 2004 feature is adapted from the classic sci-fi manga novel by Masamune Shirow, so popular that it was one of the first manga to be published in America in the late 1980s. (Shirow is better known as the author of Ghost in the Shell.) Appleseed was produced by the Digital Frontier studio in a process blending motion-capture filmed actors rendered to look more like traditional cel-animated characters rather than attempting a completely realistic appearance, composited over shiny futuristic CGI settings.

Appleseed is a great example of “turn off your mind and submerge yourself in the action.” It is set in 2131 A.D. (only 11 years different than Sky Blue), in another future world that has been completely destroyed except for a single scientifically advanced refuge city, Olympus. Here the apocalypse was due to a global World War III. The technological elite who built Olympus reasoned that humanity is inherently violent, so they also created manufactured humans, bioroids, whose emotions have been suppressed so they can serve as peaceful and fair administrators of the city. Olympus’ police force is comprised of bioroids, while the city’s military consists of normal humans.