Webcomic Movies
13 movies based on Korean webtoons
Webcomics in Korea are a very different animal from webcomics anywhere else. There’s an entire branch of the Korean government behind supporting cartoonists and promoting comics. Naver and Daum, the two competing Korean equivalents of Google, have webcomics as a core part of their business model. This leads to not only massively popular and profitable online comics, but a lot of comics seeping into other media. This year, 17% of the Korean movies released (and the most popular movie of the year) were based on webcomics.
So I decided to take a couple of weeks and watch every single one of them so that I could give you a complete, chronological look at Korean webcomic movies.
APT (2006)
Kangfull is a Korean webcomic artist who has had just as many film adaptations of his work as JK Rowling. His work is popular for adaptation because he works in a number of genres, but uses them as an excuse to engage in a series of character studies. APT is his foray into horror, each chapter following a different resident of a haunted apartment building and showing life from their point of view up until the nightly 9:56 murder. The murderous ghost is just kind of in the background.
Unfortunately, in 2006 “Kangfull Webcomic To Film Adaptation” had not quite become a genre yet, and producers didn’t trust an original story to bring in an audience, so the director of APT basically said “It’s about a ghost in an apartment building? Yeah, got it. I don’t need to know anything else” and just remade The Grudge. Worst yet, he decided the shifting perspectives thing had to go, and each scene ended up a near exact replica of the scene before it.
★☆☆☆☆ Boring, boring movie. If you want to see a Kangfull adaptation, scroll on down the list. There are 7 better ones. If you want to see a webcomic-based K-Horror movie, skim on down to the last entry.
Dasepo Naughty Girls (2006)
Coming out a few months after APT, this one went the opposite route. A direct adaptation of a comic by an artist named who calls himself B-rate Dal-gung. It is an oddly fascinating creation. Picture a gag comic from a 12 year old’s DeviantArt account, the type where every punchline is about someone farting on a book, all the girls in class being sluts, someone falling into poo, or some kind of gay stereotype… and then producers slavishly creating a big budget panel-for-panel live action film version of every gag, including the filler pages, reenacted by respected actors in humiliating costumes, without a single line of dialogue changed.
★★☆☆☆ I don’t even- I had to give this more than one star just because it was fascinatingly weird. I couldn’t look away. It was also spun off into a TV series.
BABO (2008)
Now we finally get a Kangfull movie that feels like a Kangfull comic. In this story of a mentally handicapped man who runs a sandwich stand, we start to see all of Kangfull’s indeosyncracies- recycling mishap meet-cutes, the lives of people with menial jobs, men going out of their way to show off articles of clothing women gave them, street lights representing love, snow interrupting conversations- it’s funny how many similarities his worlds have despite existing in so many different genres.
★★★☆☆ Not Kangfull’s best, but a big improvement over APT.
Hello Schoolgirl (2008)
Kangfull is known more for his storytelling than his artistic ability, which has lead some people accuse him of making ‘movie pitch comics.’ The best evidence against this charge is that the actual Korean title of this film translates to “Romance Comic.” It features a few sets of characters in different types of awkward relationships, centering around an 18 year old girl and a 30 year old guy doing everything they can to be friends without acting on the feelings they have for one another because neither one wants to be creepy.
★★★☆☆ It’s fun, but I thought Late Blossom dealt better with similar characters with similar idiosyncrasies.
Moss (2010)
A mystery film based on a webcomic by Yoon Tae-ho. A man arrives in a creepy village to settle the estate of his estranged father and creepy crap goes down. Lots of secret underground passageways and mysterious pasts and to be honest I didn’t really know what was going on half the time.
★☆☆☆☆ I didn’t hate it, but it was so unmemorable I had to go to Wikipedia just now to remind myself what happened.
Late Blossom (2011)
2011 is when Kangfull film adaptations start to get GOOD. Late Blossom is about an old Korean man working up the gumption to say “I love you” for the first time in his life. It’s a senior citizen romance starring the milk delivery guy, the cardboard collecting lady, the parking lot attendant, and his crazy wife. But once again, he avoids genre cliches and just gets to know the characters, following them long after the typical romcom plot would end.
★★★★☆ It’s really sad sometimes, it’s really funny sometimes, and it is adorable all the time and I want to hug every character. This movie ALSO became a tv series.
Priest (2011)
Korean webcomic movies were starting to become such a thing that they even convinced Hollywood to make one. However, they went right back to completely throwing out the story of the Min-Woo Hyung comic and turning into a mish-mash of unrelated clichés. It became a Paul Bettany and Karl Urban-starring vampire/western/dystopia/action/something movie that- yeah, I fell asleep like three times before I got halfway through.
★☆☆☆☆ zzzzzzzzzz
Pain (2011)
Kangfull movies became such a thing that the rights to this story were bought before he even started drawing the comic. They even hired him to write the screenplay. After he finished the script, he decided he was happy with it as it was and never even bothered to make the comic.
This is a pretty great movie, though, starring the world’s most violent pacifist. It’s about a man who cannot feel. He can’t feel pain, sense touch, or taste food. He works for gangsters, doing what he does best… get beaten up. He’s used as an example to scare people into paying money or turn public opinion by letting enemies hurt him.
His romance with a hemophiliac leads him to quit the rough and tumble life of getting beaten up by gangsters to try and get beaten up by actors as a stuntman for Korean dramas.
★★★★☆ I really liked this movie.
The Neighbor (2012)
This is Kangfull’s serial killer story and it feels like the kind of movie he’d hoped APT would have been. It follows his comic much more closely, even cutting to black to introduce captions. In this movie, we do get the chance to follow every character in the apartment building. The security guard who’s trying to lay low until the statute of limitations expires on a crime he committed. The pizza delivery guy who wants to solve a mystery. The mother who’s awkward around her stepdaughter (even moreso now that she’s a ghost.) And of course, the serial killer himself, but he isn’t forced to be the main character.
★★★★★ Every storyline in this movie was fun, and I enjoyed how they all came together. This one was great.
26 Years (2012)
Imagine an Inglorious Bastards-style alternate history revenge fantasy film… about a dude who’s still alive and probably saw the movie. The best part of this Kangfull adaptation is the animated segment early on, telling the story of the Gwangju massacre. The characters are in a completely different style from Kangfull’s art, but it’s really intense effect that hits you in the gut. It then cuts to live action as we meet the adult versions of the surviving children as they team up to bring down the man responsible.
★★★☆☆ The live action bits could have used some of the energy of the animated part.
Fist of Legend (2013)
A sports movie based on a webcomic by Lee Jong-gyu and Lee Yoon-gyun. A bunch of middle aged men, famous for getting into fights in high school, appear on a reality boxing competition show and fight for their dignity. I don’t know if it comes from a poor adaptation of the comic or not, but it’s kind of a confused film. It drops interesting characters and plotlines without resolving them and follows the boring ones… and that does full fledged flash backs on characters we never see again, but gives barely any information at all about characters we’re supposed to root for.
★★☆☆☆ A new edit could have improved this movie greatly.
Secretly Greatly (2013)
With the biggest opening in Korean cinema history, the success of this film probably means we’re in store for a whole new wave of Korean webcomic movies. This one is based on a comic by Hun, about a North Korean spy whose mission is to lay low in South Korea and pretend to be the village idiot.
★★☆☆☆ The undercover stuff was fun, but when it switches to standard spy stuff, it suddenly feels like a completely different film with no relation to the characters and plot lines that made it interesting.
The Webtoon (2013)
This movie is not based on a webcomic, it’s about a fictional webcomic. This is seriously a serious horror movie about posting webcomics without attribution. Like, a woman digitally edits some comics, claims them as her own, and there is literally a shot of her watermarking them with her own blood.
She posts them on the Korean equivalent of Tumblr, and people start dying in the exact same way as they did in the comics. Because she stole them from a ghost.
★★☆☆☆ This was fun. I am not implying this is a good movie. If you have ever seen an Asian horror movie, you have basically seen this movie. But as a webcartoonist, this movie was INSANE.
And more:
There are lots more Korean webcomic movies to come. The Five is in cinemas now, Timing is a soon-to-be-released animated sci-fi feature based on a Kangfull comic, and I just read about one in production called Cat Funeral. I didn’t even cover the short films,the anthology films containing webtoon-based segments (like Horror Story 2), or the many, many tv series based on online comics. Do you think Hollywood will ever go on a Webcomic Movie craze like Korea has?
Written by Ryan Estrada. Check out his comics!
