Serdar | Genji Press

Take Care of My Cat opens with five girls noisily celebrating their graduation, and then plunges just as suddenly into the morass their adult lives have become. In the space of only a year, the space they shared together as friends has splintered. Suddenly all the girl stuff that seemed so important last year is no longer enough to keep people together — but that doesn't stop them from trying. They stay in touch via instant messages and cellphones, sometimes with one or two of them doing all the work to corral them together. But they are no longer the clique they used to be. Whether they like it or not, they are grown up.

This may not sound like a description of one of the most riveting and beautiful movies I've seen lately, and in the abstract a story like this could have simply been turned into an exercise in cheap melodrama or theatrics. It never does, and that is a credit to Jae-eun Jeong, a first-time Korean director and screenwriter who makes the best aspects of his film almost invisible. There's never a sense that the film is plotted, that the characters are being hustled from A to B in the story — but it also never seems aimless and it's never uninteresting. Like Yasujiro Ozu, the Japanese master of movies about life's quiet drifts (in fact, one of his best movies was named Drifting Weeds), he doesn't take sides, but simply illustrates and lets the drama speak for itself.

Wonderful Days is at the same time one of the most beautiful and flawed movies I have ever seen. There is not a moment in it that isn't dazzling to behold — but its story is so hidebound, so riddled with illogic that it is irredeemably crippled. If they had paid the same attention to the script that they had to the movie's design and animation, they would have had one of the single greatest animated films ever made. I don't think that would be too much of an exaggeration, but the point is moot. What we do have is good only as a curiosity, a sad hint of what could have been.

I suspect those kinder than I will see it as being a close cousin to Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. That film also had a story that didn't exactly obey logic or sense, but was more coherent and tightly written. Wonderful Days, however, does attempt to successfully do many of the same things: it brings us several potentially interesting characters in a remarkable situation, told in a story with groundbreaking visuals.