Real pigs and fake humans: rethinking realism in Yeon Sang-ho’s ‘The King of Pigs’ and ‘The Fake’

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the two best known animated features directed by Yeon Sang-ho (1978-), The King of Pigs (2011) and The Fake (2013). Rather than characterizing these controversial and critically lauded animated features primarily as critical texts aimed at South Korean educational and religious institutions and practices, this essay brings his films in dialogue with the theories of animation developed by Imamura Tahei (1911–1986) as mediated through the historical analyses of Otsuka Eiji. By doing so, it attempts to illustrate the way Yeon's animated films draw upon the allegedly ‘limited’ palette and stylistics of animation to arrive at articulations of ‘realism of the body’ that resist ideological and social realist interpretations.

KEYWORDS:

• Yeon Sang-ho
• Korean animation
• theories of Japanese animation
• Imamura Tahei
• realism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This is corroborated by Kwon Jae-woong and Noh Gwang-woo’s meta-analysis of the academic studies on Yeon Sang-ho’s works from 2012 to 2020, 26 in total out of which approximately 13% or 50% are focused on his animated films, either shorts,feature-length works or both. The roster of films studied includes those that treat Train to Busan (a live-action film) and Seoul Station (an animated film) as a unit for a zombie-film-themed analysis (Kwon and Noh 2021).

2 There is a sizable literature in cinema and media studies that deal with the legibility and indexicality of photographed imagery and motion pictures (cf. Lamarre 2009; Manovich 2001; Rodowick 2007). However, as Martin Jay has shown in the field of French intellectual and cultural history, these discussions cannot proceed in any meaningful way unless we take into account the historical genealogy of the very discourse of media representation, i.e. in the ways in which our understanding of the acts of ‘seeing’ and ‘watching’ has been transfigured through the changes in not only socio-economic systems but also political institutions and regimes of corporeal-somatic disciplining technologies (Jay 1993).

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Kyu Hyun Kim

Kyu Hyun Kim is an Associate Professor of Japanese and Korean History at University of California, Davis. He holds a BA from Harvard-Radcliffe College and a Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University. He is the author of The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan (Harvard Asia Center Publication, 2007). His forthcoming book is entitled Treasonous Patriots: Japanese Colonialism, Wartime Mobilization and the Problem of Korean Identity, 1937-1945. He has written numerous articles on modern Japanese and Korean history, Japanese popular culture and Korean cinema, among other topics, and has served as a Contributing Editor to www.koreanfilm.org, the oldest English-language website devoted to Korean cinema.