My Beautiful Girl Mari

A touching but occasionally puzzling Korean production that was named Best Feature Film at the 26th annual Annecy Animated Film Festival, My Beautiful Girl Mari opens with a man named Nam-Woo receiving a gift from his departing friend Jun-Ho. The film then flashes back to a summer when the two were pre-teens, and Nam-Woo's troubled domestic life is further jolted by the fact that Jun-Ho is preparing to leave the pair's seaside village to attend school in Seoul. After the young Nam-Woo discovers a strange glowing marble with a human figure in it in a shop, his derelict lighthouse hangout is transformed into a door to another world, where he meets an alluring girl named Mari who can swim through the air as if it were water. Naturally, Jun-Ho thinks Nam-Woo dreamed it all…until he too is pulled into the dream. An understated, subtle film that deals deftly with issues of abandonment and young love, Lee Sung-Gang's My Beautiful Girl Mari boasts realistic character designs and lush animation (the most gorgeous scene, in which Nam-Woo journeys through the fantasy world's lush landscape in pursuit of an immense fluffy dog in whose fur Mari rides, echoes Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro). Rated TV-G, the subtitled Japanese version on this dual-language disc is superior to the sub-par English dub. Recommended. Aud: P. (S. Raiteri)