ThiefHott Too much of everything

Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

tieman64 "Americans remind me of survivors of domestic abuse. There is always the hope that this is the very, very, very last time one gets one's ribs re-broken." - Inga Muscio Grotesque and violent, Yeun Sang-Ho's "The King of Pigs" is a low budget animated feature from South Korea. Like a demented take on Orwell's "Animal Farm", or Golding's "Lord of the Flies" (to which its title alludes), the film watches as a gang of privileged kids (nicknamed the "dogs") repeatedly brutalise and bully a school's lower class students (nicknamed the "pigs").Orwell's tale saw one pig rise and destroy his oppressors. In "The King of Pigs" we see a poverty stricken student, Chul Kim, stand up to his bullying school-mates. Rather than a romantic hero, though, Chul is portrayed as a violent psychopath. "We must become more evil than they are," Chul explains, internalising the hate directed at him and re-directing it, tenfold, at those who brutalise him.Virtually everyone in Yeun Sang-Ho's tale is understood as being either a victim or victimiser. Workers and employers, the rich and the poor, businessmen and prostitutes, students and teachers, men and women, bullies and classmates, humans and animals...they're all trapped in Yeun Sang-Ho's very rigid social hierarchy. Even those who seem to escape poverty ultimately find themselves back in financial debt, beholden to others. Capitalism as a form of psychic and literal violence, the film paints a world bound by the laws of competition, predation and psychopathy. "Money only follows the rich," Chul says, "you need to be a monster if you don't want to keep living like a loser." Whilst Yeun Sang-Ho's film portrays a very real, contemporary problem in South Korea – parental/social pressures and limited job vacancies have led to a rise in local bullying – all his films are works of social critique which portray a more global situation. In "Pigs" we thus see an expansive, social hierarchy based on wealth; the ruling "dogs" and the subservient "pigs". This regime, which infects all social institutions, is enforced by the oldest all the way down to the youngest. Through them, violence is perpetrated against those lower in the social pecking order: the rich against the poor, men against women and humans against animals, who represent the lowest rung on the ladder and the most vulnerable."The King of Pigs" is blunt, unsubtle and pushes its ideas, themes and caricatures to every possible extreme. Women aren't only abused by husbands, but decapitated. Children aren't cruel to animals, but stab them repeatedly. Bosses don't underpay their employees, but beat and humiliate them in public. Like all good grotesque art, Yeun Sang-Ho deals entirely in extremes. Interestingly, the film's aesthetic limitations (low frame rate, small budget etc) only amplify its more grotesque aspects. The result is not only a film populated with freakish, disturbing characters, but one which taps deeply into a reality shared and suffered by many in our world. Elsewhere the film touches upon domestic violence, portraying it as a consequence of male disenfranchisement and male impotency (numerous studies have pointed to the correlation between male unemployment and violence toward women and children).Like an animated version of Pasolini's "Salo", every scene in Yeun Sang-Ho's film is drenched in overt brutality or quiet, unsettling angst. The film's nihilism, which only occasionally gives way to compassion, reaches its apex with Yeun Sang-Ho's final scene. Here the film pushes past the moral bankruptcy of late-capitalism to declare our entire species valueless. "Earth is covered by asphalt as cold as ice and by bodies colder that it is," a young killer muses. Yeun Sang-Ho's follow-up film, "The Fake", is equally misanthropic.8.9/10 – Superb.

octopusluke Ever since Osamu Tezuka's early 1960s work, Japan has become the controlling monolith of Asian animation. The King of Pigs dares to try and buck the trend. A Cannes Film Festival favourite from new-gun South Korean Yeon Sang-Ho, it's an unflinching take on class hierarchy and savagery in an inner city high school. Dangerous Minds meets Lord of the Flies? There are piggies abound, but the gangster terrains are far from paradisal.After a fifteen year absence, old school friends Hwang and Jong reunite over dinner. But nostalgia isn't on the menu tonight, through lucid flashbacks, the pair discuss their upbringing with utter contempt; both still psychologically troubled by the culture of bullying, whereby the rich designer wearing kids prevail and the lowlives are berated, spat on and beaten to a pulp. Not a moment too soon, their lives are transformed when the ghostly student at the back of the classroom Kim Chul teaches them how to fight back in the most malevolent way possible.Animator/director Yeon presents a truly vile story in the most attractive way possible, with the rusty Seoul backdrop lusciously well drawn and the school boys presented autonomously, yet each have their own striking gaze. Also working as the editor and screenwriter, the vengeance tale is presented in such a raw and aggressive way that the fight sequences are often uncomfortably palpable. A stunning quality for a animation picture to obtain.But this is ultimately The King of Pig's undoing. While some of the hand-drawn animation and raw emotional connect leaves you gawking, the gritty and unsettling portrait of school feudalism is just so severe. Quite rapidly, Yeon shifts from the profound and resonating to the hysterical, particularly a painfully shouty final showdown. It's a great shame. What starts as an entertaining watch culminates in a sensorily attacking one.Read more reviews at www.theframeloop.com

Patryk Czekaj A haunting, hard-hitting animation about the problem of class struggle in South Korea and its disastrous connection to bullying. With its nightmarish art direction, it stimulates many radical emotions in the viewer, assaulting him with a most sombre tale of an atrocious past.Two men struggling with domestic issues of their own meet after 15 years and reminisce about their extremely difficult school days. Their childhood was gradually being destroyed because of the ongoing, enormous and brutal pressure from the rich kids who ruled the school-grounds and often resolved to in-class violence. The fact that everybody around pretends that this horrible activity didn't even exist only made the whole issue worse and caused the richer kids to be even more confident of their impunity. The boys' last and only hope was their brave yet ferocious classmate Chul. He proved to be the only kid who wasn't afraid to stand up against the terror and tried to fight back using even more violence than his oppressors. Without any help from the outside the three friends came up with a most shocking plan - Chul will commit a public suicide. Without any hope for a brighter future they though of this extreme scheme as they only means to notifying the impassive adults about the horrible incidents that occur behind the school walls everyday. Apart from evaluating the boys' decisions and presenting their differing viewpoints on the situation - and on what's about to happen - the film also reveals a grand mystery in its final act.The plot is inspired by the director's dream, where his two friends decide to commit suicide as a revenge act for all the evil that's happened to them in the past.The King of Pigs is a mightily dark and obscure anime, where horrible reality merges with confusing visions, only to deliver a stupendously convincing message to the Korean nation. Through the story of two men it shows that many childhood traumas have terrible lifelong effects. Memories are deceiving, but they play an important role in determining how people cope with their lives.

S_Craig_Zahler although this received some good press and was supported by the excellent folks at subway cinema, this movie is heavy-handed, monotonous and badly made junk. i suppose it would be a novelty to somebody who has never seen adult animation, but otherwise don't waste your time. if you want smart and rich adult animation, go watch heavy traffic (bakshi), berserk, shigurui, my neighbors the yamadas, ghost in the shell: innocence or porco rosso.the king of pigs animation combines limited, inconsistent and ugly drawings (like king of the hill and beavis and butt head) with rotoscoping (tracing) and bad computer generated models. i saw this on the big screen and the animation is definitely the worst i've ever seen for a theatrical film-- and i saw cool world when it came out.like many bad korean movies, it is monotonously mean and there are stupid twists that undo the limited amount of characterization the writing provided (see also: the good the bad and the weird, the host, shiru). the characters are dull and one dimensional, the scenes are repetitive, the animation is awful and the overall experience tedious.