Synopsis

In front of the park of apartment complex a nineties-years old man comes walking as usual. While young seniors are playing Korean chess in the park, they don’t give him a room to play together due to the generation gap. A main character who sat on the bench discovers a 'Walkman' placed next on it. He is at a loss how to act, plugs the earphone in his ear, and then presses the play button. As suddenly the old man begins to act upside down, the life and the world are rewound at the same time…

Director

• 

  Kim He-rian
  

  The Walkman (2016)

  I express the relationship between the body and the world through the old man born in 1926 in Anyang who lived in a rapidly changing era.
  The main character is a senior figure to represent the life of the lower middle class citizen. He received Japan’s colonial education, after the liberation he was involved in the war. He had to accept the fast economic growth as given, and lived the life of the smallest unit that makes up the world.
  Sadness and pain of the Japanese occupation, war and poverty within the old man’s memory are mixed up with personal memories. All these emotions are implemented as an animation in conjunction with geographic base.
  This fairy tale which feels the thick texture of oil pastel should escape a little from the digital efficiency and then go through the analog process to draw one by one by hand.
  Making process that implies a temporality by itself is in contact with the past within the story.
  The last scene of the animation is a scene taking a group photo. Like images overlapping behind the scenery blended dimly after taking a picture the memories are dim, embellished, edited, and then are entangled one another.

Review

An old man, supposedly the protagonist of this animation, picks up an ownerless Walkman from the park bench. Once he presses the play button, time runs backwards, and he travels to the past. In this short journey, the spectators swim along and experience the time and space the old man had led from his earliest times in Anyang to the accumulation of his personal history. Director Kim He-rian’s animation film <The Walkman>, with its radiant colors and unfettered shapes, was originally a 5-minute work. Kim recreated this work into a 10-minute film by combining the actual interview footage of the old man in the animation and the making of the film to the animation. Thanks to this process, the audience can now observe the interesting combination of the darkish and wrinkled old man who endured the wind and frost of time, and the elusive vitality of the animation uncannily coexisting.
<The walkman> is a work composed of a consecutive array of a regional history of Anyang and an old man who strives to show his individual existence against an animation making the exterior of objects abstract, and that animation’s flakes. We may become curious of Anyang’s regional history after watching this work of warm and creative dedication towards a being, and what it achieved as a documentary by stimulating the curiosity of an unofficial history. [Kim Sin]

Credits

• Director, Producer, Editor  Kim He-rian
• Cinematographer  Hong In-gee
• Music, Sound  Sert Jimmy

Contribution & World Sales

• Contribution & World Sales  AniSEED
• Phone  82 2 313 1030
• E-mail  kaniseed@naver.com