Princess Seonwha and Sonogong (1968) 선화공주와 손오공
Director: Park Young-il
Genre: Animation
Country/Region of Manufacture: South Korea
Language: Korean
Duration: 67 minutes
Also known as: Seonhwagongjuwa Son-ogong / 善花公主与孙悟空
Adaptation: Addition
Summary:
While on their way to Tianchuk, Master Samjang and Son Oh-gong hear that there is a demon that freezes the village in a village they arrive at. They are captured by the dragon woman and she turned Samjang into a skeleton. After coming to his senses, Son Oh-gong goes to the Bone Palace where the dragon woman is, rescues the three masters, Sao-jeong, and Jeo Ba-gye, who have turned into skeletons, and defeats the dragon woman. When her dragon dies, she turns into a goldfish, but her dragon friend was the goldfish that came down after committing her sins. Son Oh-gong and his party, who were on their way again, faced a crisis that almost got crushed by a pile of stones. While Son Oh-gong goes to scout the surroundings, Samjang is caught by the sea and a gale and is taken away by King Demon Wind. In response, Son Oh-gong created numerous Son Oh-gongs and defeated King Demon Wind. Then, one day, Son Oh-gong and Samjang Xuan, and company, arrive at Tianchuk and succeed in obtaining the Buddha’s sutras.
In 1967, a particularly productive year for South Korean animation, as many as three films were released. The first three in the country: A Story of Hong Gil-dong (1967), directed by Dong-heon Shin; Heungbuwa Nolbu, directed by Gang Tae-ung in stop motion; and Hopi and Chadol Bawi, second part of the opening, also directed by Dong-heon Shin.
After this extraordinary boost to the country’s animated industry, in 1968 two other feature films were released that, yes, are less well known: Golden Iron Man and the one in question, both signed by Park Yeong-il -and not by Bak Young- il, as it erroneously appears in some sources-. The one that stars in this review was his debut as a feature film director and is such a rarity that it does not have a file on IMDb. On the other hand, it does appear in the Korean Movie Database, which incidentally allows me to discover that it was produced in 1967 and that Park Yeong-il had already directed at least a couple of animated shorts before embarking on this project.
In fact, in the second volume of his history of world animation, Giannalbeto Bendazzi mentions Park Yeong-il as one of the three authors of what he calls “the first real animation,” an independent short titled The Ant and the Grasshopper. (Gaemi Wa Bechangi), based on Aesop’s fable, which he made together with Jeong Do-bin and Han Seong-hak. In that same work, by the way, the Italian refers to this film as Journey to the West (Sonogong).
Son Oh-gong -손오공-, which also is translated into English as Princess Seonhwa and Sonogong, is the fourth animated feature film to adapt Pilgrimage to the West, the 1590 Chinese literature classic. It is preceded by two Chinese films, Tie shan gong zhu (1941), directed by the Guchan brothers and Wan Laiming, and The Rebellion of King Kun fu sun (1964), Wan Laiming’s second attempt, this time with Cheng Tang; and a Japanese one, Alakazam the Great (1959), produced by Tôei Dôga and directed by Daisaku Shirakawa and Taiji Yabushita based on the manga The Legend of Son Goku (Boku no Songoku), by the great Osamu Tezuka.
Narratively, it is not wonderful and the shortcomings of the Korean animation industry are noticeable in the most technically complex scenes, but the design of the characters is achieved, especially that of the fearsome woman faced by the monkey protagonist that gives the title to the movie. film. The expressive character design, along with Jeon Jong-kun’s inspired soundtrack make it a rarity worth seeking out, even if it’s far from an essential work of South Korean animation.
