When I saw some early photos from the set of Arang and the Magistrate, featuring bad wigs, bad fake flowers and bad fake smoke, I howled with derision and made snarky comments about cheap Eastern European fairy tale television.
Now I find I have to eat my snark, because I’m just loving Arang’s world creation. Ok, production is still cheap. And the wig is still bad. But there’s a consistent vision behind it all and an attractive whimsy. Rather to my surprise, I’ve been put in mind of some of my favorite fantasy books and movies. I never thought a K-drama, much less one starring such a money-spinning hottie idol as Lee Jun Gi, would ever take me there.
There is a lot of fantasy work out there; some of it good, most of it bad. For me, what sets good fantasy above the masses is understanding of human nature, thoughtful world creation, and tons of research. Too much dabbling in the fantasy genre (or ‘fusion’ as dubbed in the K-drama world lately) is actually thinly disguised laziness. “I can’t be bothered to figure out coherence or meaning, so I’m going to invent a load of random stuff and call it ‘fantasy’”. Arang and the Magistrate is hardly in the class of Diana Wynne Jones or Lois McMaster Bujold, but at least it is working its fantasy angle and not using it as a lazy excuse to break all rules of probability, physics and history. Its fantasy world feels living and breathing, rather than random and manic.
At one point, I even thought I caught a whiff of Miyazaki and my favourite scene in Spirited Away of the train making its way across a watery plain in twilight.
Another thing that purveyors of fantasy so often fail to understand is that good fantasy is grounded in real life issues such as growing up, or overcoming. Arang and the Magistrate understands this, and we have quests, people taken outside their comfort zone, people dealing with suffering, and folk manning up (mostly, Arang herself) to face challenges. Me likey.
Anyhows, here’s a series of screencaps of my favourite fantasy sequence from the fourth episode of Arang and the Magistrate, which was when I sat up and realized I was watching something different.
Imagination isn’t always followed by competent execution, but Kim Sang-Ho’s a good hand. Pretty decent show indeed, and getting better.
Oh wow. Okay, those screenshots got me. I am such a sucker for good fantasy. Off I go to watch the first episode.
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