QUIL OTONITY – Korean animation has reached new heights in recent years. Between Netflix’s Lost in Starlight and Studio Lico’s Your Letter, the industry feels more confident than ever in producing its own stories. However, that wasn’t the case in the early 2000s.

Although the country was known for its reliable outsourcing of animation talent, producing entirely Korean animated films was a huge gamble that rarely paid off (Wonderful Days). Aachi & Ssipak spent eight years in development during this era.

It began right after the 1998 lifting of the country’s anime ban, then took an additional two decades to be screened uncensored in its original language exclusively at DARKROOM. This film is certainly not for everyone, but it’s like watching someone put Rugrats into AKIRA!

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From the very beginning, this film makes its priorities clear: crude humor and extreme violence. After an opening caption stating that this world is literally driven by poop, a group of blue, diaper-clad minions brutally rob an armored truck to steal its ice cream.

These “Juicybars” were previously provided in restrooms as a reward for a smooth bowel movement, but these mutants lost the ability to defecate (along with their genitals) after consuming too many. In the midst of their heist, a motorcycle-riding Robocop shoots most of them in the head within minutes.

He moved so fast that the bullets had a delayed impact, similar to when a samurai sheathes his sword before delivering a fatal blow. One survivor grabbed the remaining Juicybar with tears in his eyes, only to be casually run over by our two main characters: Aachi & Ssipak.

 

There’s an old saying that people reflect their city, and in this case, it’s absolutely true. There isn’t a single character here you’d want to root for. Aachi & Ssipak are two low-level criminals who break into restrooms to meet their quotas for the local mafia.

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They’re utterly shallow and complete sociopaths, earning sympathy only because they’re at the bottom of a rotten food chain. The government essentially runs on a mandatory drug currency, enforced by a militarized police force and public service announcements indistinguishable from the adult video industry.

This has given rise to an army of drug-dependent monsters and a black market for criminals to sell more than just one thing, creating a never-ending cycle where one side turns the other into hamburger meat. It’s as if breathing in this city’s filth has corrupted the souls of its inhabitants.

So, when these two men meet a gold-digging woman who can actually defecate gold (one of them clearly falls in love with her), is it any wonder that sharing is the last thing on anyone’s mind? No, these two men and their “beauty” simply buy their way to the top of the criminal ladder in a three-minute montage.

Then, once they’re at the top, it’s just a matter of who’s going to race to the very top. The nihilistic undertones in the character portrayals make it hard to connect emotionally with anyone involved. But it turns out this is a good thing: I don’t care if anyone dies, so just look how awesome it is when they blow up!

It’s this brutal, no-holds-barred approach that makes the film stand out—throwing various factions into a single room and counting how many bodies pile up. If there’s one thing to appreciate about this film, it’s the brutal, kinetic, nonstop action.