Days falls far shorter, however, no thanks to its underwritten and sometimes virtually incoherent story. I understand that this was a big-budget attempt for Korea to break into the animation game worldwide, but visuals are not the only thing that make a movie absorbing, no matter what nationality the audience (something the Pixar folks understand completely). Someone needed to take a long, hard look at the script and insist that it wasn't finished.

Like Spirits, Days takes place on a future Earth where a natural catastrophe has all but destroyed the human race. Here, the world was rendered virtually uninhabitable no thanks to pollution centuries ago, and all life forms save mankind (and a few scavengers) died out. To preserve humanity, the last few survivors converged and built a giant arcology, an enclosed city named ECOBAN (Eco-Ban, get it?), which runs on pollution. There is a massive, disenfranchised underclass that keeps the pollution supply running, and among them are a band of rebels bent on sabotaging ECOBAN. Worse, the planet has almost completely healed itself; the pollution supply is running low, and ECOBAN faces extinction unless its inflexible leaders change their ways.

The movie focuses on three characters: the leader of the rebel outfit, Shua; the chief of ECOBAN security, Simon; and Jay, a female officer working under Simon. Despite Shua's outcast status, he was once close to the other two in his childhood, and made a promise to Jay to allow her to see the sunrise again. Simon, on the other hand, wants Jay for himself, and is willing to do anything that other people have done in a thousand other romantic triangles in movies to get her. Truthfully, there are many emotional moments that do pay off, but they are never followed up on in a way that gains heft: people's allegiances change with nothing more than the look in their eyes to tell us why, and the audience is left out in the cold.

The biggest and most obvious problem is the movie's pollution conceit. It winds up being nothing more than a heavy-handed allegory for our own irreverent treatment of the planet, no thanks to how illogically it's handled. There's never an explanation of how it works, and by the time the plot has really gathered steam, it's almost irrelevant. So why dwell on it at all? Presumably because it provides an excuse for the movie to present one staggering image after another -- the sight of all those stagnant windmills, for instance, is breathtaking, even if it's serving a totally addled purpose.

The way the world of Wonderful Days has been visualized is really the best reason to see it. The city of ECOBAN is like a living thing itself, with a landscape surrounding it that is the bleakest and most unforgiving I've seen in a movie in a long time. The characters are beautifully designed, too -- expressive, and to a high degree emotionally involving, but only up to the point that we realize that the movie does not really understand them, or much of anything else. Large swaths of the story are never properly explained; characters are allowed to come and go for no apparent reason; and the ending is a massive pileup of incidents with little logic or causality. Instead of catharsis, there's confusion: many of the character's fates are simply left hanging in limbo.

What's saddest about the film is that over time it stops becoming an original creation and starts becoming more of a catalog of influences, thematic and visual. The proletariat underclass is a nod to Metropolis; the police bikes/hovercraft are from Tron (as are the glowing lines and costumes of the city itself); the final chase through the city's towers is lifted from Star Wars -- which in turn was hijacking The Dam Busters. And so on. Because the plot is so vague and uninvolving, it becomes little more than a very expensive and lush demo reel for a story that was never properly written.

I need to reiterate that this is a fantastically well-made movie, and any student of animation or film in general will want to see it. Is it worth the experience if you're anyone else? Maybe, if only because it's so spectacular to look at -- but the downside is that anyone who sees Wonderful Days will only be heartbroken at how their hands close on thin air. This movie was made with the best of design teams, the highest of ambitions, and the worst of screenplays.