I saw Train to Busan in 2016 and thoroughly enjoyed it. I didn’t think it added much new to the zombie genre, but I thought it was well shot, acted and constructed. Placing the majority of the action on a train was a great way to restrain the characters and heighten tension. The character storylines were maybe a bit overwrought and broad, but I loved the characters I was supposed to love and hated the ones I was supposed to hate and felt a loss when things went wrong.
I vaguely remembered reading that the director of Train to Busan, Yeon Sang-ho , had started out with animated films. I didn’t have a lot of interest in them based on their descriptions, but when I heard that he’d made an animated prequel to Train I thought I might have to see it. (And if it was any good, maybe look at some of his earlier stuff.)
I still haven’t seen Peninsula, the sequel to Train to Busan, but I have some vague notion of starting with Seoul Station and watching the whole trilogy. (I haven’t heard great things about Peninsula, but I still feel like I should watch it.) Consider this a low-key way of starting that process.
The Medium
I watched Seoul Station on Amazon. There IS a Blu-ray available from Seoulyeok, but I haven’t heard much about it, and I don’t think it’s necessary. For streaming options, it’s available for free with ads on Tubi, Hoopla, Kanopy and FreeVee, for subs on Prime, Night Flight and Crunchroll, and can be purchased/rented on Amazon and AppleTV.
The Movie
Seoul Station follows a number of characters during a zombie outbreak amongst the homeless population in and around the titular train station. (Where, one assumes, you could find a train to Busan.)
An elderly homeless man stumbles, injured, through a crowd in front of Seoul Station. No one seems willing to help the old man except another of the homeless population (who keeps calling him ‘Bro’ – which might mean they’re related, might not). The younger man tries to get the attention of the authorities, but is constantly demeaned, harassed and put off.
Meanwhile, Hye-sun, a runaway who has left life as a prostitute, discovers that her boyfriend, the dissolute Ki-woong, plans to pimp her out in order to solve their money problems. She breaks things off with Ki-woong who abandons her (telling her she’s not welcome at their apartment) just before her estranged father shows up looking for her.
Unable to get help, the elderly homeless man dies – and comes back as a ravening zombie. Hye-sun, with nowhere to go and no one to go to, finds herself caught up in a group of homeless people as they run from the rapidly growing horde of undead.
Ki-woong and Hye-sun’s father start looking for her, at the violent insistence of the older man. As the area around the train station degenerates into chaos and violence, the search grows more desperate and difficult. A police station is overrun and soon the authorities are blocking off streets, treating the outbreak as civil unrest.
Hye-sun, her father and Ki-woong will eventually come together, in the surreal circumstance of a bunch of show apartments, but the reunion won’t be what any of them had planned.
There’s a lot of social commentary in Seoul Station. Not that there wasn’t in Train to Busan, but the slower pace of Station gives the concepts of class, societal abandonment and generational struggles more room to breathe. To be honest, I found it to be a bit melodramatic, though occasional moments – when an elderly homeless man and Hey-sun both break down, crying that they want to go home, for instance – are affecting. That may be down to my stoic northern Maine upbringing, however.
The animation is… okay. It’s occasionally exceptional, but more often simply serviceable, getting you from one scene to the next with some overwrought facial expressions to tide you over. The zombies seem to get better treatment than the main characters, with more details and better framing.
The horror moments are pretty standard – characters run into zombies, zombies chase, zombies eat characters. There’s not a lot of gore, and I felt like the animation actually killed a bit of whatever tension the film managed to build. There are two exceptions – though I still feel like I wish I could see them in live action. The first takes place when Hye-sun and a group of homeless people find a police station. It’s quickly overwhelmed by zombies and the group and an injured policeman find themselves trapped in a cell with the undead only fingertips away. It’s a tense sequence and one of my favorite parts of the film.
The second sequence is a cat and mouse game towards the end of the film, but the less it’s explained the better.
The Bottom Line
Seoul Station doesn’t quite have the action or over-the-top energy of Train to Busan. The social commentary is more obvious, and the animation is just okay. It really didn’t inspire me to try and find any of Yeon Sang-ho’s earlier animated films. I’ll still try and watch the rest of the trilogy, even though I ended up not liking this film as much as Train. That being said, it’s an interesting movie anyway and if you’re ready to make some exceptions for animated horror it’s worth taking a look.