Woochi: The Demon Slayer (2009)

A film with time travelling Goblin Rabbits trying to steal a pipe that will….I don't know what. This is Asian cinema at its best. A story built on eastern story telling. Young buck, wise old master, humorous sidekick (who may or may not be a dog of indeterminate gender) and a love interest with guts and gumption when needed most.Following the apprentice Wizard Woochi (Don Wong-Kan) and his shape shifting Dogberry-esque friend Chorangyi and their hunt for the magic that will make Woochi's name and Chorangyi human.Fight scenes of inventiveness that take the stylistic quirks of the later Matrix films and make them great, comedic timing and watch out for the reality of magic in the second act (21st century) as we find out what would really happen if you had to seek out a magic painting at two in the morning in downtown Pyongyang.Betrayal, magic, drunken Taoist gods who can't seem to get anything right and a downbeat upbeat ending that wraps the film up in the brilliance of the eponymous hero's own imagination.This is a film for teenagers, lovers of story and people who don't take themselves seriously.Big bag of popcorn.

My DVD for big budget Korean fantasy blockbuster Woochi is a superbly packaged two-disc presentation loaded with lavish extras; what a shame then that the film isn't really worth the attention it has received, either from the Korean movie-going public or the DVD company that has released it here in the UK.Although Woochi boasts a high level of invention throughout, and contains a few undeniably impressive moments of action, for every positive, one can easily find several negatives: the cinematography is impressive, but the CGI is inconsistent and rapid editing leads to confusion; the story is loaded with innovative fantasy elements, but they are introduced in such a random, disjointed fashion that the inevitable result is even more chaos and confusion; a memorable score competes against the movie's incessantly loud soundtrack; and the humour is, as often seems the case with Asian comedy, very hit and miss.Just about worth seeing for the occasional genuinely outstanding set-piece—the 'multiple versions of the hero battling a pair of goblins' scene is particularly good—but at over two hours long, with much of the action being utterly incomprehensible, Woochi is far from essential.

To make a long thought short: I've watched The Sorcerer's Apprentice first, and then the War of the Wizards the same evening. While the Disney flick was plain boring, I really enjoyed the Korean piece. Given, that the CGI is not 100% of the stuff, Hollywood's money can buy, it has all the rest I've missed in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. War of the Wizards has fun story, nice yeah-I'm-a-great-magician-fights (I loved the boss-fight). Summarised: The Sorcerer's Apprentice sticks to it's name: merely an apprentice compared to this lovely crafted Asian movie. Watch it if you like cool magician battles and have an eye and heart for eastern humor.

+ A good mix between classic Wu-Xiapian movies and time-travel humor. It never fails to deliver laughs or to impress with witty action. Scrolls, seals, ideograms and magic tricks dispensed by the terrific cast are used to serve both the action and the comic relief. No flashy CGI it's cool and discrete. (The audience burst in laughs when they did the old school 'white smoke' metamorphosis trick.)The film lacks a good editing though (a recurrent handicap in Korean movies). Despite the great acting of the cast, it tends to slow down when trying to develop the very secondary female characters. This is probably due to the presence of many Korean movie stars who always insist to get a lot of screen time for their characters even if that doesn't serve the storyline.I'll give it a 8 because of all the good laughs and this very refreshing and magical atmosphere the movie provides. While Korea's grown famous for pushing to export crappy CGI movies out of sheer patriotism but this isn't one of them. Woochi actually delivers.