Movie Review: Aachi & Ssipak

Aachi & Ssipak (2006) is officially the weirdest anime-movie I have ever seen. This Korean movie, by director Jo Beom-jin, is a dystopian sci-fi where human feces have become I major energy source and in order to encourage defecation people are awarded a “juicy bar” in turn for every dump they take. To keep the system going, all babies are implanted with an ID-ring in their anuses upon birth. For every passing of bowl movement the ID-ring send an electronic message to the governmental headquarters who duly award the defecator with his or her juicy bar.

The addictive juicy bars also spawn an underground drug syndicate, with various groups fighting for control over the juicy bar trade.

Enters the two main characters, Aachi and Ssipak… two lowlife gangsters that hijack people’s juicy bars shortly after they go to the toilet. And then there is the girl, Beautiful, who is violated by the leader of the Diper Gang, and inserted with a hacked anus ID-ring. The result is that every time Beautiful defecates her hacked ID-ring causes the main frame to pay out hundreds of juicy bars. Now everyone is after Beautiful and her lucrative dumps!

For a more detailed review read this one by Adam Hartzell.

As I said, this is probably the weirdest anime I’ve seen. The plot is strange, the characters are creepy and the style is peculiar, not ugly but, odd. It is definitely for an adult audience with lots of foul language, blood and sexual innuendo. Genitalia are blurred, which I thought an interesting technique to use for anime. (With anime the animators can easily censor things by merely not drawing it. Blurring the genetalia is therefor done on purpose as a stylistic motif.)

Would I recommend this movie? Only to die-heart anime fans that want to stay abreast with the weird and wonderful world of anime. I think that Aachi & Ssipak has created a unique Korean flavour to the anime scene, clearly different from Japanese idealism. If Aachi & Ssipak was made in Hollywood as a real movie, instead of an anime movie, I think it would be in league with such cult movies as Pulp Fiction.