“To Catch Up and Overtake Disney?”: Soviet and Post-Soviet

The Korean film industry languished between 1937 and 1955: with Japan's invasion of China, Korean language films were banned and replaced by propaganda films in Japanese; the American occupation and puppet dictatorship after World War II was not conducive to a film industry; and what industry infrastructure that survived was destroyed during the Korean War. There are three broad currents in the development of the fairy-tale film in Korea. The first, and oldest, involves film adaptations of Korean folktales and legends. The earliest of these were made during the period of Japanese colonization of the Korean peninsula and imparted various cultural and political messages. The second current consists of a relatively small group of western fairy tales which have been adapted for the Korean cinema from the Grimms, Charles Perrault, or Andersen. The third current blends tales from the two traditions, Korean and European. Although this cross-cultural phenomenon is quite rare in film, it is common in television drama.