Stream K-Dramas at OnDemandKorea

[HanCinema's Film Review] "Turning Mecard W: The Revival of Black Mirror"

The opening scene of "Turning Mecard W: The Revival of Black Mirror" makes a point of emphasizing to us the backstory of Black Mirror. It was a bad transforming toy robot that had to be sealed into some alternate universe by a good transforming toy robot. Then after the prologue is over he comes back into the real world somehow in rabbit mascot form, handing out mind control mirrors to unsuspecting children. So you see kids, the moral of the story is, don't accept cool mirrors as presents from suspicious rabbits.

Advertisement

Let's see, what else. Ah yes, in the dystopian future of "Turning Mecard W: The Revival of Black Mirror", children have toy robots that are literally capable of destroying entire cityscapes. The only thing stopping children from going on a rampage with their toy robots is...other children with their own superpowered toy robots. Which I suppose is one of the more plausible future legislations that may be enacted to prevent school shootings.

OK, OK, so the internal logic doesn't make any sense. It's not like that was a big selling point anyway. Any time children's cartoons are written with coherent internal logic they attract an unfortunate fandom of older creepy nerds. "Turning Mecard W: The Revival of Black Mirror" is the kind of children's cartoon so complicated it's hard not to point and laugh at all the stuff that's just not explained.

Presumably if you've ever seen the Turning Mecard W television cartoon, the movie version will make slightly more sense. Oddly enough the characterization is pretty impressively easy to grasp, drawing as it does from the various stock archetypes of the children's cartoon genre. There's, generic main character with spiky hair. Girl who has a crush on him but he's an idiot. Quiet guy who doesn't understand human expressions. Smart kid genius.

I could be at this awhile, and I wouldn't even be getting to the Mechanimals, the little cars that turn into giant animal themed robots and engage in huge epic fights. And I have to admit, "Turning Mecard W: The Revival of Black Mirror" does have that market pretty well-cornered. It doesn't take that long for Chekhov's Keys to get turned, and once that happens it's a massive dogpile as all the robots are fighting all the other robots, with only brief dialogue to set up the latest wacky turnabout.

And they're good turnabouts, for whatever that's work. The trick with the shadow was pretty neat. Yep, that guy has maybe five lines, but he will always live on in my heart as "kid from parallel dimension who seems like a callous jerk but is actually pretty smart". I'll write this much for "Turning Mecard W: The Revival of Black Mirror"- if I was an eight year old kid, it would probably make me beg my parents for toys. But as far as the whole "to sell toys" genre of feature length TV cartoons go, "Turning Mecard W: The Revival of Black Mirror" is decently entertaining.

Review by William Schwartz

"Turning Mecard W: The Revival of Black Mirror" is directed by Hong Heon-pyo and voiced by So Yeon, Shin Yong-woo, Yoon Ah-young and Jang Gwang.

❎ Try Ad-free