ANI-MOVIES, *Ghost Messenger

"What was the point?!" is probably what most American viewers thought when the first saw this Korean animated feature. Ghost Messenger was supposed to be a 3-part OVA series with serious homages to existing anime like Evangelion and Fate, but only two episodes were ever completed. The final one has been in production limbo for over a decade with no sight of it finishing up anytime soon. So, streaming companies like RetroCrush decided to make urine out of lemons and just combine the existing episodes into a single feature with no dub and a translated that is critically below professional standards. Most of the dialogue reads like it was an AI script written by another AI program while tripping acid. The timing for the subtitles is atrocious with several words glued together making for incomprehensible compound words. This and the whole thing ends with a hugely unresolved conclusion makes it one of the most meaningless releases on the western market.

Set in Seoul, the spirits of the departed get caught in the world of the living that feed off other spirits. To ferry these spirits along, there is a special network of agents called Ghost Messengers that hunt down rogue ghosts. Kanglim is one of these agents and uses a special cell phone to wrangle the stray ghosts by taking pictures of them. Kanglim goes missing from work and his girlfriend Bari is covering for him while keeping an eye out for him, at least when she isn't going on excessive shopping sprees. A young human psychic boy also called Kanglim finds the GM Kanglim's phone after he got caught in his own phone that the "Little Kanglim" uses for his own selfish needs while keeping the "Big Kanglim" a prisoner that he lets out every so often to help him fight ghosts, as if the Ghost Messenger was his own personal Pokemon. A senior officer among the Ghost Messenger agency named Sara gets called to find out what was really going on, and we learn that Little Kanglim was keeping his grandfather's deceased spirit tied to his family's store since his mother who was also psychic got killed by spirits. Sara also uncovers that regular Kanglim has been missing because he is under a curse that makes him a potential abomination. The dueling Ghost Messengers take their battle to epic heights while Little Kanglim enters the spirit world looking for his grandfather's ghost. The feature ends on a severe cliffhanger of Bari leading the charge of an army of Ghost Messengers riding on chimeras launching an assault on an unseen enemy.

Ghost Messenger is insanely difficult to navigate the plot to and only those who have seen bad fansubs could even have the most remote chance of figuring it out. The animation and fight choreography are somewhat impressive, but considering that the production never reached its ending, you really have to wonder why someone bothered to do an English adaptation of it, and with such inferior subtitles to boot.