Сказка про девочку и умирающую Землю на большом и малом экранах Южной Кореи

Abstract

South Korean movies and TV series are not only world-famous entertainment products that attract global audiences with a combination of a system of genres that generally reproduce the global one and details – sometimes plot-forming – closely related to national history and culture. It is also a valuable source of information about how ideas are exchanged between the contemporary Korean audience and Korean media culture, how they influence each other. Among the problems raised in the process of communication between media products and their consumers, issues related to the state of the environment, with the threat of an ecological catastrophe, occupy an increasingly prominent place. The purpose of the article is to identify the features of the eco-narrative in science fiction works intended for a wide audience. Of particular interest are works created in collaboration with Netflix and other companies of this type, since in this case both the Korean audience and the global one become the recipient; therefore, creators must take into account the requests of both the internal recipient and the external one. The main object of analysis for this article was the feature film “Space Sweepers” and the TV series “The Silent Sea”, released in 2021 on Netflix. Both the movie and the series represent a genre of space fantasy with elements of dystopia, rare in South Korea, both tell about the world of the future, in which life on Earth is on the verge of extinction. The relevance of the theme of the extinction of mankind and the Earth itself, and the opportunity to study its implementation in South Korean cultural products make the material chosen for analysis extremely valuable. The analysis made it possible to identify numerous parallels in unrelated works – at the level of narrative, visual solutions, characters. The most remarkable character is a girl endowed with special properties: she not only performs an important function in the plot, but also turns out to be a living tool for solving the main problem – dying of the Earth. A certain similarity between the complex of plot elements and the structure of a fairy tale calls into question the belonging of the film and the TV series to science fiction, even in the most conventional sense of this definition, since the denouement in both cases is provided with the help of a “miraculous” rather than scientifically based method.