A Study on the Appearance of South Korean Everyday Life as Shown in Animated Korean Films in the late 1970s

This study analyzes the appearance of everyday life in the late 1970s depicted in the dramatic featurelength animations Robot Taekwon V (1976) and Taekwon Dongja Maruchi Arachi (1977). First, Korean animation from this period had a close connection with the socio-historical environment. At that time, the appearance of everyday life as revealed in these animations show the family make-up under the control of a typical patriarchal system. However, the hero in the animation gets on the robot created on the basis of western modernized technology like scientific robotic technology, which was brought from the West world, or is disciplined. The typical patriarch in each of these two animations is a scientist, while the heroine is a faithful assistant to the hero. The two animations reflect the phases of the times mixed with the family of traditional patriarchal system in Korean society in the late 1970s when Korea was rapidly modernized under the slogan ‘Modernization of the Fatherland’, and elements of Western modernization. These two animations reflecting Korea’s modernization describe the characteristics of everyday life as follows: First, son and daughter need to be disciplined into the docile, useful body by a patriarch. Second, the value of Western science and the traditional patriarchal system coexists. Third, the traditional patriarchal system is achieved and carried on by a son. Fourth, a daughter is placed as a faithful assistant for the patriarchal system. Fifth, the character like abnormal Cyborg deviating from the patriarchal system should be punished. Lastly, the docile, useful body is achieved by modernized discipline. Conclusively, the two animations describe the fact that Korean society in the late 1970s underwent rapid Western modernization, but concurrently, the traditional family system also coexisted contradictorily.