Mother Land focuses on a family that’s a part of the Yates; a young girl named Krisha, her younger brother Kolya, and their two parents.
Krisha is having dreams of reindeer death and a red bear with glowing red eyes. She begins to see this red bear in real life, which results in her mother injured while working during a snow storm.
The injury evolves into a serious illness. A shaman visits and informs Krisha and her family that they must travel to the Northern Land and find the red bear in order to save Krisha’s mother. Krisha’s father chooses to go to the city to get his wife medicine.
Conversely, Krisha listens to the shaman instead, venturing to the Northern Land on her own. Meanwhile, Captain Vladmir of the federal army and Bazak, a former Yate turned cold-blooded hunter, on the hunt for the red bear, who is believed to the master of the forest.
Mother Land the first Korean stop-motion animated film in 45 years.
From Studio Yona, Mother Land directed by Park Jae-beom and is his first full length film. The tundra in the movie is based on a documentary called The Last Tundra. Studio Yona also opted to keep the use of 3D effects to a minimum, as nearly everything in Mother Land is handmade.
With a man-versus-nature theme, the storyline of the film resembles that seen in Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke. The Yates are a tribe that live with reindeer as Serodeto is the one that gets the most screen time. Serodeto accompanies Kolya on her quest to find the red bear. The reindeer dolls are also the most adorable in the film. What’s interesting though is that the Yates also eat reindeer. They have their own way of honoring them, but they drink their blood to stay warm and eat their flesh as a form of sustenance. The tribe also skins the reindeer, as their pelts used to stay warm during brutal winters.
The charm of the animation of Mother Land is that you can see its imperfections. Unlike Laika, which has smoothed out its animation over the years, Mother Land is more like Wes Anderson films Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs. When it comes to the dolls used in the film that have a lot of hair like the red bear, you can see shifts in its hair between frames.
