SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

The Sound of Magic
(안나라수마나라 / Annara Sumanara)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hello everyone! It’s getting colder, the festive holidays are approaching and this is the time of year that I always long for some warmth and wonder. Which made this series the ideal choice for an end-of-year show! My main reason for moving this one up on my list was because I really wanted to start watching Actor’s Meet, and this was the only one I hadn’t seen yet. Still, it definitely surprised me in many ways. I didn’t really know what to expect of it, apart that it was about magic, but the story itself turned out to have a much deeper theme and message than I’d anticipated. I’m excited to share my thoughts about this one. I actually forced myself to wait with finishing it – if I hadn’t I would’ve finished it in two days, probably. I thought I needed to take my time with it and not rush through it, as it deserved to be waited for.
Again, I don’t expect this to be a really long review as the show itself is so short. Overall, I liked it, especially when the darker themes came to light, but there’s also a couple of things I wish to point out which I thought could’ve been explained better or that I would’ve liked to get a clearer answer to. So let’s get to it, or should I first ask: “Do you… believe in magic?”

The Sound of Magic is a 6-episode Netflix K-Drama with each episode lasting about 1 hour and 10 minutes. In my experience, each episode felt like a short movie. The main story is about Yoon Ah Yi (played by Choi Sung Eun), a high school student with a very miserable life. She was forced to become an adult way too soon, as not only did her mother abandon her at a young age, but her father also left her and her younger sister to fend for themselves after he got himself into heaps of debt. Ah Yi now has to take care of herself and her younger sister Yoo Yi (played by Hong Jung Min). She has to take care of all the finances while she’s simultaneously trying to perform well at school. She has several part-time jobs, but of course none of those pay enough. At the moment the series starts, she has no idea where her father is as he barely contacts his children, and she’s trying to figure out her life as she goes, getting more and more exhausted every day. As a result, she also starts neglecting her appearance and this makes her an easy target at school for bullies who make fun of her obsession with money. It just seems like she’s a minority in all aspects, she doesn’t come from a wealthy background, even if she performs well in school she’ll always be pushed aside for students from better off families, she has to scrape the money from her part-time jobs together to even buy a bag of rice and a new set of stockings. Nothing seems to be going her way and it’s exhausting.
That is, until she meets a mysterious man at the abandoned theme park in town, who claims to be a real magician (Ji Chang Wook). There have been rumors going around at Ah Yi’s school about this ‘crazy’ magician, but no one had ever seen him in person. Ah Yi is initially very wary of him, as she’s wary of adults in general after being constantly let down by them. But the magician keeps appearing and even helps her out a few times. When her boss from the convenience store suddenly becomes touchy, he makes him disappear. When loan sharks come to her house to push her to pay back her father’s debts, he makes them go away. As she starts spending more time with him after school and even starts taking magic lessons from him, Ah Yi finds that even though his magic can’t take her sorrows or actual problems away, it does help her rediscover the joys that she hasn’t had the luxury of experiencing as a kid. It doesn’t even occur to her how suspicious it may look to others, or the fact that she doesn’t know anything about this man, not even his real name. When suspicious things start happening around Ah Yi’s neighborhood and the magician becomes a suspect for being involved with several muggings and the disappearance of one of Ah Yi’s classmates, the question of who this man actually is becomes more pressing. Ah Yi seems to be the only one who believes he’s a good person, but on the other hand she still doesn’t even know who he is, so it’s not very convincing to the police either.
Besides Ah Yi, there’s also her classmate Na Il Deung (played by Hwang In Yeop), a boy who always ranks 1st place in class except for math, as Ah Yi always manages to beat him in that. His interest in her starts out of curiosity of how she always ranks 1st in math, but it doesn’t take long for him to develop feelings for her, even though he tries to suppress them very much. Il Deung comes from a wealthy family and his parents have been pressing him since childhood to be the best in everything so he’s always been walking that road they laid out for him without question. But when he meets Ah Yi and discovers her relationship with this strange magician, he also starts getting involved in their meetings and the magician even manages to open Il Deung’s eyes to the reality of his own situation. When the truth about the magician comes to light and there seems to be even more reason to doubt his sanity, Ah Yi and Il Deung are the only ones willing to stand up for him.

I’ll start by saying that the originality of this show already gives it bonus points for me. It’s not a regular K-Drama at all, heck, it’s part musical! I believe I did hear somewhere before that there were songs in it but I must have forgotten because the minute they started singing in the 1st episode (which was like, 1 minute into the show), I immediately found myself pressing pause because ‘what the heck was happening’. It still came as a surprise. I have to admit throughout the series I still couldn’t get completely used to the fact they’d just start singing, it just felt so weird in a K-Drama! I did think it gave a nice additional layer to the fictional aspect of it, as the whole point was to make Ah Yi escape from her daily struggles for a moment, and I also believe the whole sequences that played out during the songs might not have actually happened (such as the flying merry-go-round horses etc.), but as the darker themes came to light later on it became harder for me to distinguish what was ‘real’ and what wasn’t. As in, what part of the magic that he showed her was real and what wasn’t. Especially after we find out that he didn’t actually make the store owner disappear but just pushed him over a railing, for example. He did make it snow and lit fireworks with a snap of his fingers, and also those blue sparkly butterflies… All these things were visible to everyone, not just Ah Yi and Il Deung, so that really made me wonder if he was really a magician or if these things happened by coincidence (doesn’t seem so) or if it was really only about opening people’s eyes to miracles, if not actual magic, just to make them feel better or restore a feeling that they should’ve gotten to explore more as kids.

It was interesting from the start to see the dynamic between Ri Eul (as he eventually introduces himself) and Ah Yi. Ah Yi is a kid who was forced to become an adult too soon, and Ri Eul is an adult who seems unable to let go of being a kid.

Let me go into a bit more depth in regard to the main characters.
Ah Yi is the kind of character that you just can’t help but feel for. She really has it tough and she really can’t catch a break. It’s like a domino of misfortune, Murphy’s Law, whatever you want to call it. Especially the fact that she doesn’t get any kind of support and doesn’t have any adults around her that she can lean on. She’s a teenager, but she can’t even afford the luxury to go to school and study and meet up with friends without worry. She’s constantly worrying about money, to the point of actually resorting to crawling through the dust for it. She even ends up accepting a deal with Il Deung to perform poorly on her math test just because he pays her for it. It was so sad to watch her resort to all these low ways of getting her hands on more money, but on the other hand – what choice did she have? There was no one who would help her, no one who even reached out to her out of the goodness of their heart. The convenience store owner starts out being super supportive and nice to her and then suddenly transforms into a monster when she asks him for an advance payment after her dad bails on her again. When she gets into trouble for making that deal with Il Deung about him paying her to flunk her test and she tells the teachers the truth about her situation, they twist it into making Il Deung the hero for being so generous with her. The moment she realizes that her obstacle in life isn’t money but immature grown-ups, it’s like something falls off her and I believe that’s also the moment that she starts opening up to Ri Eul more. At least he is an adult that allows her to be a kid and tells her it’s alright to do whatever she wants without worrying too much about what kind of adult she herself will become.
I really loved the part where she told him she wanted to meet her future self just to be ensured that she would turn out alright, and Ri Eul let her meet her younger self, so that her younger self could be assured. Even though I still don’t understand completely whether this was actual time travel magic or that it was just him somehow enabling her to come to terms with the doubts she’d had since she was a child, I found it a really beautiful scene. It was also really beautiful when she talked about how she never even felt like she had the luxury of waiting for Santa atChristmas since he never came to her, and how Ri Eul made her feel like she now finally got a kind of ‘Santa’ for herself too.
I liked that in the end, it was really about Ah Yi figuring out her path, it was about her finding her place in a society where she didn’t seem to fit in, and the focus wasn’t for example on her and Il Deung ending up together. It really was about Ah Yi’s journey to turn into a real responsible adult, not the version she was forced into. She ends up becoming the kind of adult she wants to become, one that can contribute to the imagination of children and encourage them to believe in magic/miracles while they still can.
Her struggle with society and how she feels like she can’t depend on any of the adults around her, her lack of a specific adult as a role model, even in regard to her own father, hits really hard. I can’t say I personally relate to every aspect of her struggles, but the part about not fitting in, feeling like you don’t really have a solid support system and just dream about things getting better without actually knowing how to get there, that I can very well understand. Ah Yi is in a terrifying position, she really has to find a solution all by herself and she also has her younger sister to take care of, who very much depends on her. Yoo Yi is the sole light in Ah Yi’s life, and Ah Yi never once thinks of her as a burden. She does very much blame their father for not taking responsibility for Yoo Yi, though. Yoo Yi is the reason she keeps going even though she is both physically and mentally exhausted. I think the bond between the two sisters was really beautiful, also because Yoo Yi, despite being able to really help her older sister with anything, never loses faith in her. I feel like Yoo Yi is more mature than her age and that she is definitely onto at least part of the situation, but she never pressures Ah Yi and she never makes anything harder than it already is. She also takes the responsibility to refrain from participating in certain school activities, for example, for the sake of saving money. She knows it’s not easy on her sister and wants to help her as much as she can, although Ah Yi tries as much as she can to still enable her sister at least to enjoy whatever activities she wants to participate in.
Honestly, that part where their dad (Jo Han Chul) suddenly shows up and then runs away with literally ALL the money that Ah Yi had saved up, even the money she was planning to return to Il Deung, that was awful. How could he be such a coward! And then he just called her from a pay phone to make a lame excuse like ‘sorry I’m such a bad father’. Seriously, if you’re already aware of it, if you already know exactly what you’re putting your kids through and how you’re making them suffer, why make it even harder for them by stealing what they barely scraped together?! That doesn’t make you any better than the crap adults they already have to deal with, such as those loan sharks. And it’s not like that’s going to solve any of your debt problems, either! That made me so mad. I’m glad that they manage to make up in the end and that he gets a job and starts visiting them every weekend, but in the beginning I really couldn’t not believe how much of a coward he was.
Also, I’m not sure if I just missed this but I don’t exactly understand what happened to their mother. I remember that they showed that she abandoned them and Ah Yi saw her leave, but the way Ah Yi was leaving messages to her mom made it seem like her mother had passed away. Or maybe that’s just how Ah Yi learned to accept it and what she made her younger sister believe? I’m not sure whether she actually died or just abandoned them. In her memories with her mom, it’s always just the two of them, so maybe it was before Yoo Yi was born or when she was still very little. In any case, even though it seemed like she was honoring her mother’s memory by leaving messages for her, at the same time it also felt like she still really yearned for her mother to come back home. When Ri Eul tries to comfort her by making all her KakaoTalk messages to her mom appear as ‘Read’ and she flips, he really seems startled that he misinterpreted the situation – he probably just thought that her mother wasn’t replying to her and it would make Ah Yi feel better to see that she was at least reading her messages – I couldn’t really blame him because I was also confused about the whole thing.

Na Il Deung’s story was of a different caliber than Ah Yi’s, but I can’t say which of them had it worse. Even though Il Deung has the support that Ah Yi lacks, ever since he was a child he was stripped completely of his own free will. He has been raised with the idea that he needs to make his parents (mostly his father) proud and his only form of acknowledgement comes from his father praising him, so he never even looks beyond that. As he finds himself getting attracted to Ah Yi, he also keeps trying to push it away or worse, he tries to use his newly established connection with her to get something out of it which will please his family. In a way, he is also still quite immature in the beginning. He is adorable when he manages to get closer to Ah Yi, and it becomes really clear for the viewers that he likes her a lot. Heck, when he blurted out that ‘okay, so that means we’re dating now’ and they both went ‘What?’ ‘What?’, that was hilarious. But then the next day he was all cold again and then suddenly asked her to flunk her math test so he could become #1 again. In my native language we have a saying that literally translates to ‘teasing girls is asking for kisses’. It refers to the typical behavior that young boys portray towards their girl crushes, if he teases her a lot, it means that he actually really likes her. That’s what it felt like to me at some point, all the more because he became blatantly suspicious and jealous of her relationship with Ri Eul and then he just started treating her badly at school as well. When he has his first personal encounter with Ri Eul, the magician shows him a nightmarish vision of how he’s been living his life, from study desk to study desk, exam to exam, trying to keep ahead of all his peers who all try to get to the next stage just as desperately. He sees students fall over and be trampled over by others on their way. All in all I found it a very creepy but also impactful scene (and song). After that, he can’t really get it out of his head and it becomes clear as day to him that he has only been following the ‘asphalt’ path that his parents laid out for him. But no flowers grow on asphalt paths, and that is exactly what he starts yearning for. He gets inspired by how Ah Yi opens up to Ri Eul and even starts learning magic from him, so much so that he starts longing to be in that same ‘field of flowers’ as them. I think the metaphors of the flower field and the asphalt road were really well thought of for Il Deung, because they represented two opposites: the asphalt road that didn’t allow any side tracks or distractions and only led him from desk to desk, and the endless field of flowers which he could run through as far as he wanted without limitations.
I really liked the scene in which Il Deung had his first solo song, when he offered his earphone to Ah Yi while they were studying in the library and then they were in that same flower field together and he was singing to her and playing his guitar. In that scene, he looked so happy and free of worry, he doesn’t appear like that in any other moment of the show. I think it just showed that, even though he’d never considered it before, he completely blossomed when being exposed to the possibility of going off the asphalt path and finding his own way. And the fact that both Ah Yi and Ri Eul keep showing him these possibilities only strengthens him in his tendency to stray from that asphalt path.
I have to say that his parents (played by Yoo Jae Myung and Kim Hye Eun) are really stereotypical examples of parents that didn’t allow their child to do anything but study. His mother literally tells him to his face that he’s not allowed to do ANYTHING except studying, that everything that’s not studying is a waste of time. I just can’t believe those kinds of parents. They claim to love their children and that they want the best for them, but they never even let them be children. They don’t even allow them to play or hang out with friends or develop social skills. Il Deung didn’t seem to have any friends, either inside or outside of school, he was always by himself, just like Ah Yi. I understand that this is a very real situation in many Asian societies, I’ve seen it in a lot of school-setting dramas before that some children are pushed so hard by their parents to study and get so little freedom in doing anything else while that’s equally (or even more) important to their social development. Il Deung was definitely someone who suffered, even though he grew up thinking it was normal as no one had ever confronted him with the reality before. Although he was suspicious of Ri Eul at first, I feel like he did come to respect him in some way, in the end enough to maintain on his side throughout all the suspicions that were raised against him.

And then there’s Ri Eul himself. We’re only given the full truth about him in the final episode, when he’s being pursued by the police for alleged involvement in the disappearance of one of Ah Yi and Il Deung’s classmates.
So when we meet him first through Ah Yi, he really seems like this mystery man who can make your worries disappear. He’s presented initially as an eccentric man who has the answers to everything, although it’s not exactly clear what his intentions are. I’d say Ah Yi was 100% right to be wary of him, although at some point I found myself urging her to just let him help her in whatever way. It just felt like finally someone was offering a legit helping hand and she kept swatting it away, although again, she had every reason to be suspicious after what she’d been through with literally every adult around her.
Ri Eul gets criticized a lot by different people that he’s a weirdo, a crazy person, an adult acting like a kid by hiding in an abandoned theme park like that, having seemingly lost sense of reality. He doesn’t seem to take any of these criticisms to heart, but one thing that he does get sensitive about is when people question his authenticity as a magician. He doesn’t like it when people tell him he’s fake and he loves to prove them wrong. However, throughout the series he does show some suspicious behavior. All in all he seems to have some sort of issue, although it remains vague for some time what exactly is going on with him. At some point I actually started believing that he was bipolar or schizophrenic or something. When a girl from Ah Yi and Il Deung’s class goes missing and Ah Yi asks him about it, he doesn’t really say anything but it feels like he knows something about it, when someone in his exact attire is spotted on several CCTV’s around the place where this girl went missing and after a mugging on an old lady, the police start asking around. Ri Eul never really gives a clear answer regarding whether he has anything to do with it. Or when he does say he has nothing to do with it, it’s still not sincere enough to fully believe it. We see footage of him attacking a guy in the place he stays at in the theme park with a knife, and we see him almost choke one of Ah Yi and Il Deung’s other classmates when she comes snooping (more about her later). It definitely seems like he’s not 100% sane, and that just raises more questions. Who is he really, and how did he end up in that theme park?
As I said before, we only find out about Ri Eul’s real identity and backstory in the final episode, through his former classmate Min Ji Soo (played by Park Ha Na). Ji Soo has appeared several times before, Ah Yi meets her a couple of times when she comes to deliver some food to Ri Eul in the theme park. Ah Yi is curious about her from the start, about how she knows him and what their relationship is (she initially thinks she’s his wife). While Ri Eul is being held in police custody, Ji Soo tells Ah Yi and Il Deung about Ri Eul as a teenager. Turns out, his real name is Ryu Min Hyuk. He was Ji Soo’s first love in high school, but he never really responded to her advances so they just stayed friends. At some point, Min Hyuk started to change, he seemingly became more anxious and stressed and his grades started dropping. At one point, he even jumped off the school roof and while he was saved, he then was taken into a mental hospital. As it turns out, Min Hyuk’s high school situation wasn’t that much different from Il Deung’s. He was also under a lot of pressure from his parents, who were both successful professors. He lived his life to please his parents and in that, he also became aware of the ‘asphalt path’ that he was being urged to follow. Once he became aware of that, his whole world started spinning and he ended up being branded a ‘crazy person’ just for not fitting into society’s set standards. As an adult, he deliberately chose to stay a child as much as he could, and most importantly, to help other youngsters in similar situations to recover the magic that they were being obstructed from experiencing in their childhood. Youngsters like Ah Yi and Il Deung, who were raised with their noses pointed towards their future before they could even really enjoy being kids.
In the end it’s revealed that Ri Eul (or Min Hyuk)’s alleged involvement with the disappeared girl and the muggings is all part of a plan to frame him. In truth, he was just hanging around the theme park trying to get Ah Yi and Il Deung to experience being a child again. He wasn’t completely sane, I’ll give you that, but I don’t believe he had any ill intentions. He only got mad at that girl when she started snooping because he didn’t like her poking her nose where it didn’t belong and, most importantly, she injured his parrot, and that bird meant the world to him. I’m not saying that he did right in assaulting her, but I do think that in his mind, he was just angry because of that and it’s not like he actually wanted to kill her.
But so yeah, I definitely found it interesting to see how similar Ri Eul’s own high school situation had been to Il Deung’s. He didn’t even approach Il Deung himself, they just happened to meet because of Ah Yi, but it was clear that Ri Eul immediately recognized Il Deung’s situation and that’s why he was able to immediately confront him with it. I like to think that once he recognized what Il Deung was going through, he wanted to help him get out of it as soon as possible because in his own time, there was no one around who recognized or acknowledged his situation. He was the one who needed to be reached out to, and because he himself suffered like that he made it his calling to be that kind of adult to youngsters going through similar realities. He knew as no other how harsh society could be on those people. Again, I don’t exactly get how he could hear these kids ‘call out for help in their minds’, if that was another real magic trick he possessed or if he just felt it after meeting Ah Yi and Il Deung once, but I can imagine how that would make him seem like a hero, or, according to Ah Yi’s analogy, a Santa figure.
I mentioned the bird before, but I want to say something more about it. Ri Eul keeps a beautiful red ara parrot in his lair at the theme park. He calls her Mi Nyeo (or ‘Bella’, as per the English Netflix subtitles) and she is the only living being that he seems to carry any personal attachment to. He has taught her how to speak and she regularly makes remarks to people that come to visit, not all of them equally friendly. She only utters friendly remarks to Ri Eul. How he came upon this beautiful bird is not revealed, we only see how desperate and sad he becomes when Mi Nyeo is hurt and from the way he flips out to the person responsible it’s clear that he has a deep emotional connection with the parrot. I would’ve liked to know a bit more about how he encountered her, like where did he get her from and how did they build up this bond? It was really sad that she didn’t make it after being injured like that.

By the way, I think the naming of the main characters is really interesting.
‘Ah Yi’, spelled 아이 in Korean, literally means ‘child’. When Ri Eul hears Ah Yi’s name for the first time, he comments, ‘Ah, so that means that even when you become an adult, you’ll always be a child’. At the moment he says this, Ah Yi is still very much struggling with her situation so I can understand that that wasn’t something she liked to hear. It just reminded her of the fact that she would always remain like that, a child that wouldn’t be taken seriously by adults, even after becoming one herself. But I believe that Ri Eul meant it as a good thing, as he thought that one should never lose the child within. In the end, though, it’s really fitting as Ah Yi takes over Ri Eul’s work in his honor and starts performing magic for children.
‘Il Deung’, spelled 일등, literally means ‘First Place’. It can also be seen as a kind of curse his parents laid on him. Naming your only child ‘First Place’, I mean sure, no pressure or anything.
‘Ri Eul’, spelled as 리을 is, I believe, the Korean pronunciation of the English word ‘real’. The magician only eventually introduces himself to Ah Yi as ‘for now, I’m Ri Eul’, but I think it’s safe to assume that him naming himself this has everything to with the fact that he is so bent on making everyone believe he is a real magician. I can’t really think of any other reason for this name, I just think he made it up from the English word ‘real’ even though that wasn’t explicitly stated as the reason.
The original Korean title of the series is ‘Annara Sumannara’, which is the magic spell that Ri Eul uses throughout the show. I think it would translate as something like ‘Abracadabra’? Anyways, it’s interesting to see they put this as the title, as if uttering the series’ title itself is already supposed to make you believe in magic.
On the other hand, I wonder about the choice for the English title ‘The Sound of Magic’, because it’s not really about sound as far as I gathered. Maybe it’s a reference to the musical aspect of the show? They might as well have called ‘Abracadabra’, IMO.

Let me move on to some significant supporting characters now.
First of all, Baek Ha Na (played by Ji Hye Won). She is a very confident girl in Ah Yi and Il Deung’s class. She’s a typical high school girl who cares about her appearance and social media ratings. Whenever she finds something interesting, she won’t let it go, even if that means relentlessly poking her nose into other people’s business. She’s one of the first people we see in the first episode telling other classmates about the rumor of the crazy magician in the theme park, and she’s also the person who consistently bothers Ah Yi at school by ‘accidentally’ bumping into her to make her fall down or drop her food in the cafeteria. Rather than feeling sorry for her and helping her out, she decides to make a joke out of the fact that Ah Yi is too poor to even buy herself a new pair of stockings. She indirectly humiliates her by first dropping a 50,000 yen note under Ah Yi’s desk and then, after confirming that she took it, coming into the classroom all ‘worried’ asking if anyone has seen her 50,000 yen note. Even though she already knows Ah Yi took it (she even recorded it on camera), she’s just doing it to see if Ah Yi will fold and admit that she took it. When Ah Yi doesn’t, she makes her feel even worse by just shrugging it off as that she’s made someone’s day and that she’ll led it slide because losing a 50,000 yen note doesn’t mean anything to her. It was really mean. It may have felt like a charity to her, but the intention of the joke was really mean, she could’ve just left the 50,000 yen there for Ah Yi to find and not said anything about it, that would’ve been kinder and it would’ve made Ah Yi feel less guilty about taking it.
All in all, I would call Ha Na gutsy if not a bit reckless. She kept going to the theme park by herself in the dark even after already encountering Ri Eul several times and she never made a good impression. She kept going there to snoop around and even plant hidden cameras while she knew that he wasn’t very fond of her. Again, I didn’t approve of how Ri Eul vented his anger on her because he really became scary dangerous there for a moment, but I also still thought that Ha Na was out of her depth by continuously provoking him. She kept saying she didn’t believe him to be a real magician and we all know how much he dislikes hearing that. In the end she was able to record some disturbing footage on one of the hidden cameras she’d installed (of which Ri Eul wasn’t aware), which showed him attacking someone with a knife. She then proceeds to relay this footage to Ah Yi and Il Deung to make them more suspicious of him as well. Either way, I didn’t really like her character simply because she got too caught up in other people’s business and I think she went a bit too far in provoking Ri Eul even though she should’ve been aware of the consequences of her actions. She should’ve known the danger of going in there all by herself in the night. Even when it wasn’t established yet whether Ri Eul was actually dangerous or not, it was still a big risk to take and I found it pretty reckless of her to keep going back there, especially all by herself.
At school, she always has this one friend that she drags everywhere with her, even though this friend usually tries to dissuade her from snooping too much. This girl, Kim So Hee (played by Kim Bo Yoon) seems to be a bit nicer than Ha Na. In any case, it seemed to me as if she actually wanted Ha Na to stop bothering Ah Yi as well, and she kept telling her not to keep bothering the magician as well. Maybe she was just scared, but I did agree with her. At least she was aware of the possible dangers Ha Na could be getting herself into. Still, she kept going along with her as if despite her doubts she just wasn’t able to say no to her friend. After Ha Na was attacked by Ri Eul, she even went on to spread that fact to her classmates, making sure Ah Yi heard it. That just made me go like, what are you giving Ah Yi the stink face for, it’s not like she had anything to do with that. Anyways, So Hee was a bit of a sheep but at least she seemed to have a bit more of a conscience than Ha Na.

Finally, I’ll address the case of the girl that goes missing from Ah Yi’s class. This girl, Seo Ha Yoon (played by Oh So Hyun) only appears in the first episode (I believe) and she goes missing around the same time that Ah Yi meets Ri Eul. Ha Yoon seems to also be a quiet girl without any friends in class, and we last see her when Ah Yi passes her on her way to her part-time job at the convenience store – Ha Yoon is just on her way out. I don’t believe Ah Yi actually sees her, by the way, they just pass each other without really acknowledging each other. Anyways, that’s the last time she appears on screen before she disappears. No one has an inkling of what could have happened, but throughout the series the police keep getting tiny pieces of information. One of those pieces of information is that Ri Eul was spotted on a CCTV in an alleyway that had shown Ha Yoon just some hours before. They also found some of her belongings in the theme park. In the beginning, I thought that maybe she’d also encountered Ri Eul and he may have done something. I didn’t think it would be anything bad, but I remember feeling like she was also a bit of an outcast at school so I thought that maybe he’d reached out to her too and she’d asked him to make her disappear or something. I don’t know what I was thinking, lol. Anyways, Ri Eul himself neither confirms nor denies anything when Ah Yi asks him about it. I kept thinking that even if he didn’t have anything to do with it, he may have at least known something about it. Either way, there’s a whole investigation and as ‘the magician’ keeps popping up in other cases in the same neighborhood, the police believe they have good reason to suspect him. An adult man living by himself in an abandoned theme park going around telling everyone he’s a magician… there’s reason to be suspicious of that in itself. I can imagine that they wouldn’t put it past him to be some sort of pervert altogether. In the final episode, Ha Yoon’s body is found in a reservoir in a park somewhere and Ri Eul is arrested. But what actually happened is a very different story.
Let me talk about the convenience store owner (played by Yoon Kyung Ho). So when we first meet him, he seems to be a very kind person. He’s the first adult we see treating Ah Yi nicely. When he busts her as she’s about to take a bite out of a perfectly good hamburger that a customer left behind, he doesn’t judge her. He even gives her 50,000 yen on her first day because she’s doing such a good job. It finally seems like Ah Yi can get some support after all. However, when emergency strikes again and Ah Yi musters up all her courage to ask for an advance payment even though she only just started working there, the owner suddenly changes. He reluctantly agrees, saying he feels sorry for her situation, but then he suddenly starts touching her and tells her she can think of him as a kind uncle and that’s when Ah Yi is AGAIN confronted by the fact that she just can’t seem to find a single decent grown-up in her life. Ri Eul appears and ‘disappears’ him – he makes Ah Yi believe that he magicked him away while we later find out he actually just pushed him over a railing and just flapped his cape to make sure Ah Yi didn’t see it. Either way, the owner does seem to disappear for a while, which only strengthens Ah Yi in her belief that Ri Eul can make people disappear. But then it’s even scarier when he suddenly appears again, when Ah Yi is being interrogated by her teachers about her involvement with Ri Eul by the police. There the owner states that Ri Eul is a fraud, that he injured him and that Ah Yi is in cahoots with him as well. In the end, we find out that he is the person responsible not only for the disappearance (and murder) of Ha Yoon, but also of the muggings as he started pulling stunts to frame Ri Eul after what he did to him.
Ha Yoon used to work at the same convenience store as Ah Yi, and she was caught trying to steal money from the cashier. The owner did the same thing to her he did to Ah Yi, he pretended to be all understanding about her situation before putting his hands on her, but Ha Yoon was one step ahead of him – she actually caught him on camera. She strikes up a deal with him to not publish the footage if he’ll help her out with more money and they agree to meet at the theme park to close the deal. But what happens then is that the owner ambushes Ha Yoon from behind in the dark and silences her… quite literally. While Ah Yi and Ri Eul were happily singing a song up in the ferris wheel nearby, Ha Yoon was murdered and disposed of by the convenience store owner. It’s later revealed that he bought a similar attire as Ri Eul usually wears, and went around in the dark to mug people – after all, who could see a face in the dark, people would only remember the attire and if he’d just use the catchphrase that Ri Eul always used (‘Do you… believe in magic?’), it would be a piece of cake to get him convicted of that. He eventually gets busted after Ah Yi reports him for sexual assault to the police and they find the attire when they search his house.

There’s one other major piece of evidence that suddenly finds its way to the police, and this is footage from one of the CCTVs in the theme park, even though none of these cameras work anymore. For some reason, this one camera came back on for exactly four minutes, just when the ambush on Ha Yoon took place. This, again, made me wonder about the authenticity of Ri Eul’s magic. Because we see that, while Ri Eul was showing Ah Yi fireworks (the fireworks’ lights also appeared in the camera footage, that was the link to when exactly it happened), one of his blue sparkly butterflies flew out and landed on that specific camera, turning it on. Just as before, one of these butterflies had turned on all the streetlights in Ah Yi’s street as she was walking home alone in the dark. So were these actual magical butterflies? I’m still not sure which parts of Ri Eul’s magic were real and which were more metaphorical. The butterflies seemed to have a special meaning, as one appeared to teen Min Hyuk as he was about to jump off the school roof, and to Il Deung when he succumbed to the pressure that one time as well. I can’t say for sure what they meant, exactly, because it also felt like the butterflies symbolized the youngsters’ signal to get off the asphalt path, but then how did Ri Eul come to control the butterflies as an adult? WHAT EXACTLY WERE THOSE BUTTERFLIES??

So yeah, I think I’ve now covered all the characters and the most important events that happened in the show. I still feel like I missed a lot of hidden meanings and metaphors/symbols, but I also think I got the essence of the message the story wanted to convey. I can say that it was definitely very different from what I’d expected, but I was positively surprised. For me, it honestly could’ve done without the musical numbers although I do understand where the idea came from. The point of musical numbers is to also take you away from the situation at hand to just let go and be free and sing and dance without looking weird. In this case, I just kept wondering whether the whole sequences of the sung numbers were something that happened in Ah Yi’s mind, or if a passerby, for example, would witness the exact same thing. I highly doubt that even within the fictional elements of the story, those horses actually flew off the merry-go-round. But there were some things that seemed to be Ri Eul’s magic’s doing, such as the butterflies and the magic mailbox for example. It wasn’t completely clear to me to which extent the magic tricks were real and to which extent they were exaggerated in the character’s minds.
But still, be that as it may, this series was definitely a gem in the way it conveyed such a deep and serious topic in such a fantastical way. Ri Eul exists purely to help teenagers connect with the child inside them, to enable them to still feel how they should’ve been allowed to feel when they were children before they were robbed of that luxury at a way too early age. Ri Eul of course still remains to be quite the ambiguous character as it’s still a fact that he’s not completely sane and possibly dangerous when he’s provoked, but his intentions have always been good – he went through it himself and chose to live the rest of his life in seclusion only to be the reaching helping hand to youngsters who, like him, aren’t aware of the toxicity of their situation or in any case, who are not able to get out of the situation by themselves. I definitely did not expect this sociological issue of pressured children to be included in this, so for that in itself the originality of the plot gets some bonus points.

On to the cast comments!

This is the third Ji Chang Wook drama I’ve watched this year and can I just say, this man has been surprising me consistently! Just when I thought I’d seen what he was capable of as an actor, seeing him both in Backstreet Rookie and this, it just surprised me. It feels like he keeps choosing dramas that aren’t exactly his mainstream kind of genre, but he still pulls it off! As Ri Eul I really got some very angsty and even dangerous vibes from him, something I never felt from him before. I was really positively surprised by his performance and also – he can even sing?! What can’t this man do?! I also know that he’s very acrobatic, so I would’ve liked to see some more of that in here as well, it would’ve been the perfect opportunity to showcase all those hidden skills! In any case, I liked him in this. He played a completely different character from what I was used to, so mysterious and enigmatic at first, and then suddenly so unpredictable and vulnerable as well. He was able to convey more sides to his acting to me in these 6 episodes than in all the dramas I’ve seen him in so far, so that was cool!

I didn’t know Choi Sung Eun from anything, I see this was only her third drama to date. She did however seem very familiar to me, but I guess then I may have confused her for someone else. In any case, to not even have done so many dramas yet and then already being cast for one like this with musical songs and everything seems a pretty big challenge! I wonder if maybe she’s a musical actress or something? Anyways, I think she should be very very proud of her performance of Ah Yi, she’s such a layered character and she got to show such a tormented and vulnerable side to her, only to balance it out with the happiness she managed to portray in her songs with the magician. I also really loved her chemistry with her younger sister. I hope we get to see more of her in the near future!

So this was actually the first show I got to see with Hwang In Yeop in it and MAN this guy is good. (I was going to say ‘kid’ instead of ‘guy’ but I just found out he’s older than me so can’t really do that, lol.) Anyways, I think he’s really making his breakthrough as he’s appearing in more and more stuff these days so I had some expectations but I really loved his performance. As what I said for Ji Chang Wook above, within just 6 episodes he showed so many sides to his acting. I think he was a really good casting choice for Il Deung. There are several dramas of his in my to watch list, so I know I’m going to see more of him, but I was really blown away by his performance here. He portrayed the struggles of a teenager stuck in the ways his parents paved for him really well and even though he did some questionable stuff in the beginning, I started feeling more and more empathic towards him when he was confronted with the struggles he wasn’t even fully aware of himself yet. I also thought he was really adorable when he started developing feelings for Ah Yi, I wish there would’ve been more of that. Although, as I mentioned in the beginning, I also respect that that’s not what the focus of the show was about. I really can’t wait to see more shows he appeared in!

I was wondering what I recognized Ji Hye Won from, and I realized she was one of patients in the hospital from It’s Okay to Not Be Okay! The girl who eloped with the alcoholic guy! She was SO different here, everything about her character was different. It was fun seeing her as such a brazen girl like Ha Na. As I said, I didn’t really like the character, but that didn’t have anything to do with the actress. I think she did a good job, overall! Even though her way of going about things was questionable, I do feel like she was looking out for Ah Yi when she told her to be more suspicious of Ri Eul. I do feel like she didn’t want anything to happen to her, or anyone for that matter, especially after experiencing Ri Eul’s anger first-hand. So in a way, I don’t feel like she was a bad person. She was just very young and immature, which is to be expected of a regular girl that age. After all, she wasn’t forced to become an adult before her time like Ah Yi.

So the little sister actually has more drama acting experience than her older sister? Hong Jung Min, what a precious little girl she was. Apparently I’ve seen her before in Cinderella and the Four Knights and I will see her again soon in some of my to watch series. I liked that even though Yoo Yi was more of a supporting character, she also got to sing a beautiful song and she even sang IU’s ‘Knees’ which was such a perfect song for their situation. I feel like Yoo Yi really was an indispensable part of Ah Yi’s story and character. Even though she was the angel little sister who never got angry or impatient or desperate with their situation, I do feel like she was more aware of the misery her sister was experiencing and that she must have felt very sorry she couldn’t do more to help her. She was the epitome of lightness in this series, I kept referring to her as Ah Yi’s light at the end of the dark tunnel, the light she always got to go home to. Also when the dad briefly returned, Yoo Yi never blamed him for anything. I think all she wanted was just to have her family together. I’m glad they got there in the end. Oh and that scene when Ah Yi thought she was missing and went all over to look for her and then got the call from one of Yoo Yi’s friend’s mom that she’d fallen asleep while playing there… if that didn’t emphasize how much Yoo Yi meant to Ah Yi, then I don’t even know anymore. That was heartbreaking.

I love Jo Han Chul! We don’t usually get to see him as a non-comical character, so I was happy to see this side of him as well. Although I’ve already voiced my dislike of the father’s behavior, Jo Han Chul can do little wrong in my eyes. He still portrayed the character really well. I think he was Ah Yi’s main example of how much you could screw up as an adult. Of course she loved him, but he was the kind of an adult she did not want to become. Of course it taught her what she needed to know, but it was still incredibly irresponsible of him to leave his kids like that, after their mother also already had left them all for the same reason (probably). The scene where he phoned Ah Yi and was just kind of smiling away his embarrassment and guilt really hit differently. There’s a difference between screwing up and owning up to it and realizing your mistake but still making up excuses because ‘after all, I’m just a terrible dad’. Ah Yi had all the reason in the world to be mad at him. Finally getting a job and visiting them more was the least he could do to make up for it.

Not me flinching when I realized Il Deung’s dad was played by the same guy who played the bad guy in Itaewon Class! He had such a different vibe around him here! I further know Yoo Jae Myung from Jealousy Incarnate, Hwarang and Strong Woman Do Bong Soon. I kept wanting him to be a better dad, one who would be more forgiving than the mom when it turned out his son was struggling, but he was just as bad. It felt like he managed to remain calmer about the situation, though, but he still only wanted his son to perform in line with his own reputation.

Il Deung’s mom’s actress was also in Itaewon Class! I further know Kim Hye Eun from Romantic Doctor Teacher Kim, Introverted Boss, Radio Romance, Are You Human Too?, Encounter and Clean With Passion For Now. She’s a very familiar face. As the mom, who is typically more emotional in dealing with her children’s struggles, I really expected more from her. The way she dealt with Il Deung’s ‘rebellion’ definitely was not the way to go. She only restricted him more rather than listen to what he had to say and see that the way she raised him was not okay. She gave a good performance of a relentless mom who didn’t see any fault in her own ways, though. It was also a different side of her acting that I saw here, as I feel like I’ve only seen her in more sympathetic characters so far, haha.

I had the same kind of issue with Yoon Kyung Ho. I’ve only ever seen him as sympathetic guys, so to suddenly see him explode off the screen like that, to suddenly see him as such a dangerous guy was really surprising! It isn’t until then that you realize what a big and potentially scary guy he can be, haha. I’ve seen him in a bunch of stuff like Goblin, Duel, Age of Youth, I’m Not a Robot and Itaewon Class as well. Big Itaewon Class family reunion happening, as I saw Ryu Kyung Soo also made a guest appearance! Anyways, it was nice also seeing a different side than usual from Yoon Kyung Ho. I still envision him as a very friendly ahjussi though, haha.

I also want to give a shoutout to Joo Ye Rim who played the young Ah Yi – she was fantastic. I really choked up during the scene where teenage Ah Yi came face to face with her younger self and managed to comfort her, that was so beautiful and well thought of, flipping it around a bit to current Ah Yi comforting her younger self rather than meeting her twenty-or thirtysomething self from the future.
And of course I cannot forget best boy Nam Da Reum who played teenage Ryu Min Hyuk – I don’t know how he does it but he seriously looked like a young Ji Chang Wook? This guy is such a genius actor, I can’t wait to see him turn old enough to finally get his own main roles rather than always being cast as the ML’s younger version. He deserves it all!

And with that, I’ve come to the end of my review. It’s been a really fun ride, a really unexpected ride and I’m glad I gave it a try. It definitely is not a typical K-Drama, but I think that’s also part of its charm because it’s exactly what sets it apart from the rest. It conveys a serious sociological issue through depictions of magic, imagination, hope and freedom. As I mentioned before, I couldn’t quite get used to the musical numbers, and I can imagine people finding it awkward or skipping through those, but for me, when they started singing I just paid extra close attention to the lyrics. I imagine it being Ah Yi’s hidden thoughts that she otherwise could not properly convey, and in accordance with the magical elements, it just made sense to make her sing them out as this is also how it goes in musicals – they sing out their true feelings and thoughts because they can’t simply say them. It really surprised me from the get-go when they all started to sing and dance but that’s also what immediately intrigued me about it.
I also really liked that they made an additional after-credit scene in which the cast takes their bows as if they’ve just finished performing the whole show as a stage performance in front of an audience. You could suddenly see all the actors as themselves, interacting and dancing with each other and it was just a really cheerful way to end the show.
All in all, it was unique, it was original, it was surprising and it was striking in its approach to convey such a serious message. I enjoyed it, it had been a while since I actually refrained from watching it in one go, I really would’ve gone straight through it if I wasn’t planning on writing a review. Otherwise this review would’ve been posted two days after the previous one and I wasn’t going to do that to myself, haha. I’m glad I spread it out a bit more so that I could take my time with writing a worthwhile review about it.
I’d say the only thing that it lacked for me was some more understanding of how exactly Ri Eul’s magic worked. I would’ve liked to know for sure where Ah Yi’s imagination started and where the actual magic tricks ended and vice versa. The few loose ends to make it an open ending weren’t necessarily a bad thing, but it still made me wonder about what happened to several other characters. For example, we don’t get to see Il Deung in the final ‘X years later’ part, which made me wonder whether he and Ah Yi still kept in touch. I wondered about the period in which Ri Eul started living in that theme park, I wondered how he met Mi Nyeo. But yeah, mostly I wondered about the magic tricks. Of course everything was fictional, but even within this series, I feel like there was a limit to what was actually happening and what was the experience of it happening. Like, Ri Eul turning on the merry-go-round was one thing, the horses flying off it another. One might have actually happened, the other may have been exaggerated in Ah Yi’s imagination. I would’ve liked to get a clearer distinction between the two. But apart from that, I really enjoyed the show.

So yeah, this was my last Netflix K-Drama of the year, the final ones on my 2022 list are all ‘regular’ dramas, but I’ll definitely keep watching K-Drama on Netflix as it’s such a comfortable platform to watch them on. I’ve now lined up all the dramas I plan on finishing within this year, so please look forward to a couple more soon! Without my intention I incidentally chose several short dramas in a row, that’s why I’m going through them so fast now, haha. Anyways, I’ll be back soon enough, so stay tuned and don’t forget: whenever you feel down and need to believe in a miracle, you know which magic words to use!

*\ Annara Sumannara /*

Bye-bee! ^^