Aachi & Ssipak Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.5

Aachi & Ssipak Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 28, 2014

The South Korean creative team who created Aachi and Ssipak were living pretty dangerously when they created an animated movie built around (there’s no really polite way to say this) poop, for heaven knows critics will latch on to any element within a given movie to sum up that enterprise in a word or two. Since this is a family site, we won’t resort to using a common synonym for poop to describe Aachi and Ssipak, but will instead actually cut this extremely outré outing a tad of slack and say that, while certainly inventive in premise and execution, it’s also, in the words of another animated rabble rouser, craptacular.

Aachi and Ssipak's premise is fairly convoluted, involving a dystopian future society that runs on excrement, meaning that good citizens are required to "output" a certain amount. The government keeps everyone in line by handing out Popsicle like snacks called Juicybars that are highly addictive. The titular pair are a couple of black market entrepreneurs who deal in Juicybars and get involved in a manic chase which involves a bunch of tiny blue mutants called The Diaper Gang as well as a porn star named Beautiful and her would be pimp/director, Jimmy the Freak. It's all very odd and predictably rude and scatalogical, at times even bordering on the surreal, but perhaps surprisingly, it's not all that funny, despite some really frenetic voice work by Ed Skudder and Zack Keller of Dick Figures: The Movie.

Aachi & Ssipak Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Aachi and Ssipak is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cinedigm with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Whatever the film's faults are as a not always funny gross out comedy, the look of this animated outing in high definition is often spectacular. Utilizing a combination of CGI and more traditional techniques, Aachi and Ssipak is incredibly bright and vividly colored, with excellent sharp line detail and some extremely memorable character designs. There are some very minor contrast fluctuations and some similarly very minor banding on display, but overall this is a fantastic looking release.

Aachi & Ssipak Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Aachi and Ssipak offers only the English dub of the film, available in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1. This is a fairly over the top sound mix, with some great immersive surround activity in the many action scenes, but the film's all new dub-step score by Kevin Seaton simply overpowers the film at times and probably would have been more effective had it been placed further back in the mix. Fans of the film will probably be disappointed that there's no Korean audio, though this version has been trimmed by several minutes from its original theatrical presentation, which may account for the lack of the original soundtrack being included.

Aachi & Ssipak Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 1:32)

Aachi & Ssipak Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Aachi and Ssipak may well appeal to a younger male demographic that thinks Adult Swim isn't offensive enough. While the film is visually audacious and quite entertaining, the new English soundtrack is distracting at times and for such a provocative subject, there are precious few laugh out loud moments. Those with a scatological bent will no doubt want to check this out, though.