Child's play: the painterly and realistic backdrop of wartime Korea is an ominous world of wonders for Birthday Boy's stylized main character.(Animation)

"Birthday Boy" is a timeless story set in a specific place and time--Korea in 1951. As the young protagonist of this nine-minute CG movie meanders home through a nearly empty town, we observe the bombed-out buildings and the ravaged landscape of a country at war. But we also see the delight on little Manuk's face as he finds a screw in the empty fuselage of a plane, or watches a stream of tanks roll by on the back of a transport train. The camera spends a lot of time on that face, which is at one moment keenly concentrating, at another seemingly devoid of thought. It's the face of any child at play. But Manuk's simple diversions take place against the backdrop of a war that will soon affect him much more than it already has.

"Birthday Boy," which was named Best Animated Short in the Computer Animation Festival at SIGGRAPH 2004, is the first 3D CG film from animator Sejong Park, a recent graduate of the Australian Film Television and Radio School, where he completed the project. (The film, incidentally, is also the first from the school to have earned the prestigious award at SIGGRAPH.)

The inspiration behind the movie, Park explains, was the desire to compare the innocence of childhood with the realities of wartime. "I wanted to tell the story of human life using animation," he says. "Life is not always fun; it includes both happy and sad times."

Park says that "Birthday Boy" is also a reflection of his childhood in Korea, where he was born and where he lived until he was 31. Though his relatives weren't involved in the war, "it is still recent history and very much alive in the Korean consciousness," he says.

Park also relates to Manuk's creativity and resourcefulness. In the film, the child crafts soldiers and other toys out of bits of metal that he finds on his rambles through the half-destroyed town. "I was never given any toys as a child and enjoyed making my own," he recalls. On moving to Australia, he was struck by how many presents children received for their birthdays. "This was a vast contrast to my own childhood experience. It was very different in Korea." Even so, "Birthday Boy" doesn't preach or deliver a heavy-handed message. The story proceeds at a deliberate and gentle pace, as we observe Manuk's interactions with his surreally disrupted world.

It's a story for which CG animation would seem to be the medium of choice rather than the medium of necessity. "Birthday Boy" doesn't have any chatty aliens or inanimate objects that spring to life. There are no otherworldly textures or blue fur. In fact, the film could theoretically have been shot with live actors, or made in 2D. But Park says that 3D software tools he learned to use at school made it possible for him to control the look and vision of the animation in a way be couldn't have otherwise.

To begin with, although Park was already a 2D animator and illustrator before he began work on "Birthday Boy," using 2D animation would have required more involvement from more people, and would have taken longer. "In 2D animation, you need to do cleanup, in-betweening [creating the drawings between key frames], ink and paint, layout, layout cleanup, and background painting," he explains. "With 3D animation, although the modeling and character setup take a lot of time, once it's done, there's no in-betweening or cleanup time needed." And, he adds, once a 3D character has been textured, it doesn't need to be textured again, as it would in traditional 2D animation.