When you consider the cultural context behind “Deer Flower,” director Kangmin Kim’s short animated film is an interesting if horrific look at remedies from the East. Told through what essentially looks like origami, “Deer Flower” is a stark and pretty unusual tale about a family seeking a cure for their son’s ailment. Traveling a long distance and paying a lot of money, they take their son behind a farm, where a reindeer is held down by a machine and has its antler cut.
From within a beating and pulsing blood pours out, and the child consumes it, soaking in what is a surefire high. “Deer Flower” uses the hallucinations as a means of exploring how humanity has leeched off of nature as a solution to diseases they can’t quite tackle or cure themselves. Thus nature ultimately pays for their search for cures, and these cures aren’t a guaranteed answer.
It’s made evident in the film when the young son responds to the cure in a way the parents never expected. Kangmin Kim’ and Seulhwa Eum’s animation style is unique and very memorable, allowing for an aesthetic that adds to the surrealism of the tale. Ultimately, “Deer Flower” is an abstract and admittedly hard to follow animated short (I had to research it online before finally catching on to its themes), but it’s one with a lot of complexity and commentary on nature, and our search for cures through the destruction of nature.