Did you know that North Korea has an animation industry?

Uniting the Two Koreas, in Animated Films at Least (NYT)

“North Korean animators are excellent,” he added. “They learn quickly and work very hard.” The SEK animation studio in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, which did the animation, has been involved in an array of international productions since the late 1990’s.

[…]

Mr. Shin has not finished working with North Korea, though. He said that both North and South Korea have agreed to produce his next project: a six-part animated series on Goguryeo, an ancient state that once occupied the northern half of the Korean Peninsula and much of Manchuria about 2,000 years ago. China recently created a furor in Korea when it claimed historical ownership of Goguryeo.

While South Korea is well known as a source of low-end cell drawing and inbetweening contractors for Japanese and American animation studios, the number of creative productions coming from that country has been dismally low. Despite being a fairly big animation fan, I have only seen a single long piece, a beautifully drawn film called Oseam, and a few shorts. Why after all these years is Korean animation so undeveloped? Why haven’t they benefited from this so-called ‘Korean wave’?

3 thoughts on “Did you know that North Korea has an animation industry?”

  1. Actually, I did know NK has an animation industry. In a book by Teri Ito (A Japanese comedian and host of Koko ga Hen Da Yo Nihonjin) he included some pictures of ads. It wasn’t anything spectacular, but maybe they could earn some foreign capital by animating American cartoons?

  2. here’s a link to a site which seemed to be promoting some korean animation films.
    http://www.kofic.or.kr/annecy/index.asp
    in the last few years there was my beautiful girl, mari which, if i remember correctly, got an award at some film festival and did get good reviews. There also was wonderful days.
    I just think the korean market just isn’t big enough to support traditional korean films and korean animations. mari and wonderful days got decent reviews and were decently promoted but both were ultimately box office failures as was oseam.

  3. Keep your hands off North Korea, they will not be outsourced like your other puppets, American scum!

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