Anime & Donghua

Libs when their treats are made in sweatshops in countries run by right wing despots:

Libs when their treats are made in AES countries:

you would think these people would see that the dprk has an animation industry and think some of the lies they were told about it were wrong. but instead they just go "oh no, show i like has bits made by The Bad People!"

But of course they hate the government, not the people

The DPRK has been working on animation programs since the late 1980s, if I'm not mistaken. I'm pretty sure they've worked on an episode of Avatar, several episodes of Invincible, Iyanu (Some design documents were leaked, which made some Redditors and US diplomats angry, as they don't want the North Koreans to get paid due to sanctions), several Italian Catholic and magical girl shows (The Original Winx and Angel Friends or Warriors, something like that), some Japanese anime and the Simpsons and Futurama movies.

Not to mention the fact that they make animation for the state television. Most of them seem to be fantasy shows related to Korean history, but the best-known show is probably Squirrel and Hedgehog and its 2005 remake (it seems they announced a new remake for it this year).

Yeah, and tons of Western, especially European, animated series were outsourced there.

I'm assuming outsourcing to the DPRK became cheaper than outsourcing to occupied Korea which Western animated shows also did. AKOM was an animation studio that was infamous for its terrible work on shows like G1 Transformers and Batman: TAS.

The animation in this episode is pretty good too if I recall, certainly of the same quality as most other episodes

That concept sounds so good. But then, I do absolutely love "modern socialist winds up in medieval fantasy world, quickly becomes so disgusted (s)he must apply dialectical materialism and drag this place kicking and screaming into a form of communism, 1917 style, after all, tsarist Russia wasn't an industrialized nation either" as a subgenre - I don't like isekai as it usually goes, I do like this variation of it - and I also like less explicitly isekai style dropping a modern communist into a decidedly apolitical or liberal hegemony universe in order to lead a revolution, especially when they didn't set out to do so, and they and the local party's attitude to it is "we want a revolution the way a desperate woman wants an abortion, or the way you want to gnaw your leg off when you've been caught in a bear trap" - the whole "no one wants to need a revolution" trope.

You might like the John Brown Isekai - it's not explicitly communist, he's very much written In Character and less as a revolutionary figure and very explicitly as a Christian acting out of religious conviction against slavery, and an early American who believes in the American style of democracy, but a student of historical communist tactics and governance practice might see some parallels in the military tactics and the very early council systems when they've got less than a hundred people. And, y'know, even a bourgeois revolution is a good thing in a feudal society if it ends slavery and brings some level of democracy. As much as I like stories that take that setting and skip straight to the proletarian revolution. Like the Bolsheviks actually did in our timeline.

I remember hearing that that part of The Lion King that people sometimes claim has the stars spelling out "SEX", aCtUaLLy had the stars spelling out "SEK", because that scene had supposedly been outsourced to SEK Studio — and the stars were SEK's way of sneaking in some credits for themselves, since they wouldn't get credited otherwise. Now the evidence of this story actually being true are basically nonexistent, just rumors, but it's still a fun story if nothing else, right?

But honestly just give me more animation from every country in general, though. I used to say that I wanted to watch at least one animation from every country — really, I still kinda do, but it's just not easy to actually do this, right? It's easiest to get into animation from the Core Anglosphere and Japan, obviously; and it's decently easy to get into animation from Europe, the FSU, China and Korea if you know where to look; and I've found it considerably more difficult to get into animation from everywhere else, but part of that might just be that I'm just not trying hard enough, right?

This desire to see animation in all countries flourish really also goes hand in hand with my own interests in fanime / (budget) independent animation, as well as my interests in fandubbing and fansubbing, and my fantasies about Norway sort of reevaluating its relationship to animation from Seppoland and Japan and going through a whole sort of renaissance of local animation that cuts into these countries' soft power. Because basically nothing about anime that makes it so appealing for so many people is actually specific to Japan in any meaningful way, it's really just historical happenstance.

Oh, and another side note about animation in the DPRK specifically: the anime tracker website Anilist used to have a section for DPRK animation, but they got rid of it for some reason! Honestly I am STILL a bit ticked off about that, because that was one of the best resources I knew of for learning about and exploring that country's animation, and by Jove do they have animation in the DPRK, I can tell you that much!

I know they do a lot of stuff for internal audiences, but if the DPRK produced home-grown media that was appealing to Western audiences, it would open up countless minds to their struggle.

When they say animation studio, they typically means a Japanese studio does the design and key frames, then they send it to usually some SE Asian country to do the in-between frames. This is why you will often see Vietnamese names in the credits of nominally Japanese produced shows. I would imagine it's something similar here.

DPRK has an official film promotion website. The website shows clips from the films, but I think it's not the full films. Some of the films are on youtube if you search the title. Screenshot from the Animation page.

http://www.korfilm.com.kp/en/kofilm?type=11

animated feature film of A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court

Umm....how much would it cost to hire this studio to make me an anime?

So apparently, after some investigation, the South Korean studio that was hired to do the animation outsourced the project to the North Korean studio under the nose of the American company that hired them.

That's... kinda scummy, actually.