Well maybe this explains the high quality juche cartoons coming out of North Korea now a days:
North Korea is well known for its nuclear ambitions. But it is relatively little-known fact that the country is a hidden outsourcing mecca for the international animation industry, producing such well-known movies as The Lion King.
Even while North Korea has been under US-led sanctions that include a ban on commercial trade, several US animated films have allegedly been outsourced to the country, according to Beijing-based businessman Jing Kim, who says he was involved with American animation producer Nelson Shin’s filmmaking business in the Stalinist pariah state.
(…)
After seven years of cooperation with North Korea’s state-owned SEK Studio, employing as many as 500 North Korean animators out of its staff of 1,500, and 18 visits to the country, Shin finally completed Empress Chung in 2005, a famous Korean folk tale about a daughter who sacrifices herself to a sea monster to restore her blind father’s eyesight. It was the first cartoon jointly produced by the two Koreas.
Any guesses on how the animators were paid? Very predictably:
Kim said he didn’t pay the North Korean artists in person for their work. Rather, he wired US$170,000 to North Korea directly for their 2006 assignments.
If true, this is another example of the outsourcing of slave labor from North Korea.Â
HT: reader
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8:46 pm on March 14th, 2007 1
Art macht frei.
6:07 am on March 15th, 2007 2
If you run across it, a French-Canadian animator who worked at SEK studio for several months wrote/drew a hilarious travelogue.
http://www.amazon.com/Pyongyang-Journey-North-Guy-Delisle/dp/1896597890
10:02 am on March 15th, 2007 3
[...] It’s a cruel world after all: GI Korea discusses Disney’s alleged use of slave labor in North Korea. Salary payment arrangement turn out to have something in common with Kaesong, and with European [...]
9:27 pm on March 15th, 2007 4
I saw a throwaway line on a blog about ‘family guy’ the cartoon, which said something about it being drawn in Korea, I wonder if was done by the NK too?
7:38 am on March 16th, 2007 5
[...] of popular mass murderers, Disney probably uses slave labor in North Korea (as if there’s any other kind) to make its below-average animated [...]
10:14 am on October 15th, 2007 6