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  • Hyperbolic Nationalism: South Korea’s Shadow Animation Industry
  • Kukhee Choo (bio)

South Korean popular culture has become an integral part of the global media flow, from the popularity of K-Drama, K-Pop, and films over the past decade to the explosive circulation of “Gangnam Style” around the world in 2012. But as critics have pointed out, South Korean popular culture has mostly been represented abroad by its live-action films and television drama, as well as by its attractive entertainers. 1 What remains largely unexamined is the production, since 1950, of animated series and movies for South Korean audiences, most of which were developed by South Korean animation studios that were used by Japanese anime companies.

The Japanese animation industry is built on its vast subcontracting networks, which include many international companies. Currently there are approximately 700 animation studios in Japan, with sixty-five major companies that belong to the larger animation production organization called the Association of Japanese Animations (Nihon dōga kyōkai). 2 Those that are not a part of this organization are mostly small studios—sometimes as small as a room with a handful of employees—that work as subcontractors to larger ones. Therefore, major animation studios often subcontract to foreign production houses that can complete work more quickly. [End Page 144]

Currently, Japanese animation companies rely heavily on subcontractors in China, the Philippines, Thailand, and Taiwan; however, Japan’s earliest major outsourcing country was South Korea. Beginning in the mid-1960s, South Korea became an essential part of Japanese animation production. In fact, subcontracting for Japanese animation studios (as well as for U.S. and European cartoons) not only made animation production a viable industry in South Korea but also contributed to South Korea’s position as the third-largest animation producer in the world until the end of the 1990s. 3 As Thomas Lamarre points out, the fact that Japanese animation studios outsourced so much of their production to other countries complicates the “Japaneseness” of the finished animation. 4

In a similar vein, I argue that the very notion of “Japanese” anime becomes more complex and nuanced when viewed from within the larger history of animation in Asia, and that often the outsourced animation work of the “other” has been overlooked by global audiences due to the dominance of the Japanese anime industry. In this article, I will map the historical development of South Korean animation, tracing its origins back to the 1950s and focusing particularly on titles with conspicuously hybridized narratives and visual qualities. By doing so, I aim to bring to light the various modalities and praxes that allowed South Korea to come out from the shadow of the Japanese anime industry.

It was on HLKZ Television (Daehan Bangsong), South Korea’s first private television station established in 1956, that animation became an integral part of the emerging media industry in postwar South Korea. 5 A few short advertisements and experimental animations appeared throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, and in 1967 South Korea saw its first animated theatrical film, Hong Gil-dong, produced by Shin Dong-heon. Since then there have been five to ten animated films released annually, but production has dwindled as viewership of South Korean animation has decreased over the years. Recent South Korean media has asked questions such as why South Korea, a country with an animation production infrastructure similar to Japan’s, and a country that has been actively creating Korean-language animation for years, has not produced a figure such as Tezuka Osamu. Some analyses suggest that South Korean audiences do not accept animation. 6 Nevertheless, owing to decades of active production, South Korea’s animation industry eventually attracted the government’s attention, which led to official recognition and promotion of digital animation in 1999. 7 This influenced the Japanese government to push for its own “Content Industry” promotion policy in 2004. 8

Despite this official acceptance, there have been few studies of Korean [End Page 145] animation compared to the scholarly work on Japanese anime: John A. Lent and Yu Kie-Un present a brief history, and Yoon Ae-ri explores how South Korean animators are situated “in-between” the demands of...

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