The article isn’t talking about taking the end product, it is about North Korean’s involved with the movie’s production by providing low cost manual labor for animating or ‘drafting’ the images for the shows (and then presumably a portion of this income is fed into the state). They’re not supposed to be doing this, but have identified ways to get jobs passed to them via some sort of broker who allocated part of the work to them or gets their citizens placed using fake credentials.
Oh I see, I assumed the article was going to be “north korea is making animated versions of existing films for silly reasons”, because the article started with “north koreans are only allowed to use the internet with someone else sitting right next to them and approving every 5 minutes”
What’s more likely is Amazon and HBO contracted a South Korean studio who subcontracted a Chinese studio for some of the more mundane animations, and they proceeded to sub-subcontract a North Korean studio.
There’s a lot of outsourcing for animation, this happened like 15 years ago with Avatar: The Last Airbender, where one of the South Korean studios involved with Book 3 subcontracted some work to China (cursory Google says DR Movie, which collaborated with a Chinese studio based in Qingdao)
Why would they do that instead of pirating it?
Where are the files?
This seems like one of those news stories about North Korea that nobody bothered to think critically about, let alone verify.
The article isn’t talking about taking the end product, it is about North Korean’s involved with the movie’s production by providing low cost manual labor for animating or ‘drafting’ the images for the shows (and then presumably a portion of this income is fed into the state). They’re not supposed to be doing this, but have identified ways to get jobs passed to them via some sort of broker who allocated part of the work to them or gets their citizens placed using fake credentials.
Oh I see, I assumed the article was going to be “north korea is making animated versions of existing films for silly reasons”, because the article started with “north koreans are only allowed to use the internet with someone else sitting right next to them and approving every 5 minutes”
What’s more likely is Amazon and HBO contracted a South Korean studio who subcontracted a Chinese studio for some of the more mundane animations, and they proceeded to sub-subcontract a North Korean studio.
There’s a lot of outsourcing for animation, this happened like 15 years ago with Avatar: The Last Airbender, where one of the South Korean studios involved with Book 3 subcontracted some work to China (cursory Google says DR Movie, which collaborated with a Chinese studio based in Qingdao)