Thousands of exposed files on North Korean server tell the tale.
Sanctions placed upon the North Korean regime, for its ongoing human rights abuses and nuclear warfare programs
Damn where are the sanctions on the US? You know, the only country crazy enough to use those nukes on actual human beings instead of just using it as a deterrence like the DPRK does?
Sanctions placed upon the North Korean regime, for its ongoing human rights abuses and nuclear warfare programs, prohibit US companies from working with DPRK companies or individuals
Does that mean the rest of the world is morally obliged to do the same to the US for the same reasons?
uncritical support for the DPRK in its heroic struggle to liberate occupied Korea from the genocidal American empire.
Good for them. Maybe the sanctions should be removed since:
A) they obviously dont work and
B) if socialism is so bad i'm sure the state will fall on it's own without outside pressure
Sanctions never worked as intended. Troll farms are nowadays more powerful.
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)
Reposting part of a comment I made in another thread about this, but:
animation across east Asian countries outsources labor between each other all of the time. Your Japanese anime is just as much Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese at this point, as it is Japanese.
Go look at the credits of most modern anime productions out of Japan, and large swathes of the names you see aren't Japanese, but are from those other countries.
Even a fairly low stakes, low budget, slice of life anime, like Non Non Biyori has Vietnamese names all over its god damn credits, because globalization has impacted the east Asian animation industry in such a way, that there's an large cross pollination of talent across borders, for better and worse.
And that's not to mention the western animation that gets outsourced to these places, South Korea especially.
The fact North Korea is also involved in this complex outsourcing process shouldn't be surprising to anyone who knows anything about how that industry works.
Some of the projects included work from season 3 of the Amazon show Invincible
hype
