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Comment by exhilaration | Hacker News Reader

But that's the most interesting part of the article - that Amazon and HBO projects are being worked on by NORTH KOREAN workers!!! I totally agree with the HN headline and I'm glad it got me to click and read the entire article.

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It's also wild that it somehow makes financial sense to outsource a core input into your product. A company that makes animations outsourcing animation makes as much sense to me as a software company outsourcing engineering. Though we do have a plane company that outsources making planes, but that's going some sort of way right now...

To be fair, the outsourced tasks seem to be for edits, and not for original artwork.

There’s a lot you can hide with outsourced software engineering. With animation it’s all on display.

Animation has been outsourced for decades, typically with in-house artists providing the key frames and outsourced animators doing the “in between” frames.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsourcing_of_animation

Oooh I can try tackling a bit of this (I'll try not to ramble... )

But anyway studios have been outsourcing animation work to Asian countries for a while now.

You might have seen some of the work product from one of the larger Japanese animation studios: TMS Enterainment who has worked on things like Batman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, The New Batman Adventures in addition to shows like Tiny Toon Adventures and Transformers in the 80-90s.

Some more recent(ish) examples are Cartoon Network outsourcing the animation for Steven Universe to Rough Draft Korea located South Korea and Nickelodeon outsourced some of the work for Korra to a Japanese company called Pierrot.

I'm just rambling at this point so I'm going to just leave a few links below that can do a better job of illustrating than I'm able to.

Wikipedia, Outsourcing of Animation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsourcing_of_animation

[DCAU Fandom Wiki, TMS Entertainment: https://dcau.fandom.com/wiki/TMS_Entertainment,_Ltd.

Reddit thread, Stylistic differences between two studios: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheLastAirbender/comments/1m4wbn/st...

AnimeNewsNetwork, American animation outsourced to Japan (2015): https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2015-11-02/.94920

I guess everyone remembers those strange Tom & Jerry episodes that felt like watching Twilight Zone. They were made in Czechoslovakia.

https://www.awn.com/animationworld/tom-jerry-produced-prague

Heck, The Simpsons has been largely animated in South Korea since the beginning over thirty years ago! They've even made jokes about that in the show itself.

https://www.today.com/popculture/simpsons-rides-seoul-train-...

This is fairly standard for mature products. In the early days the whole production process is tightly integrated, but as components and processes mature there is less room for there to be some “secret sauce.” Once that happens it makes sense to outsource it to other firms who compete on cost while you focus on parts where you can differentiate.

That said, companies frequently misstep determining where they can safely outsource and where they must keep things integrated.

Software companies don't outsource engineering in your country?

Almost never the entirety of it, no. back of office / LOB apps, sure.

I can see how one company might focus only on developing its technical skill in animation, rather than other aspects that are important to a production (like writing, music, marketing, etc), and do contract work for anyone who wants to make an animated production, no matter the story / market / etc. Sort of like how TSMC mostly focuses on semiconductor manufacturing excellence and leaves the design to other companies, with only a small amount of its production used to manufacture its own component designs.

But for studios where mastery of a certain animation style is critical to their work, vertical integration makes sense too.

From the prospective of these companies, the "core input" of the product is already in their hands: The intellectual property of the stories/characters. Media productions from this core IP is down the value chain.

Consider that Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and Micron, all manufacturers of semiconductors, outsource their semiconductor manufacturing.

Consider that most game development studios outsource most development on a per-project basis.

Consider that most car manufacturers outsource most of their parts manufacturing to other manufacturers.

Basically: It's more unusual for a business to not be outsourcing their line of business.

If the headline is factually wrong, it doesn't matter whether you agree with it or not.

Original title "buried the lede" and was too long for HN, so I edited it.

It may be useful to see how others linked to this news - the original place I found this was at Engadget, which had this title: "Some Amazon and Max cartoons may have been partially animated in North Korea" https://www.engadget.com/some-amazon-and-max-cartoons-may-ha...

Which linked to Reuters: "North Koreans may have helped create Western cartoons, report says" : https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/north-koreans-may...

I linked the original report, which makes no mention of animation, but is the obvious focus of the article. The point isn't who did the outsourcing, but what was done, IMO.

The length limit on HN titles sometimes makes nuance difficult - maybe I should have added "may have been outsourced" instead. I was not going for clickbait/misrepresentation.

But it's not. The original headline was just vague, and HN tends to ignore headlines that are too abstract or vague.

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