Production companies such as Amazon, HBO Max and the BBC may be using North Korean labor to produce some popular shows, according to the discovery of ongoing animation work on an unsecured cloud server in 2023.
Per The registerNick Roy, the lead author of blog NK Internethowever, discovered the server’s existence analysis of 38 Northa publication by think tank The Stimson Center on events and policies in the North Korean region, suggests that the server is no longer in use.
There are also questions about the nature of the files found during the analysis. While many files were explicitly worked on, including direct instructions written in Chinese and translated into Korean, other files, relating to the BBC children’s show Octonauts, were complete, making it unclear whether they were simply files used as a reference for other projects were used. , or what the outfit is actively working on.
We’re going to make a movie (you draw), boy
Other work-in-progress files were identifiable from the third season of Amazon’s Invincible and Cartoon Network/HBO Max collaboration “Iyanu, Child of Wonder”. While animated television isn’t really in Ny Breaking’s wheelhouse, for example, our sister site has previously covered Invincible, already this month.
The 38 North report sheds little light on the contracted operation, only that it was based in Pyongyang. The report suspects that it concerns April 26 Animation Studio, or SEK Studio, “North Korea’s premier animation house,” but also a company that came under US sanctions in 2016, while other companies collaborated with it and faced similar punishments received regarding ‘corruption and corruption’. violation of human rights’ not until 2022.
This stuff is pretty scary, honestly. As a consumer, it’s easy to put this out of your mind because you essentially believe that there is no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.
There’s a lot of truth in that: It’s a basic guarantee that you or I have deliberately or otherwise poured money into the coffers of some unethical operation in the pursuit of happiness, or simply life itself, especially when companies like Amazon are busy running their money. every aspect of it.
It’s true that you can be a boring internet nihilist and say, “Be real dude, it’s a cartoon,” but they don’t come out of the blue, right? Why not make tens of thousands of drawings under duress and see if your arm hurts?
The other big question that remains unresolved is: how hard did people in the trenches are working on, for example Invincible season 2? Discovering the answer may be beyond us cloud storage but we would still really like to know.