Which is stupid in 2024 anyway, because animation across east Asian countries outsources labor between each other all of the damn 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 to the point of the post, it makes sense that the DPRK would be involved in that to some extent. The original Squirrel and Hedgehog cartoon, for example, has some pretty impressive visuals for a TV series, compared to the stuff coming out of Japan, at the same time, prior to the consumer electronics boom of the 80s.
Too bad they didn’t get to work on the scripts, too. It’d be awesome to have a generic isekai power fantasy become more like the anti-imperialist classic Squirrel and Hedgehog.
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