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The art of Korean animation (Korean: 한국 애니메이션), or Aeni (Korean: 한국 애니) has gone from hand-held flip books in early times to studios that produce work for major American and Japanese animation companies.
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Market
According to Korea Creative Content Agency, in 2010, the character market share of domestic characters was about 28% in Korea. The remaining 72% were occupied by the foreign character such as from Japan and USA. But in 2014 the character market share of domestic characters soared to 40%. The value of Korean character market reached 8 trillion won in 2013. In 2012, Experts predicted that the total market size will grow to 10 trillion won in the near future .
Animation industry
The type of work ranges from collaboration/minor contribution contracts, to most of the work. The South Korean animation industry can be considered dynamic in that there are around 120 animation studios, mostly competing with some of the larger studios that throw smaller studios by way of overseas export market (OEM) work. While it is mostly firms in South Korea that contract with Western studios, some of the work is reported to be subcontracted to North Korea as well.[1]
Active animation studios or companies of South Korea include:
Former include:
History
The Korean animation industry was in a period of crisis throughout the 2000s as depression born of the realities of being merely an industry the West gave factory-type drawing work to, began to sink in. This followed the 1990s, a period of explosive growth for the industry when Korean studios made most of their profits from OEM, mostly from the United States.
In many ways 2011 was a bright transitional year for Korean animation with "home-produced" animated feature films finally finding box office success in South Korea instead of the usual financial failure. As far as OEM is concerned, the likes of Rough Draft Korea (RDK) keep on landing new contracts which have seen Rough Draft perform the manual work on over 45 popular "Western" cartoon titles over the last 16 years.
Korean animation has boomed in popularity in Eastern Asia with the success of the series Pororo the Little Penguin and Origami Warriors in 2011, leading fans to want to discover more Korean animated product. This success is due to the perfecting of technique and financial returns being reinvested into new animated products.
Some Korean animators still blame the booming Korean game industry for draining the animation industry's talent pool,[2] but the box office success of the Korean animated film Leafie in 2011 in South Korea is inspiring a new generation.