Squirrel and Hedgehog

June 19, 2014 7:31 AM

Squirrel and Hedgehog - Yes folks, this is a North Korean cartoon produced in house ... The animation is really good, (episode 24 and on is animated in Flash, while before it was all hand drawn) the story is pretty complicated sometimes, and the characters are cool. The only thing actually wrong with this show, other than it being blatant propaganda, is that the lipsync is awful.

YouTube playlist of all episodes
Playlist of episodes with English subtitles
Overview with more links
Korean wiki (in dubious English via Google Translate)

posted by Wolfdog (8 comments total)

It's good, but it's no Worker and Parasite.
posted by entropicamericana at 7:51 AM on June 19, 2014 [8 favorites]

That's pretty interesting, I wonder how many of their people actually have the ability to watch it? Are tv's common? Is electricity to watch tv provided? Makes me think perhaps that more people in the west have seen it than in the country? Is the target audience actually S. Korea and others?
posted by Carillon at 9:30 AM on June 19, 2014

"Have some gifs and screenshots Brian Silvestro made of the best character, Lt. Vixen (not her real name lol, blame the internet for that one)."

Everyone is furry for Lt. Vixen.
posted by egypturnash at 9:56 AM on June 19, 2014

Are tv's common?

According to Ask a North Korean, most North Korean households have a TV set.
posted by The corpse in the library at 10:41 AM on June 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

All the better to propaganda you my dear.
posted by Twain Device at 10:48 AM on June 19, 2014

I don't know about TVs (other than the link posted above) but Kim Jong-Il was not only an enormous movie buff but a huge believer in the power of films as propaganda. Things may have changed after the famine, but at least throughout the 90s every village in North Korea had a government-supported movie theater, no matter how dinky, and tickets cost basically pocket change. The movies were all either Russian, Chinese, or home-grown Korean communist propaganda.
posted by Itaxpica at 11:15 AM on June 19, 2014

I hope after reunification they continue it, but as a sort of in-universe secret history thing to counter the previously official propaganda.
posted by Small Dollar at 12:34 PM on June 19, 2014

Much of Guy Delisle's comic book memoir, Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, takes place in the animation studio he has come to help manage (although the details of his assignment are never fully explained). It does seem to imply that European companies have been subcontracting a lot of animation to North Korean studios for a while.
posted by Corduroy at 3:13 PM on June 19, 2014 [1 favorite]