AKOM

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AKOM (Animation KOrea Movie Productions) is a South Korean animation studio owned and founded by Nelson Shin. AKOM is known for its very error prone... ahem... "cost-efficient" animation and is used frequently for American cartoons. Some shows AKOM has worked on include: The Simpsons, Saban's X-Men & Silver Surfer, The Tick, Savage Dragon, Tiny Toon Adventures, Arthur and Batman: The Animated Series; the company was actually fired from the latter because of their consistently sub-par work.

The Transformers episodes animated

• Ep.19 - "City of Steel"
• Ep.23 - "The Autobot Run"
• Ep.28 - "The Core"
• Ep.66 - "Five Faces of Darkness, Part 1"
• Ep.67 - "Five Faces of Darkness, Part 2"
• Ep.68 - "Five Faces of Darkness, Part 3"
• Ep.69 - "Five Faces of Darkness, Part 4"
• Ep.70 - "Five Faces of Darkness, Part 5"
• Ep.73 - "Dark Awakening"
• Ep.74 - "Forever Is a Long Time Coming"
• Ep.76 - "Thief in the Night"
• Ep.80 - "Ghost in the Machine"
• Ep.82 - "Carnage in C-Minor"
• Ep.83 - "The Quintesson Journal"
• Ep.85 - "The Big Broadcast of 2006"
• Ep.89 - "Grimlock's New Brain"
• Ep.92 - "The Face of the Nijika"
• Ep.96 - "The Rebirth, Part 1"
• Ep.97 - "The Rebirth, Part 2"
• Ep.98 - "The Rebirth, Part 3"

Additional animation

• Commercial bumpers (season 3, 4)
• Title sequence (season 3, 4-via recycled animation)

Production history

Since Shin also happened to be the producer of the original Transformers cartoon, Sunbow would start using AKOM beginning with season 2. It's confirmed that Toei animated 39 of the 49 season 2 episodes, which leaves ten more episodes that were shared between AKOM and at least two unknown studios. As the three episodes "The Core", "The Autobot Run", and "City of Steel" (which all share the same animation/drawing style, hence suggesting that they were all done by the same studio) are widely considered to be of the same quality and style as AKOM's season 3 work, it's highly probable that they were done by them, leaving the remaining seven episodes for the mystery studio.

AKOM's participation increased dramatically by season 3, where they produced a total of 14 episodes (Toei animated 13 episodes, "Call of the Primitives" is animated by an unknown studio whose animation style is noticably distinct from either Toei or AKOM, and see "Not actually AKOM" below for more). The short-lived season 4 (the three-part "The Rebirth" series finale) was then handled entirely by AKOM, as well as all of the season 3 and season 4 commercial bumpers and the season 3 title sequences.

Characteristics

Bizarrely, Akom used THREE colour schemes for Optimus Prime, each seemingly regressing to an earlier stage of development.

AKOM rather noticeably never got the right color guides for some characters. Many characters have small and large coloring oddities whenever they appear in an AKOM episode. A list follows.

In Season 2:

• Bumblebee has a black-colored disk in the middle of his robot mode back, which should be yellow.
• Chip Chase has a blue jacket instead of brown.
• Gears' truck mode is red with blue fenders instead of blue with a red camper top. His white robot bits are colored light gray.
• Hook's feet are white instead of green.
• Laserbeak's beak is more often than not the same dark gray as his head.
• Megatron's gun barrel is dark gray.
• Optimus Prime's backpack is white instead of red.
• Prowl's entire body is a light gray instead of white.
• Soundwave has a white backpack/battery case, instead of blue.

In Season 3:

• AKOM frequently used older, outdated designs for some characters. Grimlock shows up with his older, flattened head design, and the characters introduced in The Transformers: The Movie would sometimes appear in their older, pre-production designs, their designs switching in and out from shot to shot. Toei was guilty of this too, but to a far lesser extent.
• Whether drawing the characters in their outdated or finalized designs, AKOM always used outdated colour models for several members of the cast, including the movie characters. Consequently, regardless of design, Rodimus always has red shoulder indentations, Galvatron always has a lavender pelvis, Kup always has grey boots, Cyclonus always has thick purple eyebrows, and Arcee always has a grey collar, to name just a few pronounced details.
• Numerous characters have the inside of their mouths colored in a shade that corresponds to their helmet: Ultra Magnus's mouth is blue, Arcee's is dull pink, Springer's is green, etc. Maybe AKOM thought their heads were hollow?

To AKOM's credit, the animation cel count for their shows was a few frames-per-second higher, thus the episodes they produced appeared noticeably smoother than non-AKOM-produced episodes.

Not actually AKOM

In the 1990s, fans considered the episodes "Starscream's Ghost" and "Only Human" to be Toei episodes, as they were clearly visually superior to all AKOM episodes. When Toei's website resume revealed that Toei only did thirteen episodes of the season, however, the numbers didn't add up, and the two episodes became considered AKOM work by default for years, despite the visual differences. With the reveal that a third unknown studio worked on the series, it is almost certain that those episodes were the work of that unknown third party, not AKOM.

External links

• AKOM official website (Often offline)
• AKOM at Wikipedia