User:JoseBxR
About
Music artist and Media Editor for OverClocked ReMix.
Creative talent with absolutely no free time to create.
Maintaining a YouTube channel for multimedia product, but so far is mostly a collection of funny English dubs of martial arts films.
Animation maven from the prehistoric (before Internet) era. Areas of interest: U.S. theatrical shorts from 1930-1954; U.S. theatrical cel animation; Animation produced in Japan for Japan from 1970-1995; TV animation co-produced in Japan from 1980-1995.
This page is to be a repository for information regarding my research in identifying G1 animation works, and also possibly information on poor G1 English dubbing, perhaps even the music from the series and my issues with presenting so many show oddities as "errors".
All notes on identifying G1 animation (subject to change)
Following is pure draft speculation, and is being updated constantly as I uncover new evidence. Nothing is 100 percent. Everything so far is mostly attributed to "my own eyes and my own experience", which may be what got us into this mess regarding AKOM's work, but the difference with me is I keep my conclusion-jumping to an absolute minimum. Anyone can feel free to comment and point me to any and all additional, even contradictory, evidence for consideration within the discussion tab. I intend to compile video evidence of animation techniques, movement and styles between episodes (eps), and present them somewhere for the community, possibly for linking to talk pages.
Animation Determination As Of May 6, 2023
Season 1 (s1):
- 16 TOEI and/or TOEI-Outsourced
Season 2 (s2):
- 39 TOEI and/or TOEI-Outsourced
- At least 7 AKOM
- 3 UNKNOWN but possibly AKOM-Outsourced
Season 3 (s3):
- 13 TOEI-Outsourced
- 15 AKOM and/or AKOM-Outsourced
- 2 SEI YOUNG
Season 4 (s4):
- 3 AKOM
Factual Evidence
Errors are possible, but this collection of facts and creator claims is the basis for research on all eps.
AKOM claims work on 39 eps from the entire series (according to their website)
Toei (according to archived "resume" webpage) claims work on
- all 3 eps from pilot miniseries
- all 13 eps from "Part 1" (season 1)
- 39 eps from "Part 2" (season 2)
- 13 eps from "Part 3" (season 3)
Production materials allude to AKOM out-sourcing to Sam Young studio. Production materials belonging to Paul Davids indicate Sei Young worked on "Surprise Party", with no evidence of Toei involvement. Davids also claims some work came from a studio in the Philippines. There is confirmed evidence of storyboards shipped to Korea or Japan for preliminary work, which may or may not offer clues on the studio(s) ultimately selected for animation work.
Challenges
It is admittedly difficult to identify studios in general, and non-Toei animation in particular, as explained below. However, I’m still baffled as to why only three eps out of s2 were readily identified as AKOM, and nothing else, considering that Nelson Shin was a top producer, and especially with so many other eps unidentified. There should have been no “unknown studio” as understood up to this point: if it’s not Toei, then the next reasonable thought would be that Nelson got his people to do it. Now that we have some numbers bandied about, we may indeed have some “unknowns”, that of course don’t match the accepted info.
I didn’t necessarily wish to go into the weeds of exactly who was outsourced to do which ep, but some of that work will have to be done to the extent of gathering evidence for identifying Toei’s work, and maybe it’s worth trying so that the wiki could be able to link to and track all evidence linking studios to this work. I need help on this: Who in the world is claiming all these other studios in the first place? Where are we getting "Nakamura", "Dai Won", etc. from? This site's only apparent link to any evidence is that one tweet about Studio Look, since everyone was dying to know who was behind "Call of the Primitives" (what made you all think it was TMS? LOL), but nothing else, and sites such as iMDB and ANN welcome contributions, but with no apparent links to authoritative resources, not even on an "some guy said to me over DMs" level. This is maddening. Anything real that I collect I want to try to get preserved on this page, at least until we have something better established in the community.
Speaking for myself, this process is not as easy when there aren’t enough human characters running around to compare with. Robot characters make it more difficult. Most times you can only rely on mouth movement, a few poses and possibly some special effects, and that’s about it.
The greatest difficulty with identifying AKOM work is that this show is essentially their very first product: Marvel helped establish the studio in South Korea in 1985, and they probably hit the ground running, even though their first official work may be “My Little Pony: the Movie”. There’s almost nothing else from the time period, all the way until “Spiral Zone” in 1987, and by then their style changed significantly in some areas. Still, there are some good clues in that show, and they credit the animators!
Some folks are using “models” as a way of identifying animation. Although bad animation wouldn’t necessarily follow models anyway, and I wouldn’t want us to overthink about how something looks, at the expense of how something moves, this could be helpful in spots. In the case of Hoist, it helps me confirm where there’s a previous suspicion; The “alternate" Hoist model is identified only in eps that I already suspected were done by AKOM.
AKOM's majority of work in s3 is on another level of garbage generally, and IMO it should not be used as any sort of guide for comparing techniques in other seasons or shows. It just doesn't look like anything else out there; it seems to be exclusively the work of Sam Young, and I hesitate to even assign blame to AKOM, except for agreeing to outsource work to this bootleg outlet. AKOM is capable of good animation, even great animation in the view of some. They apparently allowed their dregs to work on s3, but s2 had a few legit awesome sequences. I’m convinced “A Decepticon Raider in King Arthur’s Court” is one of theirs, and it’s arguably their best TF work. By the time s4 came around, AKOM settled on a style similar to most contemporaneous South Korean output, but still characterized by their almost singular sloppy line work.
THOSE “Three”
"City of Steel", "The Autobot Run" and "The Core" are in my view very, very obviously produced by a studio within the whirlwind of South Korean outfits employed by Marvel around this time (called MiHahn, Pan Sang East, Dong Seo etc.), because the work is, if not exact, extremely similar to work on "Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends", as well as other Marvel shows of that period. “Amazing” explicitly credits an "association" with MiHahn, and “Incredible Hulk” is said to be from Pan Sang East. I have seen credits from either “Hulk” or “Hulk & Spider-Man” that mention Pan Sang East. It’s my guess the "Philippines" remark references something from these ranks, although these main outfits are all evidently Korean. Those eps are not AKOM-style to my eyes, and apparently no one has challenged this for a long time, except for one remark in an old wiki (I’ll hereafter identify these as PSE-style). All that said, I am currently not ruling out the possibility that this unknown studio may have ended up as an AKOM sub-contractor. We have evidence of AKOM outsourcing due to the Sam Young materials.
Overlap?
Some folks have it right that because one studio claims an ep, it doesn’t preclude other studios laying claim to the same ep. The numbers from Toei and AKOM imply some overlap. I have come to rely on depictions of Megatron for identifying Toei works, and Starscream for identifying AKOM works, but it's not foolproof. I worked out all the Toei claims, stupidly not considering that the community has already done most of that good work, but the AKOM stuff will require much more study, especially since, unlike with Toei, there are no numbers on how many eps they produced for s2. Has anyone tried to ask Nelson Shin? People have indeed contacted him about possibly releasing his magnum opus “Empress Chung” internationally. Unless AKOM themselves come clean about which 39 eps they are claiming, we may never have a complete resolution. I don’t expect they’ll cooperate after decades of (some undeserved) scorn and ridicule heaped on them by the fandom, but maybe worth a shot?
Recycling
Recycled animation is virtually a dead giveaway for identifying studios. I started with the idea that any ep that reuses animation from Toei could be assumed to be claimed by Toei. I strongly suspected that even if an episode has nothing else from Toei except that Prime animation, then Toei claims it. “Attack of the Autobots” doesn’t seem to have anything else Toei-like, but I'm not sold in either direction yet. I am marking stuff like this in my research. It’s not just Prime: “Golden Lagoon” features stock Toei animation of Omega Supreme; a Bruticus merge is repeated in “Aerial Assault”; certain cassette ejections are repeated in certain episodes; etc.
Other Shows
“G.I. Joe” and “Defenders of the Earth”, as mentioned, are very good study resources. For example, I realized that although “Aerial Assault” is unique for Transformers, this animation (which I may recall also seeing in “Bionic Six” and “Southern Cross”) is in quite a few “Joe” eps, most notably the “Pyramid of Darkness” 5-parter. In the case of Sei Young, “Defenders” gives us much more than “Surprise Party” to use as a reference, because they produced so many eps on that show. I’m convinced “Only Human” is a Sei Young product, which would actually reconcile some of the available info. Here’s why: The Toei resume indicates 13 “Part 3” eps, but also indicates a production year of “1987”; that would seem incorrect, unless they either didn’t count “The Return of Optimus Prime” (which aired Feb. ‘87) or didn't work on two of the non-AKOM eps. However, if the two Sei Young eps don’t count as Toei-produced, the numbers check out. Toei’s resume claims only two eps of “Defenders”, so we know Sei Young doesn’t count under Toei in that case.
Ink & Paint
Folks should keep in mind that “later” stages in animation, such as ink & paint, could be done by other studios. I feel as though certain episodes may have farmed that work out, so when folks, for example, say that “Starscream’s Ghost” is so much better qualitatively than their other s3 works, I don’t see that as much as I see slightly better work enhanced with better ink & paint. In the case of “Only Human”, ink & paint seems to make Sei Young’s animation better than their exact same output for “Surprise Party”. “Return of Optimus” Part 2, IMO, is quite terrible, but with very impressive ink & paint work that I believe makes people think the animation is better than it actually is.
