AKOM

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Nelson Shin, you cheap little...

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

Additional 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,[1] which leaves ten more episodes that were shared between AKOM and an unnamed studio from the Philippines.[2] 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 mysterious Filipino studio.

AKOM's participation increased dramatically by season 3, where they produced a total of 16 episodes (Toei animated 13 episodes, and "Call of the Primitives" is widely believed to have been done by Tokyo Movie Shinsha). 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

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 were often shown in their older, pre-production designs.
  • 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?
  • Rodimus Prime's gun is red instead of black. The indents on his upper shoulders are the same red as his arms, instead of white.
  • Cyclonus's eyebrows are dark purple instead of the same color as his face; his face tends towards a more pinkish-purple hue rather than gray.

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.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Archived version of Toei's resume for joint productions, confirming their share in seasons 2 and 3
  2. ↑ Interview with production coordinator Paul Davids at the Cybertron Chronicle, confirming the use of a studio from the Philippines
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