AKOM

**AKOM Production, Ltd.** (**A**nimation **KO**rea **M**ovie 애이콤 프로덕션) is a South Korean animation studio in Songpa-gu, Seoul that has provided much work since its conception in 1985 by Nelson Shin. Its biggest claim to fame is the overseas animation of more than 200 episodes of *The Simpsons*, a total which continues to increase. The studio also produced a portion of the overseas animation for *The Simpsons Movie*.

Other well-known series that AKOM has been involved in include *X-Men*, *The Tick*, *Tiny Toon Adventures*, *Animaniacs*, *Batman: The Animated Series*, *The Transformers*, the first 11 seasons of *Arthur*, and six of *The Land Before Time* films.

Nelson Shin also operates KOAA Films; for simplicity's sake, its output has been noted in this article as well.

The studio is also responsible for publishing a South Korean animation magazine called "Animatoon" since 1995.

## Amongst the series and movies they animated: (series by KOAA Films marked with an \*)

* *Adventures in Oz World*
* *The Adventures of Corduroy the Bear*
* *Aliens* - Produced unused animation sequences for several toy commercials in the 90s.
* *Animaniacs* - 62 shorts and 3 bumpers
* *Arthur* - The company's other most notable work, with over 300 episodes.
	+ *Arthur's Perfect Christmas*
	+ *Arthur, It's Only Rock 'n' Roll*
	+ *Postcards from Buster* - (season 1 only), replaced by DQ Entertainment.
* *Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!* - Hired for the first season before being replaced by an in-house team.
* *Batman: The Animated Series* - 13 episodes . Fired after the episode "Cat Scratch Fever" was animated.
* *The Brothers Flub*
* *Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars*
* *A Bunch of Munsch* - 2 episodes
* *C Bear and Jamal*
* *Chuck E. Cheese in the Galaxy 5000* - Their Last Project to use Animation Cels (with Rough Draft Korea)
* *City Hunters* (alternating with Sunmin Animation)
* *Conan the Adventurer* (alternating with KK C&D Asia)
	+ *Conan and the Young Warriors* (episode: "The Hand of Fate")
* Crash Bandicoot (1996) - Animated Cutscenes.
	+ *Crash Bandicoot* (1998)
* *Dilbert* - 4 episodes. Rough Draft Studios and Yeson Entertainment handled the rest.
* *Dino-Riders* - Hired for the remainder of the show's run after the first two episodes, replacing Hanho Heung-Up.
* *Dooly the Little Dinosaur* - Worked on the first season with Hanho.
* *Dr. Rabbit's World Tour*
* *Dorothy Meets Ozma of Oz*
* *Dragon Flyz*
* *Earthworm Jim*
* *Empress Chung* (worked alongside the North Korean SEK Studio).
* *Exo Squad* - Replaced Sunrise after the initial stages of planning.
* *Flash Gordon (1996)* (with Sei Young)
* *Fraggle Rock* - Animated Adaptation.
* *Gabriel Garza*
* *Gargoyles* - Six episodes of "The Goliath Chronicles"
* *G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero* (uncredited, also did animation for most of the comic commercials) & *G.I. Joe Extreme*
	+ *Sgt. Savage and his Screaming Eagles*
* *Huey's Life* (With Sunwoo, and Rough Draft)
* *Huntik: Secrets & Seekers* (uncredited)
* *Invasion America*
* *The Jackie Bison Show* pilot
* *Jem* - 6 episodes dumped onto them by Hasbro and Paramount after TMS grew too expensive.
* *Kelly's Dream Club*\*
* *Kid 'n' Play* (uncredited)
* *The Land Before Time* - Movies II to VI
* *Little Clowns of Happytown*
* *The Little Lulu Show* - Season 3, replacing Wang Film Productions
* *Little Orphan Annie's Very Animated Christmas*
* *Littlest Pet Shop (1995)* - With Wang, Heewon and KK C&D
* *Little Wizards*
* *The Magician*
* *Magic Sport*
* *Marsupilami*\* (2000 series)
* *McGee and Me!* - All of season 1; StarToons did the three season 2 episodes.
* *Mission Hill* - 6 episodes. Remaining episodes were by New Millennium.
* *Moon Dreamers*
* *Monsters and Pirates* (season 1 only)
* *Mosaic* - Opening titles only, main feature handled by Mook DLE.
* *Muppet Babies* - From Season four to the series' end.
* *Murphy Brown* - G.I. Murph only
* *My Little Pony* - G1, The Movie (With TMS Entertainment) and *Tales* only.
* *My Scene: Jammin' in Jamaica*
* *The Oblongs* - 7 episodes. Remaining six were by Rough Draft Studios.
* *Peter Pan & the Pirates* - Amongst other companies, 9 episodes.
* *Pinky and the Brain*
* *Problem Child* (season 2 only, replacing D'Ocon and various supporting Spain studios)
* *Road Rovers* - 4 episodes
* *Rescue Heroes* - Seasons two & three, replacing Hong Guang.
* *RoboCop: The Animated Series*
* *Rude Dog and the Dweebs*
* *The Savage Dragon* (TV series, with APPP)
* *Silver Surfer: The Animated Series*
* *The Simpsons* - The company's most notable work, with over 200 episodes.
	+ *The Simpsons Movie* (with Rough Draft Studios)
	+ *The Simpsons Game*
	+ *The Longest Daycare*, *Playdate with Destiny* and *The Force Awakens From Its Nap* shorts
	+ *The Simpsons in Plusaversary*
	+ *Super Bowl Pregame 1999* (unconfirmed, as there are no credits, but it looks like their work)
	+ Various Butterfinger commercials, uncredited
* *Skeleton Warriors*
* *Sky Dancers* (with SEM Animation)
* *Something From Nothing* (Animated special)
* *Sonic Boom* (with Bardel Animation, Hong Ying Universe Co., Ltd., Jam Field Toronto, NE4U, Rough Draft, Snipple Animation, Saerom, The Answer Studio, TMS Entertainment, Tonic DNA and Yowza Animation)
	+ *Sonic Boom: Tails' Destiny The Movie* (with Snipple Animation and The Answer Studio)
* *Sonic The Hedgehog: Animated* (with Digital eMation, Rough Draft, The Answer Studio, Saerom, Sunmin, Sunwoo and Yeson)
* *Sonic The Hedgehog (2022)* (with Jam Field, Yowza, Mercury Filmworks, NE4U, Tonic DNA, TMS, Rough Draft, The Answer Studio, Snipple and Saerom)
* *Space Cats*
* *Spiral Zone* - 15 episodes, others by Visual 80 and an uncredited Mook DLE. Also split camera duty with Trans Arts.
* *The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper*
* *The Super Mario Bros. Super Show*
	+ *The Legend of Zelda*
	+ *The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3*
	+ *Super Mario World*
* *Taz-Mania* - 35 episodes
* *Teen Days*
* *The Tick*
* *The Tale of the Great Bunny*
* *Tiny Toon Adventures* - 23 episodes
* *Toad Patrol* (season 1; replaced by UTV Toons)
* *The Transformers* - The company's first (known) work, 20 episodes (Three *Season 2* episodes, fourteen *Season 3* episodes and *The Rebirth* 3-parter). Done uncredited, series with TMS Entertainment.
* *Ultimate Book of Spells*
* *Vor-Tech: Undercover Conversion Squad* (with Koko Enterprises)
* *Winx Club*
	+ *Pop Pixie* (uncredited)
* *Wunschpunsch* (with Nightstorm Media)
* *X-Men: The Animated Series* - seasons 1-4, and the first five episodes of season 5, some season 3 episodes and later episodes done by Philippine Animation Studio Inc. and Hong Ying.
	+ *X-Men '97*

## Unconfirmed:

* *The Magic Pudding*: Akom lists having worked on the film on its website, but they aren't listed in the credits and no crew members are listed. Crew members from Fil-Cartoons *are* listed, however.
* *The Real Ghostbusters*: The show is mentioned on their page on Wikipedia, with the episodes "Slimer Come Home" & "When Halloween was Forever" in Season 1 and "Station Identification" & "Fright at the Opera" from Season 2 attributed to the studio.

## Tropes associated with the company:

* Animated Adaptation: *Attack of the Killer Tomatoes*, *Earthworm Jim*, *RoboCop*, *Savage Dragon*, the list goes on.
* Animation Bump: Occasionally (including select instances in *Batman*, *Transformers*, and *Tiny Toon Adventures*). Word of God has pointed out that they did the good animation in *Spiral Zone*. Also appears in *The Simpsons Movie* for obvious reasons.
	+ Many fans of Arthur consider the company's animation to be of acceptable quality as well, slight errors aside.
* Animesque: *Sonic Boom*, *Sonic The Hedgehog: Animated* and *Teen Days*.
* Author Appeal/Creator's Favorite: *The Transformers* episodes "The Core", "City of Steel" and "The Autobot Run" had liberal usage of the Constructicons.
* The Dark Age of Comic Books: What their animation style for *G.I. Joe Extreme* and *Exosquad* resembles.
	+ *X-Men* would slip into a similar style once in a while as part of that show's inconsistent animation quality.
* Butt-Monkey: Considered one for the *Transformers* fandom due to their mostly poor animation.
* Deranged Animation: Their season 1 *Tiny Toons* episodes were quite rubbery and wacky, though they got a bit more conservative starting in the second season when Dev Ramsaran replaced Warren Marshall as overseas supervisor.
	+ *The Simpsons* has its moments as well, especially when the animation was produced at Klasky-Csupo instead of Film Roman and eventually Fox Television Animation.
* How the Mighty Have Fallen: AKOM was one of the busiest studios of the late '80s through the '90s (in 1996, for example, they worked on *fifteen* different series throughout the year), but the 2000s were not kind to the studio (and they lost one of their major properties, *Arthur*, to Animation Service (HK)), and the '10s have been even worse. It's now gotten to the point that *The Simpsons* is, for the most part, the only American series they're working on anymore (and even there, roughly half of each season is done at Rough Draft).
* Limited Animation: Not to the extent of Filmation, but still present. Of course the founder first worked at such a company.
	+ Averted to some extent on *Tiny Toon Adventures* and *Animaniacs*, which utilized full animation.
* Medium Blending: *Sonic Boom* and *Sonic The Hedgehog: Animated*
* Off-Model: Aside from some exceptions like *The Simpsons*, a pretty awful poster child of this trope.
	+ The studio (along with Sunrise) was fired from *Batman* because of this. As this article says about the episode "Prophecy of Doom": Series director Frank Paur: "How hard is it to animate circles?"
	+ Paur adds in the same article that "Mad as a Hatter" was AKOM's best episode, but still needed to perform "close to a hundred retakes", and Bruce Timm says "Feat of Clay, Part 1" was animated by AKOM's C-Team, and "nearly completely redone two or three times before we could actually air it without cringing".
		- While the first part of "The Cat and the Claw" wasn't all that hot, the second part (given to AKOM) was a mess, according to Bruce Timm. Timm: The whole end sequence was geared around the explosions, and they were some of the worst you'll ever see. We retook all of them two or three times. They were still awful, but we ran out of time and had to air them.
	+ Even *The Simpsons* was not immune, despite being considered the best studio by some. Thanks to a combination of Klasky-Csupo (the first domestic studio to work on the show) still animating in the looser, more cartoony *Tracey Ullman Show* style and AKOM not getting the unique animation feel of the show (not helped by most of their past work at the time being rather amateurish even for 1980s standards), "Some Enchanted Evening" almost cancelled the series before it even began; James L. Brooks famously said of it, "This is shit." It's estimated that about 70% of the episode had to be re-animated (and headed by David Silverman's team), with only a few scenes from original director Kent Butterworth surviving to air.
		- On a similar note, the commentary notes that "When Flanders Failed" came back with "a thousand mistakes in it and was just a complete and utter mess." Some parts had to be re-animated in America.
	+ Related to the "Some Enchanted Evening" example above, the *X-Men* pilot "Night of the Sentinels" had similar issues regarding its animation. Their refusal to fix these two episodes almost forced a contract severing between them and Marvel (their longstanding partner at that time) by ABC, Wizard Magazine even noting that one industry insider suggested their motto be "Akom... Quality Is Our Only Compromise." Like "Evening", the two episodes were fixed for reruns and later releases. The rest of the series, despite its stiffness and inconsistent character designs, would never dip to the same levels the pilot did.
	+ Then, there's *The Transformers*. While it's hard to explain *what* extreme AKOM's episodes go to without Walls of Text\* , what *is* easy to explain are some of the more common errors in their episodes, such as the wrong character model being used (they had a habit of using Grimlock's rounded robot mode head and giving Optimus and Soundwave white backpacks for instance), layers done wrong so that a character will *disappear "behind" something that's actually behind him*, three shots with a group of characters will have three different versions of the roster, including an Autobot with Decepticons or vice-versa. Season 2 even kept screwing up Devastator's combination. This meant no two versions ever looked the same under AKOM. With none of them having the right Constructicon going into the right place and at times, omitting a team member entirely, "The Core" being the most egregious with this issue. And it wasn't just aesthetically displeasing\* , but could *really* become plot-altering  and could easily become unintentional instances of Deranged Animation on full display. All of this is exasperated by the fact that this was their first animation work upon foundation.
	+ It was inevitable for *Exosquad*- the highly-detailed designs of the E-frames and various other tech in the show pretty much assured this would happen.
	+ While the character designs that Akom used for *Tiny Toon Adventures* were nice, the animation itself could vary wildly. Some of the worst offenders of Off-Model animation in the series were "A Quack in the Quarks" and "Wacko World of Sports".
		- These problems would also carry over to *Animaniacs*. AKOM episodes have a similar art-style to episodes animated by Wang Film Productions (which had generally high-quality animation) at first glance. However, in practice, AKOM is much less fluid. Their animation quality then deteriorated further, and they were fired in the final season, while Wang (which was also beginning to decline in animation quality at this point) got to stay until the show ended.
* Signature Style: In many of the shows they animated on, AKOM liked to draw the characters with shadows that shifted when they moved.
	+ Most explosions animated by them , tended to be nothing but giant plumes of oranges or greys (or in some cases, both) animated by painting directly onto the cel. This was largely phased out by the mid-90s.