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Production companies such as Amazon, HBO Max and the BBC may be using North Korean labor to produce a number of popular shows, according to the discovery of in-progress animation work on an unsecured cloud server in 2023.

Per The Register, Nick Roy, the lead author of blog NK Internet, discovered the servers existence, although analysis from 38 North, a publication from think tank The Stimson Center covering events and policy in the North Korean region, suggests that the server is no longer in use.

There are also questions about the nature of the files found during analysis. While many files were explicitly work in progress, including direct instructions written in Chinese and translated to Korean, other files, pertaining to the BBC childrens show Octonauts, were complete, making it unclear as to whether they were simply files used as reference for other projects, or actively worked on by the outfit.

Other work-in-progress files were identifiable as from the third season of Amazons Invincible and Cartoon Network / HBO Max collaboration Iyanu, Child of Wonder. While animated television isnt really in TechRadar Pros wheelhouse, our sister site has previously covered Invincible, for example, as early as this month.

The 38 North report sheds little light on the contracted operation, only that it was based in Pyongyang. The report guesses that its April 26 Animation Studio, or SEK Studio, North Koreas premier animation house, but also an outfit put under US sanctions in 2016, with other companies found to be collaborating with it given similar punishments relating to corruption and human rights abuse as late as 2022.

This stuff is quite frightening, honestly. Its easy, as a consumer, to put it out of mind under, essentially, the belief that theres no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.

There's plenty of truth in that: its a basic guarantee that you or I have intentionally or otherwise put money into the coffers of some unethical operation or other in the pursuit of happiness, or just life itself, especially when companies like Amazon are working on running every aspect of it.

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True, you can be a tedious internet nihilist and say get real dude, its a cartoon, but they dont appear out of thin air, do they? Why dont you draw tens of thousands of pictures under duress and see if your arm hurts?

The other big question that remains unresolved is: just how hard did people in the trenches work on, say, Invincible season 2? Discovering the answer might be beyond our cloud storage remit, but wed still be very interested to find out.

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A cloud server leak seems to show top animation shows are part-made in North Korea - TechRadar