Steel robots and space turtleships: the divergence of Korean animation and Japanese anime

During the Park Chung-hee military dictatorship, Korea shadowed Japanese industrial upgrading at every stage. The same was true in animation, in which Korea took Japanese animations, indigenized them, and imbued them with a techno-nationalism that positioned Korean animation as both dependent on Japan and destined to overcome it. Instead, the opposite happened: today South Korean animation is a pale shadow of Japanese anime’s global success. This essay argues that this divergence, rather than the result of flawed state policies or overdependence on outsourcing, is the result of objective shifts in global capitalism that began in the 1970s. This essay analyses two Korean animated films that mimicked Japanese animated works: Robot Taekwon V (1976), which mimicked Japanese animated film Mazinger Z (1972) and Fly! Spaceship Geobukseon (1979), which mimicked TV series and film Space Battleship Yamato (1974–1975; 1977). While the former Japan-Korea couplet was situated in convergence between the HCI (heavy and chemical industry) economic plans of Japan and Korea, the latter couplet marked the divergence between Korean animation and Japanese ‘anime,’ i.e. the rise of a new commodity form constituted by global ‘otaku’ consumption that reshaped the global economy and ended the previous period’s possibility of economic development.