#aeni

And it's on Youtube, here's the entire movie:

So this is a semi-Animation Night post. It's the writeup but the actual screening is tbd, since I'm planning to combine it with an in-person screening and that will take some planning. Anyway...

Empress Chung (왕후심청, 2005) is something I've been wanting to watch since Animation Night 20. It is an animated film based on a Korean folk story, created over six years in collaboration between director Shin Neung-Kyun (aka Nelson Shin) and his South Korean studio AKOM, and the state-owned SEK Studio of North Korea.

AKOM are primarily an outsourcing studio. Their animation can be seen in many American animated series, notably The Simpsons, Transformers and Batman: The Animated Series. SEK, meanwhile, are best known for series like Squirrel and Hedgehog and The Boy Soldier, which tend to attract a mix of curiosity and dismissal as nationalist propaganda. (We watched a few eps of Squirrel and Hedgehog back on AN20). However, at various points they have taken on outsourcing work, and that's how this film came about.

Cinema Escapist write...

Born 1939 in North Korea’s Pyongsan County, Shin moved to South Korea at age 13 during the Korean War. After immigrating to the US and working for American animators (including on Star Wars’ lightsaber) during the 1970s, Shin returned to South Korea and founded AKOM Production—best known for animating The Simpsons. Wanting to tell his own stories instead of animating others’, Shin decided to make Empress Chung, a feature film based on a famous Korean folk tale about a daughter who sacrifices herself to restore her father’s eyesight. While trying to get Empress Chung off the ground, Shin unexpectedly bumped into representatives of SEK Studio at an international film market. Since he was largely self-financing the project, Shin decided to work with SEK in order to save costs; it was also a poetic move for a man who’d been born in the North. Thus, Empress Chung became the first feature-length film co-production between North and South Korea. Around 500 staff from SEK Studio handled main production, while Shin’s South Korean animators performed pre and post-production; Shin personally visited Pyongyang 18 times to supervise production. Empress Chung opened simultaneously in North and South Korea on August 12, 2005, the 60th anniversary of the end of Japanese rule on the peninsula. Though it wasn’t a box office hit, the film represented a milestone in inter-Korean relations, and inspired Shin to further collaborate with SEK Studio. After Empress Chung, Shin and SEK went on to make an animated TV series called Warriors of the Goguryeo, inspired by the history of an ancient Korean kingdom.

Which makes it pretty unique in the history of Korean animation. It's definitely not the only case of SEK working with South Korean or Western studios (one notable example is René Laloux's film Gandahar), but Empress Chung came as a symbolic collaboration, at a brief time of relatively reduced tension. Down the line, it also led to SEK's animators working on a number of American cartoons, including the Simpsons movie and AtlA.

Here's Nelson Shin being interviewed about the film...

Despite this historical significance, Empress Chung pretty much disappeared after its initial theatrical and film-festival run. It never got a real home-media release. So it became a prized piece of 'lost media'. As a commenter on the youtube release puts it, it's the 'holy grail' of lost Korean animation.

But a print of the film did exist, sent around on DVD to Japanese distributors in the hope they might take an interest in releasing it in Japan. It's not exactly high-quality and there are Japanese hardsubs which can't be removed. Nevertheless, this print surfaced unexpectedly on Yahoo Japan in 2025.

So, enter Fileast, a collector of obscure Asian video. They managed to get their hands on this print, and this led to a collaboration project with the Lost Media Wiki to attempt to restore the film as much as possible and create an English fansub, combining it with higher-quality sources wherever possible. The result is the video you see at the top of this post. The upscaling and denoising is pretty intense and gives a certain amount of blurring/ringing artefacts, and the intrusive hardsubs have had to be covered by black boxes in various places, but it's absolutely watchable.

So what's this film all about?

The story is based on a Korean folktale called The Legend of Sim Cheong, 심청전 in Korean, whose history is a bit murky. It's believed to have been more or less pinned down by the 18th Century, but it's less clear whether it was an existing folktale or an original composition drawing from other sources. Whatever its origin, the story spread in both printed novel and pansori performance versions in the early 20th century. Since then it's inspired many different adaptations, including films, novels, webtoons and even apparently a cultural festival in the town of Gokseong.

In all its different versions, it centres on Sim Cheong (심청), the daughter of a blind man Sim Hakgyu (심학규) living in Hwangju near the northern border of modern-day North korea. Either she or her father learn from a Buddhist monk that, given a large offering of 300 sacks of rice to the Buddha, Cheong's father might regain his eyesight. In order to pay for this, Cheong sells herself to a group of sea merchants who wish to sacrifice her by drowning her in the Indang Sea. I'm not entirely sure why they want to do this in the original, but in the film, the sea is incarnated in a raging sea serpent, and they're hoping to appease him to allow trade with Japan and China.

After Cheong sacrifices her life for her father, the Jade Emperor recognises this great act of filial piety and sends her back to Earth in a lotus flower, where she marries the Emperor of China. She throws a feast for the blind to try to find her father; as a result, she finds him and his blindness is miraculously cured.

As a work of animation, it's fascinating to finally see this. While most of the Korean animation I've watched tends to draw heavily on the stylistic conventions of anime, this one definitely seems to take more after the Disney formula (mythological story, full animation, talking animals), although maybe a better analogy would be early films of Toei.

The film takes a somewhat revisionist angle on the story, though I'm not 100% entirely sure which elements are original. Here, Cheong's father is blind because, as a minister, he refused to participate in a conspiracy against the king, so another minister sent soldiers to burn his house and kill him. Cheong's mother is killed in the attack and her father blinded, and we skip forward to them living incognito in a coastal village, where Cheong is known as a kind, hard-working girl beloved by all.

She and her father are accompanied by three animals: Danchu the big fluffy guide dog, Gahi the duck who can't fly, and Teosang the turtle, who between them span a pretty wide range of anthropomorphisation. Cheong studies poetry with an old woman and takes care of her father until the duck makes him fall in the water, which introduces them to the Buddhist priest and the promise of a miracle with 300 bags of rice.

The tone is a little odd, since it needs to balance the dark content of the mythology it's drawing on, and the conventions of a cartoon aimed at kids. So for example Cheong's father (bloodlessly) cuts his enemies down with a sword in the first few minutes of the film, and there's a clear difference between him and the evil scheming minister I-reone and his goons (they're basically ninjas, idk if there's a Korean equivalent but they wear the masks and everything).

This tension is particularly strange in the sequence depicting Cheong's sacrifice halfway through the film. The actual sacrificial ritual is strikingly depicted and achieves some real drama, but this is followed by a very strange, and honestly incredibly elaborate action sequence where the turtle Teobong attempts to fight off the sea serpent Lord Indangsu and his octopus minions when they come to take her body. He does this by blowing conch shell to summon various other sea life to join the battle. Ultimately, harassed by swarms of fish, the serpent surfaces to attack the boat, only to get killed by lightning. I guess they didn't want to be like 'human sacrifice actually works'?

The film is at some pains to make sure that nobody but the merchants and the evil scheming tavern owner know that Cheong is selling herself to be sacrificed for 300 bags of rice. Before the sacrifice, Cheong deceives her father, claiming that she will be adopted by a noble lady; when the truth gets out, her father abandons the village in shame (though the Buddhist monk has no compunctions about taking the offering still!). Meanwhile, Cheong is resurrected by a fish and taken to the underwater court of the Great Dragon King, who is delightfully depicted as having a fish for a head, where she is praised not so much for the sacrifice itself (which he dismisses as a fearful supersitition) but for her role in killing Indangsu.

Cheong's lotus flower is brought to the palace, where the ministers are arguing over who should marry the prince. The last 20 minutes of the film are mostly about the palace drama subplot and Cheong's father making her way to the palace. There is a fight with wolves that feels like they come straight out of Tezuka. But ultimately of course her father reaches the palace just at the end of the feast, Cheong is reunited, and she marries the prince in a big old ceremony. Three cheers for filial piety etc. etc.

On the animation front, while I can certainly make technical quibbles, like the spacing/timing of the movement is often quite unnatural and the acting is very uneven, there's evidently a lot of research put into the historical (Joseon-era) designs and costumes here. I'm particularly enchanted by the variety of hats on display, like the semitransparent gat worn by male officials. And it certainly doesn't lack ambition! Lots of crowd scenes, acrobatics, background motion, here and there complex camera moves. Indeed, it is often the more choreographed motions, like dancing and religious ceremonies, which come off the best. (I'll admit, I'm a sucker for historical performance arts in animation. Same with Yamada's Heike Monogatari.)

The scenes of Cheong's father moving around are particularly interesting, they put a lot of effort into showing how he navigates the world while blind, with the help of Danchu. And the most important dramatic scenes do rein in the strange twitchy motion a bit and work a lot better.

A fascinating element throughout is the depiction of historical crafts and Joseon-dynasty Korea - you see characters preparing food and textiles in a variety of ways throughout the film, using all sorts of fascinating tools that I don't know the names of. It really makes me wish for a high-res scan of the original film so we could fully appreciate the backgrounds, but honestly given what sort of state the source was in, it's amazing we even have it at all!

I can definitely see why this film was not successful at release - despite using some digital techniques, it broadly feels like it belongs to the prior era of animated films like Nezha Conquers The Dragon King (Shanghai Animation Film Studio, 1979) or Toei films like Legend of the White Serpent (1958), with a straightforward mythological retelling plus talking animals that was long out of fashion by the mid-2000s. Given that Shin Neung-Kyun is old enough to have lived through the Korean War, it makes some sense that this is the sort of film he'd want to make as a passion project, but yeah.

In a funny way, I do think the mystique of this film - animation in North Korea, unavailability for 20 years - adds a lot to the experience of watching it. We can't entirely compare this with other North Korean films (of which I've only seen Comrade Kim Goes Flying), because as far as I understand, the story is pretty much all defined on the South Korean side. That said, the co-production aspect is pretty significant! The film was originally released with two different audio tracks with the North and South Korean dialects, it was released simultaneously on both sides of the border, and it definitely seemed like Shin intended this as a kind of cultural bridge. Unfortunately, history did not shake out that way - though Shin quietly continued to work with SEK studio for many years after.

Examples (Eastern -> Western name order):

Aono Hajime -> Hajime Aono (Surname: Aono) Kim Dokja -> Dokja Kim (Surname: Kim) Wei Wuxian -> Wuxian Wei (Surname: Wei)

Feel free to explain your reasoning in the notes.

Korean Yuri aeni film The Summer (Geu Yeoreum) reached the top spot at the Korean independent art film box office upon its June 7 debut. The film is one of a few queer animations produced in Korea.