By MARK RUSSELL
SEOUL, Aug. 29 - It is the most Korean of folk tales. A young girl, Shim Chung, gives her life to a sea dragon so that her blind father may see again - and is rewarded for her filial piety by becoming an empress.
A scene from the animated feature "Empress Chung," which opened in North and South Korea this month.
Nelson Shin worked for seven years and spent more than $6.5 million on his new animated film.
Now Shim Chung has earned another reward for her selfless sacrifice: an animated version of her ancient tale has become the first film to be released at the same time in North and South Korean movie theaters. "Empress Chung" opened on 51 screens in South Korea on Aug. 12, followed by 6 screens in North Korea on Aug. 15 - 60 years after the end of World War II, when the United States and the Soviet Union divided control of the Korean Peninsula.
"Empress Chung" is also a labor of love for Nelson Shin, and an expensive labor at that. Mr. Shin, a Korean-American animator, worked for seven years and spent more than $6.5 million of his own money to tell the classic tale.
Mr. Shin, 65, has devoted a lifetime to animating other people's stories, including 20 years at AKOM, his production company in Seoul, doing the grueling work of grinding out the tens of thousands of drawings needed in each episode of "The Simpsons" and other Western television shows. But he wanted to tell his own stories, so he started a new animation venture to create "Empress Chung": KOAA Films, based in the United States.
"I picked 'Empress Chung' because it had the most drama," Mr. Shin said, "and it is full of our Korean tradition." He was able to finance the film himself, but to cut expenses he turned to animators in North Korea, where labor costs a small fraction of what it does in South Korea. He worked with about 500 animators ("100 in the South, and the rest in North Korea") to create the 500,000 drawings required for "Empress Chung."
"The usual 'Simpsons' episode has about 20,000 cells in 22 minutes," Mr. Shin said. "So 'Empress Chung' had a lot of details."
"North Korean animators are excellent," he added. "They learn quickly and work very hard." The SEK animation studio in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, which did the animation, has been involved in an array of international productions since the late 1990's.
It was a natural connection for Mr. Shin, who was born in what is now North Korea in 1939. He was 12 when he walked with his family from North Korea to the South during the Korean War. "I remember the bombs going off overhead," he said.
Despite the hard times after the war, Mr. Shin knew he wanted to draw. After doing editorial cartoons for newspapers and working on some animated films, he immigrated to the United States in the 1970's. He found work with DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, one of the main subcontractors for Warner Brothers cartoons, and stayed on after Marvel Comics bought the company in 1981. Highlights of those years, he said, included helping create the light sabers in the original "Star Wars" film, producing the television series "The Transformers" and directing the movie version.
But it was an emergency rush in 1985 for the film "My Little Pony: The Movie" that allowed Mr. Shin to start Akom Studio in Seoul. In only 10 weeks, his newly formed team of animators was able to create the 300,000 cells required for the 1986 film. "We all just worked nonstop," he said.
It was a bountiful time for animation. In 1994, the South Korean government finally recognized the economic potential of the industry and started to support it (a far cry from 1967, when the government labeled cartoons one of the "six evils" of Korean society). By the late 1990's, South Korea was taking in up to 50 percent of the world's subcontracted animation. AKOM at one point employed more than 1,700 people.
Today, AKOM employs just 150. Most of the South Korean animation industry has suffered a major slowdown, and a rising standard of living has made South Korea less of a bargain, as animation companies increasingly moved to the Philippines, Vietnam and North Korea. In addition, two-dimensional animation has fallen out of favor. Audiences are turning more often to three-dimensional animation films like Pixar's "Incredibles."
More seriously, perhaps, Korean animators did not learn how to tell their own stories, preferring to churn out others' tales. "Koreans' technique is O.K., but they don't know anything about creation," Mr. Shin said.
Recent Korean attempts at original animated stories have not done well at the box office. The $10 million science-fiction film "Wonderful Days" barely made $2 million. "My Beautiful Girl, Mari" and "Oseam," both Grand Prix winners at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival (in 2002 and 2004), also barely made a blip at the Korean box office.
And it looks as if "Empress Chung," which also won a special prize at Annecy in 2003 and the top prize at the Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival in 2004, did not escape that fate either, earning just $140,000 in its opening weekend (a highly competitive weekend nonetheless, with new releases like "Fantastic Four," "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance" and "Welcome to Dongmakgol").
Mr. Shin has not finished working with North Korea, though. He said that both North and South Korea have agreed to produce his next project: a six-part animated series on Goguryeo, an ancient state that once occupied the northern half of the Korean Peninsula and much of Manchuria about 2,000 years ago. China recently created a furor in Korea when it claimed historical ownership of Goguryeo.
"I don't want to focus on where the land was; I don't want to make trouble," Mr. Shin said. "But it is a fantastic story."