AKOM



AKOM (short for Animation KOrea Movie Productions) is a South Korean animation studio formed in 1985 by Nelson Shin, a former animator at DePatie-Freleng Enterprises and creator of the Lightsaber effects in Star Wars, as well as producer of the original Transformers TV Series and director of the show's (first) full-length toy commercial.

The studio is also responsible for publishing a South Korean magazine called "Animatoon" since 1995. You can probably tell from the title what the magazine's about.

See also Toei Animation, Mook DLE, Mainframe Entertainment, Production Reed, Studio Gallop, Dong Woo Animation, Actas, Wang Film Productions, GONZO, Sunwoo Entertainment, Industrial Light and Magic, Digital Domain and Studio 4°C, other studios involved with Transformers.

Amongst the series they animated:

 * Animaniacs - 61 shorts and a handful of bumpers.
 * Arthur - Worked on the first eleven seasons before being replaced by Animation Service HK.
 * Attack of the Killer Tomatoes - Hired for the first season before being replaced by (a surprisingly inferior) in-house team.
 * Batman the Animated Series - 11 episodes. Fired after the episode "Cat Scratch Fever" aired.
 * The Brothers Flub
 * Bucky O Hare and The Toad Wars
 * Conan the Adventurer
 * Dilbert - Done alongside Rough Draft Studios (also their partner on The Simpsons) and Yeson Entertainment.
 * Dino Riders - Hired for the remainder of the show's run after the first two episodes, replacing Hanho Heung Up.
 * Doctor Rabbit's World Tour
 * Earthworm Jim
 * Empress Chung - AKOM's first major production for the Korean market, worked alongside the North Korean Studio SEK.
 * Exo Squad - Replaced Sunrise after the initial stages of planning.
 * Fraggle Rock - Animated Adaptation.
 * Gargoyles - Subcontracted by Disney, of all companies. Six episodes
 * G.I. Joe & G.I. Joe Extreme
 * Huntik Secrets and Seekers
 * Invasion America
 * The Land Before Time - Movies II to VI
 * Marsupilami - Early Marathon episodes only. The better known Disney series was done by Wang Film Productions and Saerom.
 * Mission Hill - 6 episodes. Remaining episodes were by New Millennium.
 * Mosaic - Opening Titles only, main feature handled by Mook DLE.
 * Muppet Babies - From Season four to the series' end.
 * My Little Pony - First two generations and The Movie (With Toei Animation).
 * The Oblongs - 7 episodes. Remaining six were by Rough Draft Studios.
 * Peter Pan and The Pirates - Amongst other companies, 9 episodes.
 * Pinky and The Brain - certain episodes.
 * Rescue Heroes - Replaced the first company from season 2 on.
 * The Simpsons - Over 200 episodes. The company's most noticeable work and one they still do. They also helped animate the movie.
 * Spiral Zone - 15 episodes only, the others by Visual 80.
 * Teen Days
 * Tiny Toon Adventures - 22 episodes. One of their episodes had Ink and Paint shipped off to Fil Cartoons and mistakenly credited to Wang.
 * The Tick
 * The Transformers - The company's first noticeable work, 22 episodes (Three Season 2 episodes, sixteen Season 3 episodes and The Rebirth 3-parter). Done uncredited.
 * Winx Club
 * X-Men - seasons 1-4, and the first five episodes of season 5, later episodes done by Philippine Animation Studio Inc and Hong Ying.

Tropes associated with this Company:

 * Animation Bump: Occurs occasionally in some of their shows (Batman, Transformers, and Tiny Toon Adventures) and Word of God points out that they did the good animation in Spiral Zone. Also appears in The Simpsons Movie for obvious reasons.
 * Limited Animation: Not to the extent of Filmation But still present. Of course the founder first worked at such a company.
 * Averted on Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs, which utilized full animation.
 * Off-Model: The studio was fired from Batman the Animated Series because of this.
 * "Some Enchanted Evening" of The Simpsons had to be reanimated for this very reason; James L. Brooks even said of it, "This is shit." However, it's unknown how much of the blame can be attributed to AKOM, or to Klasky Csupo, the first domestic studio to work on the show.
 * "Carnage In C-Minor" is often considered to be one of the worst Transformers Generation 1 episodes, animation wise. Though it can't (and doesn't) do their quality justice. It's hard to explain what extreme AKOM's TF episodes go to without Walls of Text . Each episode is filled to the brim with errors, such as the wrong character model being used (think "Alice's voice is heard but we see Bob talking; Dave is walking past in the background, but isn't Dave dead?!), layers done wrong that a character will 'disappear behind' something that's behind him, three shots of a group of characters will have three different versions of the roster, including an Autobot with Decepticons or vice versa, and so on. It wasn't just aesthetically displeasing, it was honestly plot-altering sometimes With AKOM, get used to wondering this kind of thing. They keep getting work because they're cheap, but they are the embodiment of "You get what you pay for."