Animation films and the shaping of violent children
Still image from North Korean children’s animated series ‘A Squirrel and a Hedgehog.’ (Source: KCNA)
When defectors from North Korea see kids’ animation movies in South Korea for the first time, they’re usually in for a shock. They’re nothing like what they were used to.
“The films I grew up with now look excessively brutal and provocative,” said Lee, who arrived in 2022 and is studying political science at Soongsil University in Seoul. “Watching South Korean films, I felt the cruelty of the regime in the North which has been indoctrinating children for nearly 80 years.”
While the North’s film industry is struggling, as we reported last month, propaganda through animation and cartoons remains in full swing.
Throughout North Korea, the first sentence four-year-olds children learn in kindergarten is, “Thank you, dear father Kim Jong-un.”
The second is, “American bastards are wolves.”
Loyalty to the leader and hatred of the United States are the twin themes that characterize North Korean nationalism.
This is not news, but the international community forgets and from time to time reminds itself.
As the regime does not permit private education, the indoctrination is uniform in kindergartens and schools nationwide.
One of the most popular cartoons is A Squirrel and a Hedgehog. It depicts the current military standoff on the peninsula with the United States as a wolf, Japan as a weasel, and South Korea as a mouse. Other Western powers are crows and foxes under the control of the American wolf.
The North Korean military is the squirrel, with a heroic spy squirrel infiltrating the South on espionage missions.
Although the story may fit the North’s view of the standoff, the problem lies in the level of content that is inappropriate for children. There are numerous scenes of people drinking, scantily clad mice, and people being shot and killed.
Another popular animation, The Boy General, depicts the ancient peninsular kingdom of Goguryeo defeating northern invaders. It is also packed with gruesome scenes of people having their throat slit or being shot with arrows.
Anywhere else, people would automatically consider such scenes too unsettling for children. But having themselves been subjected to such abnormal indoctrination from early on, North Korean adults fail to catch the negative impact.
“The regime has been cleverly exploiting national division to maintain its dictatorship,” said Lee, a 55-year-old defector who entered South Korea in 2012 and is currently pursuing a doctoral program in North Korean studies at a university in South Korea.
“Slogans like ‘Let’s defend the leader with our lives’ or ‘Let’s become guns and bombs for our leader’ that are so familiar to citizens are no different from the suicide attack mentality of Al-Qaeda-like terrorist groups,” she said.
Such indoctrination colors everything youngsters are involved in. On June 1 Children’s Day, for example, they participate in games like ‘Throwing Grenades’ and ‘Destroying American Bastards’ at events held nationwide in nurseries and kindergartens.
Lee said that the indoctrination is so thorough that children do not consider the killing of Americans or South Koreans to be murder.
“They grow up with a violent use of words, uttering phrases like ‘I will kill’ as a casual matter of course from the earliest age,” she said. “Preaching violence like this to children is unjustifiable under any circumstances.”
Zane is a defector from North Korea. Before defecting in 2022, he worked at a state-run North Korean company based in Russia. Prior to his assignment in Russia, he had worked at the external affairs department of a company affiliated with the DPRK's Escort Bureau. He graduated from Pyongyang University of Architecture.
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