Empress Chung (partially found Korean animated film; 2005)

This article has been tagged as Needing work due to its lack of clarity.

The film's theatrical poster.

Status: Partially Found

Empress Chung (Korean: 왕후심청) is a 2005 animated feature film, produced in both North and South Korea and directed by Nelson Shin.

Synopsis

The movie is based on a famous Korean folk tale about a daughter who sacrifices herself to restore her blind father's eyesight.

Production

As a personal project, Shin spent eight years getting the project off the ground, including three and a half years of pre-production. The film was co-produced in North Korea by the Chosun April 26th Children Film Studio (also known as SEK), and the score was also recorded in the North by the Pyongyang Film and Broadcasting Orchestra. In a move unusual for the Korean film industry, the character voices were recorded in both the South and the North due to differences in dialect. For the definitive international release version, the South Korean dub is the one used.

Release & Disappearance

On August 12th, 2005, Empress Chung became the first film to have been released simultaneously in both North and South Korea. The film was featured at the 2004 Annecy International Animation Festival, and was also recognized with several awards in Korea.

The film grossed US $140,000 on its opening weekend against a US $6.5 million budget, continuing a trend of under-performing animated features made for the Korean market.

Since then, the film simply vanished and no home release was ever produced. Nowadays, the only things related to the movie that is online is the trailer, sound test animation, some screenshotes^[1] and a collection of children's books.^[2]

Surprisingly, KMDB does not even have this movie on VOD despite having even much older titles such as A Story of Hong Gil-dong from 1967 which was considered lost for many years which raises a question was this movie purposely never released anywhere due to political tensions between North and South Korea.

Another thing worth noting is that the movie does have a page on FilmDoo which does allow users to vote if they wanna see movie available on platform.^[3]