Page 1 of
2 BOOK
REVIEW An
animator's novel
experience Pyongyang: A
Journey in North Korea and Shenzhen:
A Travelogue from China by Guy Delisle
Reviewed by Fraser Newham
Guy
Delisle was far from home in a three-star Chinese
hotel, shivering in the arctic blast of an air-con
on the blink. There was every indication that the
project was heading for disaster - and no
guarantees that his local colleagues even
understood there was a
problem. He was ready to
snap.
The obvious next move? To attack the
hotel room; in Delisle's case with a sharp
roundhouse kick to the wall-mounted
air-conditioner control, utterly unresponsive up
to this point, presumed broken. It was only when
his head cleared that Delisle, inspecting the
damage, discovered the futility even of that. "The
temperature control on the AC doesn't control a
thing," he writes. "It's just a plastic dial held
in place by a screw."
There may just be Asia Times
Online readers who find all this a little bit
familiar, for such is the stuff of working life on
the frontiers of globalization. At the time
Delisle was working in animation, a
French-Canadian plying his trade among the studios
of Europe - studios that by the
late 1990s had largely gone out of business as
work migrated to the
cheaper workshops of Eastern Europe and the Far
East. Delisle had stuck with his French employers,
but consequently his work saw him spending
increasing amounts of time in East Asia on
short-term managerial contracts.
Two such
jaunts he has turned into a pair of graphic
novels, Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China
and Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea,
originally published in French and now newly
reissued in English-language international
editions.
Chronologically, his Shenzhen
trip came first; the book records a lonely two
months he spent there over Christmas 1997, working
on the animated version of popular French comic
strip Papyrus.
Meanwhile, his stint in the hardcore-sounding
destination of Pyongyang came five years later;
there he represented French
channel TF1, one of a hardy gang of
French-employed animators managing some of the
cheapest animation talent in the world during a
brief window of opportunity, now closed (by
sanctions).
Outsourcing, both books make
clear, is no picnic - or this, at least, is the
view from the ground. In North Korea, life is
relentlessly colored by the need to make political
accommodations with the regime. On arrival he is
required to pay homage to a statue of Kim Il-sung.
Most of his movements are shadowed by an official
minder, and at work an elderly political commissar
pads around the studio drinking tea from a tin
cup. At one point at work he pops a jazz compact
disc into his personal computer, and his minder
flies into the room insisting that he shut the
door, lest the devilish beats pump forbidden
thoughts of freedom through his local colleagues'
veins.
In Shenzhen, by contrast, his
accommodation is with the buccaneering, unsteady
capitalism of China in the first months after Deng
Xiaoping. He is very conscious that he is living
in a cultural desert, where only construction,
development and making money feature on the local
agenda. The whole organization in Shenzhen is
flying by the seat of its pants, and Delisle must
contend with mountains of work, impossible
deadlines and penny-pinching wherever possible.
Soon after his arrival, for instance, he discovers
that the local partner has ditched layout
altogether - instead the animators only have
photocopied storyboards to guide them, all to save
a buck.
In both settings he has
familiar-sounding difficulties communicating his
requirements to his staff. Animators at the
Pyongyang studio just can't nail that typically
French (and seemingly quite essential) gesture,
the "ooh la la"; and in Shenzhen he resigns
himself to micromanaging his staff, writing out
the smallest of instructions to avoid confusion
and, when all else fails, even as his desk groans
under the accumulated workload, in time-honored
fashion rolling up his sleeves and
damn-well-doing-it-himself.
To revisit
these joyful times in the form of a graphic novel
has novelty value - Tintin, Delisle implies at one
point, never had to put up with this - and
certainly the author makes the most of the format
here. On one level the immediacy of cartoon strips
allows Delisle as a short-term visitor to document
what he finds with reasonable accuracy; he can
draw what he sees, to a large extent
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studios that by the
late 1990s had largely gone out of business as
work migrated to the
cheaper workshops of Eastern Europe and the Far
East. Delisle had stuck with his French employers,
but consequently his work saw him spending
increasing amounts of time in East Asia on
short-term managerial contracts. 
channel TF1, one of a hardy gang of
French-employed animators managing some of the
cheapest animation talent in the world during a
brief window of opportunity, now closed (by
sanctions). 
