• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.43
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• pp.151-184
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• 2016

In order to develop the animation industry, it is essential to encourage other related areas because all related industries can create synergy effects through exchanging their business. The magazine industry dealing with animation is one of them since the animation magazine plays an critical role in providing information and knowledge as well as analyzing market and industry from the practical viewpoint. But, there is only one magazine working in Korea, and it has never been researched so far even though over 20 years has passed since its first publication in 1995. It is Animatoon that is published by the company of Akom Production Co. who produced animation from the mid-1980s and Nelson Shin, the CEO of Akom, has worked as the Chief Editor. This research deals with Animatoon from the first issue till vol. 115 which was published in 2015, and tries to explore the characteristics. The result is as follows. First, Animatoon provides items to understand every article easily. Second, it provides original English articles written by foreign correspondents. Third, it provides different type of articles such as terminology explanation, production pipeline related knowledge, information about newly-released animation DVDs and so on. In addition, it is found out that Animatoon has small amount of advertisements. These characteristics shows that Animatoon helps subscribers to judge the contents of articles easier, tries to focus on the global trend, and provides basic and critical information. Therefore it can be said that Animatoon has enough features to be judged as the specialized magazine. First, Animatoon has its own specialized area, which is animation. Second, considering the type of articles, Animatoon tries to have all the parties concerned as its subscribers. Although, the amount of ads in Animatoon is small, only animation related ads are run through the whole issues.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.44
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• pp.85-116
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• 2016

This is the in-depth research dealing with Animatoon, the only animation-specialized magazine in Korea. By examining articles provided under the 'Animatoon Report' category, which is one of article categories set by the publisher, this research tries to find out the topic of articles and examine the tendency of topic. 'Animatoon Report' is chosen because the category title does not clearly show characteristics of articles, but has the second largest number of articles among all categories. First, the articles of the first ten years (1995-2005) has the largest number of pages as well as images, which means each article of this period tries to enrich its contents. Second, the role of magazine reporters are not critical considering the number of articles written by reporters are smaller than those made by the editorial department. Third, articles tries to deal with diverse issues and are mostly placed in front of the magazine. Fourth, in early days, articles used to provide the 3~5 lines of introductory summaries, but changed into provide the lead, the Korean and English subtitle, and so on. Fifth, articles mostly focus on issues of animation and Korea rather than other areas and countries. The results on the basis of article type are as follows. Among the types of people, work, organization/company, event, policy/industry, and etc, the policy/industry type has the largest amount of articles, and articles on the policy and those on the industry shows similar number of articles. Second, the event type has the second largest number of articles even though there are several separate categories only for the event. Third, articles in the et cetera type are often seen in early days because Animatoon who did not systemize the company itself focused on animation history and production techniques. Fourth, articles both on the people and the work type are consistently seen through the whole time period, but those on organization/company and event has more and more articles as time passes. In conclusion, it is possible to mention that the 'Animatoon Report' type shows more interest in policy and industry, and its interest on both issues are consistently seen from 2001 to 2015.