Peter Chung

Peter Chung is a Korean animator, he is best known for his unique style of animation and his wonderful approach to visual storytelling. As he has worked and lived in the US, Korea and Japan he has an awareness of different cultures and the visual practice in each.





After studying animation at university he worked as a layout and storyboard artist for a number of children’s series including transformers, Rugrats and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (A series I adored when I was younger). As children’s series aren’t the most challenging he began creating his own animation called Aeon Flux. This strange animation started as a series of 5 minute shorts, it was soon picked up by MTV and developed to be 22 minute only episodes.

His style of drawing is inspired by Japanese anime and manga, which can be clearly seen. But his inspiration is not just limited to inside animation, he is inspired by a mixture of writes, comic book artists, film, expressionism and of course his personal experiences.

He escaped the fix patterns animation was set to, where it was considered to be only target at children, whereas now there are many animations made for adults.

Chung explains that every last detail in animation is carefully pre-planned; nothing can be left to chance when so much time is taken to create only short scenes. This makes it no less creative as all design has an intention for the end result.

Audiences need to be involved with the characters, it the character feels something then the audience need to react to it.

When creating Aeon Flux, Chung didn’t want to follow the mainstream rules of telling a story. His animations don’t start at the beginning, he starts from the middle yet the audience is still able to grasp what’s happening. There is character development which allows the audience to decide if the character is ‘good’ or bad’. Different viewpoints are used to narrate, so the audience isn’t simply just given the story straightaway. Finally he covers themes which would be expected in animation. This all allows the audience to really interact with the animation, to solve puzzles, think and recall events.