firebreather

For nearly three decades, Peter Chung has been a name in 2D animation, with such titles as “C.O.P.S.” and MTV’s “Aeon Flux” series. Now, he’s joining the 3D ranks, directing Cartoon Network’s first CGI movie, “Firebreather,” which premieres Wednesday at 7 p.m. ET/PT. “Firebreather,” based on the comic book series by Phil Hester and Andy Kuhn, is the story of a teenager named Duncan whose mother is human and whose father is Belloc, a 120-foot fire-breathing monster king. Hero Complex writer Noelene Clark caught up with Chung for Five Questions.

PC: It’s funny, because it’s where I started. A lot of people know me for my work on “Aeon Flux” and think of my work as being targeted for adults, but I started doing stuff for a younger audience. So for me, it’s not strange for me to be doing something like this at all. In this specific instance, I would say, it’s very satisfying now to sit with an audience and watch the movie and just have them respond very spontaneously and emotionally. And thinking a lot about how to do that, because for a long time, I was really trying to engage the audience on a cerebral level with “Aeon Flux” and with “The Animatrix” and some of the other things like “Tomb Raider,” and be a little more ironic or a little bit more self-referential, whereas this, I think, is just more of a classically told story. … [In "Aeon Flux"] I’d self-imposed all of these restrictions: no family, no personal ties, all the stuff which, to me, makes telling an emotional story a whole lot easier. I didn’t want those easy methods in the case of “Aeon Flux.” In the case of “Firebreather,” I mean the story, [relationships are] so intrinsic to the character, that it was kind of liberating to be able to make use of all of that. … When I was doing “Aeon Flux,” it was like I had this huge handicap that I’d imposed on myself. It’s like you’re training, and you’re running races with a pack of weights on your back, then suddenly you’re able to take them off, and you can run wild, and that’s a little what it felt like working on “Firebreather.”

firebreather