Taiwanese filmmaker Cheng-Hsu Chung made “Adorable” while studying animation at the Royal College of Art in London. He based the story illustrating the mental journey of a queer person partially on his own experience. Visually, he combines his characteristic style with abstract animation to provide us with a vivid image of the queer community.
“Adorable” follows a queer person exploring his sexuality and the queer community. For Cheng-Hsu Chung, this community is a place where discriminations, freedom, and love coexist and as such, he reflects on, both negative and positive sides of this world. Examples are, on the one hand, the way people stare at and make fun off LGBTQ+ couples and, on the other hand, the acceptance of one another within certain LGBTQ+ groups.
Cheng-Hsu Chung addresses a number of characteristics of queer life, such as porn. For many queer people, especially those growing up in traditional families, watching porn is often the first way to explore their sexuality. But other aspects are shown as well, such as online dating, partying and drug use, and the drag queen scene. For Cheng-Hsu Chung, this scene is the place where people can be themselves and where gender fluidity is not a utopia. The film ends where it started, in a room with a barred window as if to say that for many queer people, participating in this world is not a possibility.
To visualize this world, Cheng-Hsu Chung combines extremely abstract animation with more realistic imagery. But even the most realistic scenes are very stylized. His characters have a typical gender fluid design that Cheng-Hsu Chung developed while studying at the RCA. Transitions between scenes and styles occur in different ways, such as the morphing of characters and props into different forms and shapes.
Even though he used stop-motion techniques in the past, Chung now mainly works with hand drawn animation, the style of which ties in with his illustrations. All frames used for “Adorable” are hand painted, a technique he later reused for “Recode Running” (2019), commissioned by Adidas. The structure of the paint can clearly be seen, and this crude application evokes a speed in producing the frames of this film that underlines the importance of the subject to him. The high paced editing of the film emphasizes the hectic and rushed life of some LGBTQ+ people.
Sound plays an important role in the film. In “Adorable” Joe Farley's sound design consists mostly of sound effects. These are used in the figurative scenes but serve an important goal in the surreal and abstract scenes where they hand the viewer clues to interpret and understand what he is seeing. The sparsely used soundscapes add to the atmosphere of the scenes being at times unheimlich, trippy or relaxed.
With “Adorable” Cheng-Hsu Chung made a film that shows the difficulties LGBTQ+ individuals face in their daily life, but he also touches on some positive facets of their community. As such “Adorable” is much more liberating and joyful as one would think at first sight.
