(France/Belgium, 73 min.)
Written and directed by: Laurent Boileu & Jung
Starring: Jung, William Coryn, Christelle Cornil, Jean-Luc
Couchard, David Macaluso
Jung was born in South Korea but was adopted by a Belgian
family at the age of four. Jung knows few details about his life in Korea,
aside from the year of his birth and the description written the adoption
agent, “Colour of skin: honey.” It is therefore unsurprising that Jung grew up
with his adopted family in Belgium feeling a hole in his life and wondering
about the family and culture he left behind. Jung, now forty-two, returns to
South Korea in Approved for Adoption
and retraces his family.
Approved for Adoption tells
Jung’s story in an exciting blend of animation and live action footage blended
with Super 8 archival images taken during Jung’s childhood by his adopted
parents. The mixed form tells an old coming of age tale anew. Jung, who grew up
to be artist, adapts his own graphic novel into this animated autobiography that
has inflections of documentary. Jung notes that drawing afforded him a chance for
therapy and escape as he felt excluded within his adopted him, as his mother
always treated him a bit differently from the children to whom she gave birth.
She was always a bit harder on Jung than she was on the other kids, and this
psychological distance was compounded by harsh discipline that saw Jung’s
parents teach him a lesson via crops and whips.
Feeling like an outsider within his own family, the elder
Jung recalls how this sense of exile caused a dangerous self-loathing towards
his South Korean identity. It caused some romanticizing, too, as the animated
Jung dreams of reuniting with his birth mother to repair the rift he feels
within himself. Jung finally decides to reconcile with the past as he returns
to South Korea and explore his journey to Belgium. The trip to South Korea,
captured in live action, shows the real Jung exploring the city he long thought
of as home. Throughout the live action scenes, Jung mediates upon how the
constant struggle with identity and escapist role-playing of his youth—he often
pretended he was Japanese—eventually led him to channel his energy into
creativity.
The bulk of the film is comprised of beautiful animated
scenes that represent Jung’s childhood in Belgium. The great thing about
drawing, Jung says, is that one can imagine life how one likes it. The scenes
from the past are honey-hued sepia, a nostalgic tone that reflects upon Jung’s
youth with warmth for the family he is only now coming to understand during his
journey. Approved for Adoption’s
beautiful animation and sentimental coming of age tale are buoyed by a moving
score by Siegfried Canto and Little Comet that underscores Jung’s retrospection
with some acoustic rifts.
The animated sequences include some imaginative leaps as
Jung conjures an idea of what his absent Korean mother might be like. Appearing
as an elusive and ethereal figure, the mother Jung chases seems a more exotic
interpretation than the blunt, hard-nosed white woman etched in the Belgian
memory bank. Jung, in the live action scenes, eventually notes that this dream
of finding his birth mother always skewed his perspective. Things look much
sunnier when they exist as a fantasy, but it’s only through grounding oneself
in reality that one finds any sense of closure.
The mixed form of Approved
for Adoption therefore works brilliantly as Jung finds his own grounding in
real life, but then uses his flair for creativity to rewrite and reimagine the
childhood with the love he came to realize in retrospect. The animated return
to the past lets Jung retrace his roots not to South Korea, but to Belgium,
where his true family as he knows it began. Refashioning his life as a fable, Approved for Adoption lets Jung be both
within and without his happy family as he situates his own sense of belonging
into a hybrid world. Approved for
Adoption is a playful study of family and memory, and art and reality as
Jung finds the form that fits him best.
Rating: ★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Approved for Adoption screens again:
Sunday, Sept. 22 at
The ByTowne at 3:00 pm
Please visit www.animationfestival.ca for more
information on OIAF.
