CHAKHAM
2018 · 3m · United States
Directed by Yoon Su Lee
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A hand-drawn animated portrait of the Korean expectation that young adults be obedient and self-sacrificing, and the cost of drifting between one's own desires and others' expectations.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a coming-of-age film about filial duty, which sounds like exactly the kind of consensus tearjerker I'd skip—except Lee animates the internal collapse so viscerally that the premise flips into something genuinely unsettling, a portrait of psychological surrender that refuses the easy catharsis.
Hand-drawn animation in service of intimate emotional territory places this squarely in a lineage of lyrical East Asian shorts that use form to articulate cultural constraint; the restraint in Lee's visual language—economy of line, precision of gesture—signals a filmmaker thinking formally about how abstraction can render the ineffable.
The crucial choice here is the decision to animate rather than live-act: that abstraction creates distance from the character's face just when you need it most, forcing the viewer to read desire and resignation into minimalist gesture and negative space, which transforms a 3-minute film into something that lives in your chest.
Reviews
Yoon Su Lee's poetic, abstract animation Chakham is a shining example of such a film. 'Generally, Chakham (the noun means goodness, good nature in Korean) has a very positive meaning, but the more I got used to that kind of praise, I felt I lost my ability to judge what is my true happiness and genuineness.'