Peter Chung was given a great deal of freedom on Matriculated, his episode in the Animatrix series, based on the feature The Matrix.

For almost three decades, Peter Chung has been carving out a unique place for himself in the field of animation. An artist with an instantly recognizable visual style, his work has ranged from storyboards and characters designs for television shows like Transformers, Rugrats, Phantom 2040 and Reign: The Conqueror to creating the MTV series Aeon Flux, writing and directing the short Matriculated for The Animatrix and directing the OVA The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury.

Chung's interest in animation began when he saw a screening of student films from CalArts at an animation festival when he was in high school. Soon he was making his own animated films in Super 8. "At that point," he says, "I knew that was what I wanted to do. CalArts was the only school that I applied to. I just knew that I was going to get in." He did, attending CalArts from 1979 to 1981, and that's also where we began our interview.

Craig J. Clark: What was it like for you when you got to CalArts?

Peter Chung: I applied to be in the character animation department and after my first year there my teachers suggested that I switch to experimental animation. They didn't seem to think that my style, my sensibility was what they were looking for. It's changed a lot since then, but at the time the department was run by ex-Disney artists, so they were very rigid about what they were looking for.

CJC: And the experimental side gave you more freedom?

PC: It did, but it was kind of like they didn't provide any useful instruction at all. I felt like after my second year I'd gotten everything I was going to get out of being at CalArts. I was eager to start working in the industry.

CJC: And one of your earliest jobs was on Ralph Bakshi's Fire and Ice. Was Bakshi one of your influences?

PC: Yeah, more so than Disney at the time. I was 20 years old and my interest in animation was making the kinds of films that I wanted to see at that age. For the most part that didn't mean Disney fairy tale-type movies. It was more like R-rated films like what Bakshi was making, and Fire and Ice was perfect for me because I was a big fan of [Frank] Frazetta as well. Frazetta at the time was a big influence on me. The chance to work with both of them was hard to resist.

CJC: So were you drawn to his kind of individualist vision?

PC: Yeah, what I liked about Bakshi was I felt his films came from a personality, an individual, whereas I felt Disney films -- as technically polished as they are -- just didn't seem like works of personal expression. They seemed to be products of tradition, and they are products of a group effort. I never got a sense of the personality behind them like I did with Ralph's work.

CJC: After that you did a lot of storyboard work and design work on various TV shows.

PC: Before I did that I actually got hired at Disney, funnily enough. I left Bakshi to go work at Disney for about two years. It's strange thinking back on it. It was a very vague kind of job where I came up with ideas that they would use or they wouldn't use. They did that a lot at the time at Disney. They would hire animators straight out of school and put them in development, hoping to see what they would come up with.

I worked on a live-action movie about Einstein, designing visual effects sequences, and after that I was asked to develop a feature film idea. I wrote an original story for a live-action film with computer-animated effects, kind of as a follow-up to Tron. At the time they had high hopes for Tron. When that wasn't a success, my project was canceled. Eventually, I got frustrated after two years of working on projects that didn't get produced.

So I decided to go and get as much experience as possible. I started doing storyboards for TV, Transformers, and then I did character design. I did a bit of everything. I did some animation, layout. I tried to get a lot of experience in a lot of different areas as a way of working my way towards becoming a director, which was what I wanted to do.

CJC: So by the time you were actually developing your own show, you had this array of skills. And obviously the process of putting a show like Aeon Flux together is not linear...