Queer Animation: 'Portrait of D' (2003/2025) by María Lorenzo Hernández Now Restored

María Lorenzo Hernández, one of Spain's acclaimed indie animation filmmakers and educators, is always busy. When she's not teaching, she's crafting animation on Valencia murals or revisiting old horror films to make them an animation feline story

Her recent work (along with producer Enrique Millán) has been to restore one of her earlier films (and a queer story full of literature and painting references) that brought her general acclaim. The 2D animation 'Portrait of D' tells the story of two characters in Victorian England, the painter Nowan and his model, Count D. The interaction between those rather shady people will leave its mark on the perception of portrait painting itself, apart from making them prone to all kinds of vices and self-destruction.

The 2003 cel animation film has been recently restored, and now premieres in its painting glory. Director María Lorenzo Hernández talked to Zippy Frames.

Early Inspiration & Painting Backgrounds

I've been drawing and painting for as long as I can remember, and I started painting portraits when I was 15. I have spent hours with the models, talking about everything. For me, painting a portrait is the process of getting to know a person.

When I studied Fine Arts in Valencia, I had the chance to study Animation. By the end of my studies, torn between painting and animation, I wrote an imaginary story about a portrait that could never be finished. A classmate who read it told me, "This is unbelievable. Here you're telling how you search for yourself."

A while later, I began developing the project as a little exercise for my PhD courses in Animation and Design. I found a subject on production design very interesting: it wasn't about designing sets, but rather about creating relationships of continuity between spaces, transformations, or playing with representational styles. Thus, this project took visual form until, in 2002, I decided to start producing it on my own.

The Ghosts of Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker in 'The Portrait of D.'

Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker not only remained friends until Wilde’s passing away, but they also shared a common creative universe. In The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Dorian is corrupted by a hedonistic, decadent gentleman after he is made immortal by his friend, the painter. The portrait is a key object that vampirizes the model. I had also read a book about the writing of Dracula that mentioned a series of discarded characters: one of them was, precisely, a painter who painted to paint the mysterious Count, but he never achieved his goal, since the portrait always changed.

'Portrait of D.' is at the crossroads of both stories: the painter (Nowan)  wants to portray Count D. because he is fascinated by him. Somehow, artists look for immortality, but Nowan will be cursed in the process.

Building A Visual Atmosphere

For Count D., I had the limitation of never showing his face to keep him mysterious, so he always had to appear indirectly, from behind, out of focus. It was important to create enchanting environments, dreamlike and nightmarish atmospheres, to suggest a certain mood; for instance,  at the beginning, when the wave of women wanting their portraits surrounds the painter. Later in the street scene,  Nowan (now transformed into a vampire), puts on his red glasses, and we see the passersby through his eyes

The film was a unique opportunity to bring to life the painting style of some of my favorite artists (like the Victorian portraitists John Singer Sargent and Giovanni Boldini).  They had a wonderful command of things like composition and lighting, and what's more, they didn't usually spend many sessions on their paintings; they were fast painters. I think it was easier for me to evoke their elegant world through animation than to try to paint on canvas the way they did. It's much harder to imitate them when painting a picture!

Making the Animation

I had a storyboard drawn in pencil and painted in watercolor that was a key guide for maintaining the visual style throughout the production. Nowadays, an animatic is a much more important guide than a storyboard because we work digitally almost all the time and, in the end, the animatic evolves with the film and helps a lot with timing. But I had it recorded on a VHS tape; it wasn't much use to me that way.

Portrait of D. was animated with pencil and paper over a period of five months, and then we moved on to cel painting for three months. We painted more than 2,400 cels. It was a very exhausting task and, above all, we discovered that it was very difficult to keep the characters stable when we painted them in the film's very loose painting style. But I think that the trembling movement is now at the core of all my animations.

Narration and Soundtrack

I included the main character’s voice as the backbone of the narration, as I designed the storyboard. It was important to select only a few lines for the film script to find a balance between words, images, and music. The few dialogues in the film are shown indirectly —from the back, from the top of the character— to avoid lip synch.

fWe had a key musical theme: Gabriel Fauré’s Sicilienne, which has been my main inspiration since I watched the 1979 John Badham Dracula version.  My sister Mª Teresa, a piano player, and my friend Verónica Morales, a violinist, performed together the music for the film. My sister helped me choose the other music themes, mainly: Joan Maria Thomas’ The Black Swan, a disturbing piece for piano, and Emmanuel Comforto’s Mazurka Torrevieja. For the Expressionistic red scene, a flash-forward that takes place by 1930, I edited samples from different soundtracks, with a special nod to Cabaret.

Film Challenges

In 2003, the budget was my savings, given that I couldn't find a professional production company to make this short film or apply for any kind of funding. Despite this, the real difficulties arose toward the end of production: although a Rostrum camera was available at the Faculty of Fine Arts, we lacked a proper capture system, as the maximum available quality was PAL (720x576 pixels). This was one of the reasons why, over time, producer Enrique Millán and I considered re-digitizing all the original drawings that I had kept stored in boxes.

The 2025 Restoration & Its Effect

We scanned all the paintings on cels in 4K resolution, which increased the image quality 15 times compared to the original.  To restore the soundtrack, we decided to clean the original music recordings instead of re-recording them digitally because we wanted to maintain the beauty of the acoustic instruments. On the other hand, Foley was re-edited and dialogues from the Spanish version were re-recorded with new actors (but we kept the lead voices in English). 

The new cut was created using the old one as a guide, and we decided to respect the original's 4:3 aspect ratio so that we wouldn't have to modify the animations. In the new cut, only small aspects were updated, such as a decorative text that was previously handwritten and now converted to a vector drawing.

However, the greatest difficulty in the remastering came from having to scan backgrounds and characters separately, because when they were scanned together, the backgrounds tended to move in each frame. We covered the cels with colored cardstock to scan them, then removed the base color to combine the characters with the backgrounds. Additionally, to prevent the characters from looking too flat, we introduced a shadow effect to make it look like they had been photographed the old-fashioned way.

How Does it Feel to Restore 'Portrait of D'.?

'Portrait of D.' was the foundation of my entire filmography. Many good things happened to me thanks to this work.  Its restoration experience has been deeply satisfying and, I would add, transformative. Handling all this old material, which tells me about who I was 22 years ago, has been very intense. I even kept a journal to record the curiosities of what I found. I reviewed the entire production, not only the acetates but also the layouts, the sceneries, and hundreds of hand-drawn works carefully designed. Images of the old house where I lived, the hours I spent on this work, and the friends I had who helped me in this endeavor came to mind. I've also noticed the numerous iconographic connections this short film shares with my later works, such as Felina (2024).

Is 'Portrait of D.' Queer Animation?

I was aware of this while working on the film, that the relationship between Nowan and D. is homoerotic. In fact, there's a scene where Nowan is naked on D.'s bed, after having been vampirized. At the time of the film's release, I didn't receive any comments about it, although a friend of mine, Jesús Insua, dedicated a poem to the film: 'Portrait of D. Blues'. It ends this way:

“Obsessed with capturing you / your beauty, caged / prodigious, escaped / my impregnable canvas.
And after profaning you / my perverse human race / proclaimed a great victory. / It was an endless hecatomb.
I simply satiated your hunger / by oppressing your sublime aura. / Vain, clumsy, I squandered / your chance to love me.”

Watch 'Portrait of D.'

Film Review (Vassilis Kroustallis):

It is highly unexpected (but welcome) that a film that evokes so many colors, shapes, and figures ultimately explores emptiness. María Lorenzo Hernández reshapes the classic literary stories of Dorian Gray and Dracula to create a hybrid of a twin character whose moral stance leaves them with no face whatsoever (as opposed to a monstrous face). The meticulously painted film brings to life Victorian England as if it were a matter of course, and the fluidity of animation makes the whole animation short breathe. Yet this is a breath that reveals fear and anxiety: the whole film (helped by the English-voiced narration and the playing of Gabriel Fauré's Siciliénne) feels like a constant threat to reveal the empty character behind the glasses, masks, and fancy clothes. The hide-and-seek game is common in queer environments, which have to settle for depravity to have a bit of recognition. Seeing the film through a queer lens, we can sense the cracking of mirrors and the portraits that are no longer there as signs of an identity that never had the chance to reveal itself, instead being closeted in cramped and shady rooms after dark. Fluidity is here transferred from the animation to the characters themselves, and identity is not a given. The greatest advantage of the 'Portrait of D' is its indeterminacy: it is made even more relevant today than the 2003 (when it was first released). It tells you of a world and its characters that still deceive themselves (but not in front of a mirror) to achieve life-as-passing-by, but not the full thing. An intricate and remarkable animated film, which makes painting part of a distorted life.

About María Lorenzo Hernández:
María Lorenzo Hernández (born in Alicante, Spain, 1977) is one of Spain's most renowned animation filmmakers, whose short films have been selected, screened, and awarded in more than 40 countries. Nominated for the 2016 Goya Awards for The Night Ocean (2015), her short films pivot on a host of artistic disciplines—music, drawing, photography, and film—exploring different aesthetics and narrative styles through experimentation with rhythm and movement.

Her webpage  and Demo Reel

'Portrait of D' Credits:
Written and directed by María Lorenzo.
Animation and color (painting on cells) by María Lorenzo, Manuel Hurtado and Enrique Millán. | Voices: Peter Solly, Juan Sastre, Marta Bascuñana, Graham Purvis, Michael Nugent. | Sound recording: José Gabriel Ríos (GREM, Universitat Politècnica de València). | Music performed by Maite Lorenzo (piano) and Verónica Morales (violin), recorded in 2003. Restored by Armando Bernabeu Lorenzo. | Themes: Gabriel Fauré (Siciliénne), Joan Maria Thomas (The Black Swan), Emmanuel Conforto (Mazurka Torrevieja), Armando Bernabeu Andreu (Etiam). | Scanning and editing: María Lorenzo. | Sound post-production and mixing: Pedro Aviñó. Sismic Audio Studio, Valencia. | Production: Enrique Millán, Valencia 2003-2025.

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