A young royal from the planet Clitopolis must summon her inner labrys to save her ex-girlfriend in Lesbian Space Princess, now playing in Prague cinemas after premiering at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival and later screening at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. This engaging Australian animated satire can sometimes feel a little too on-the-nose (its villains are literally Straight White Maliens) but it has a lot of heart, and takes its axe to queer culture right alongside mainstream sensibilities.
Princess Saira (voiced by Shabana Azeez) is the painfully insecure daughter of the two queens of Clitopolis (Jordan Raskopoulos and Madeleine Sami), a lesbian utopia floating safely inside “gay space.” After being dumped by her girlfriend Kiki the Destroyer (Bernie Van Tiel), Saira’s world gets even worse when Kiki is kidnapped by the Straight White Maliens, a trio of extraterrestrial incels who want Saira’s legendary magical labrys for their own nefarious purposes. The problem: Saira has never been able to summon it.
Written and directed by Leela Varghese and Emma Hough Hobbs, Lesbian Space Princess wears its politics, jokes and influences proudly on its sleeve. The result is occasionally exhausting in its determination to make every possible joke about lesbianism, misogyny and genitalia, but it’s also difficult not to be charmed by a movie this unabashedly weird. And beneath the neon colors and deliberately juvenile humor is a surprisingly sincere story about self-worth, identity, and finding out that you don’t need someone else to validate you.
Saira is introduced as an introverted, deeply insecure young woman who is overshadowed by her universally adored lesbian mothers and unable to summon her birthright weapon. In Clitopolis, being gay is not an issue at all: There is no coming-out story, no homophobic family and no struggle to fit into a heterosexual world. Instead, Saira’s problems are entirely her own, rooted in her inability to form healthy romantic attachments.
Even her lesbian mothers aren’t the perfect role models Saira imagines them to be; they can be just as unhelpful in allowing their daughter to discover herself as more traditional parents might be. Saira’s eventual realization that she needs to stop looking for someone else to complete her is hardly a novel idea, but Lesbian Space Princess gives it a genuinely refreshing context.
The script struggles right alongside Saira when it comes to advancing her relationships: a romance with the benevolent Willow (Gemma Chua-Tran) doesn’t go where we might expect, and Saira’s ultimate realization concerning Kiki arrives well after the audience has worked out where this is going. Still, credit to Varghese and Hough Hobbs for making the story primarily about Saira rather than simply using another relationship to externalize her emotional growth.
The supporting characters provide some of the film’s biggest laughs. The Straight White Maliens, voiced by the Australian comedy trio Aunty Donna, are deliberately ridiculous, but they’re also given enough personality to become more than easy targets. Their schemes to attract women to their man cave are stupid in exactly the right way, and their bizarre attempts to understand relationships provide some of the movie’s funniest sequences. Even the “problematic” ship (Richard Roxburgh), which immediately informs Saira that women can’t be captains, is eventually allowed a satisfying character arc of its own.
The animation isn’t especially sophisticated, but the intentionally simple 2D designs are distinctive, with a candy-colored palette of pinks, purples and neons transforming the galaxy into something that feels halfway between a queer fever dream and an offbeat Cartoon Network series. It may not have the polish of a major studio production, but its handmade quality suits the film’s freewheeling personality.
The same is true of the humor. Some of the jokes land well; others are so obvious you can see the punchline approaching from several light-years away. The Straight White Maliens are intentionally broad, and the film’s constant parade of phallic jokes, wordplay and sexual references can become a little much. At its best, however, the comedy is genuinely inventive, particularly when the film turns its satirical gaze back toward queer culture rather than simply mocking outsiders.
That’s ultimately what makes Lesbian Space Princess more interesting than its premise might suggest. It isn’t content to present queer culture as some perfect utopia in opposition to a terrible heterosexual world. It pokes fun at both sides, while recognizing that insecurity, bad relationships, and parental expectations don’t disappear just because you’ve escaped heteronormativity.
The result is a unconventional animated feature that doesn’t always hit its targets but is consistently trying something different. Lesbian Space Princess may occasionally mistake obviousness for wit, and the romantic elements never quite reach the emotional heights of Saira’s internal journey. But there’s genuine warmth underneath all those neon colors and genitalia jokes.
