Lesbian space princess is an Australian animated feature film made by Emma Hugh Hobbes and Leela Varghese. It is a relatively small production and can generally be seen as an indie movie depending on who you are asking. The movie received a Teddy award at Berlin International film festival, has a 98% freshness among critiques on Rotten tomatoes, recently got picked up by Netflix and somehow became the number 1 enemy of the internet over night.
I will today give you a totally unique perspective on this movie. While many has released videos talking about it, cringed over it, and roasted it, I did the unthinkable:
I watched it.
The plot of lesbian space princess
Lesbian space princess is a scifi comedy telling a story with themes surrounding self worth, relationships, and growing up.
The movie focuses on the titular space princess Saira (Shabana Azeez) who has grown up as an insecure shut in within the wonderful utopia of Clitopolis. She is surrounded by her neglectful parents and harsh subjects leaving her with only one person on her side Kiki(Bernie van Teel) who promptly breaks up with her leaving Saira alone.
When Kiki is kidnapped by the dastardly alien species known as the straight white “maliens”, Saira is told to give up her royal labrys (an axe often used as a symbol within lesbian and feminist circles) as ransom to save Kiki and maybe win her back. The only issue is that she has no idea how to summon it.
Saira decide to go on an epic quest alone outside of gay space to find the weapons expert named Blade that might be able to help her bring out her Labrys. She is accompanied by a “problematic-ship” (Richard Roxburgh) from the 21st century and finds the nonbinary and bisexual Willow (Gemma Chua Tran) that she quickly grows romantic feelings towards.
What I like:
The movie is fun. It is cleverly written, filled with small innuendos and references and has very believable dialogue. It is very much a movie for the queer audience with jokes surrounding sexuality, gay culture, and more. The writers are however clearly giant nerds that throw in references to popculture on multiple occasions which I enjoy.
There is a segment that uses Rush E, another segment uses the audio sting from FLCL, the titular lesbian space princess has a sailor moon transformation, there is a scene were a monster explodes ripped straight out of panty and stocking, “problematic ship” is a shipping discourse term, and more. There are a lot of small nuggets for the more experienced viewer.
It isn’t only a movie you should watch for the references though. I think the main conflict in lesbian space princess is interesting and well told. While the setting is rather fantastical the internal struggle is very down to earth and relatable. Jokes flows well and the movie grapples with some heavy themes and internal struggles. I think that a lot of teens and even adults can appreciate it if they give it a chance.
It is very much a movie made for a very specific audience which is young queer adults with a tumblr sense of humor. This should be expected by a movie called lesbian space princess but apparently people never caught on.
The music was always well produced, while some lyrics where pretty obviously meant to be a little over the top and campy I never had an issue with it. I understand if ukulele musicals aren’t everyone’s favorite but I don’t think it has to be your favorite to not be bad.
I think the movie has a very fitting conclusion that really ties everything together. in an effort to not spoil lesbian space princess to you I won’t tell you what it is.
Some real issues
The animation is often stilted and don’t always look the best. There are plenty of scenes where they reuse specific shots over and over. Action scenes are often just badly choreographed. I understand that Saira wouldn’t be an adept fighter or anything given who she is but it that realization don’t make the fights involving her more interesting.
This is not a movie that you should watch for the sakuga although it isn’t as badly animated as some would let you believe. While there is a lot of effort put into this movie it is obvious that they worked on quite a slim budget leading to relatively limited animation.
Some jokes feel like they drag on a little to long. I don’t think they would be if it weren’t because of that stilted animation and it’s clear that they wanted to do more but that was seemingly not possible given the limitations.
The “Issues”.
Lesbian space princess has been accused of being more or less the devil by plenty of people online who I won’t name individually. The reason because of this is not because of any real flaw with the movie. It is quite obvious that it is a decent movie from the critical reception alone. While awards and critiques aren’t infallible they point toward a better movie than what is described.
There are some obvious things that work against Lesbian space princess that make it an especially easy target. It’s a woman led feature film called Lesbian space princess that pokes fun at incell culture and straight white men that has a lacking visual presentation. It has a lot of jokes that drag on pretty long that people make fun of despite the fact that they like similar jokes in other media like Smiling Friends. especially the “realistic dialogue” bits. The fact that it was released on 9/11 don’t help.
Before even watching it I have seen people saying online that Lesbian Space Princess is transphobic, woke, ugly, badly written, amateurish, unfunny, stupid, and “the one thing that everyone from every fandom hates”.
People are claiming that it is transphobic due to the inclusion of the Labrys. This is because many mean that the symbol has been coopted by and associated with TERFs. While it is understandable to have issues with some symbols its also clearly a movie celebrating the queer identity. The labrys is also not exclusively used by transphobic people. The creators has previously explained in an interview with Joysauce that the labrys inclusion was done to reclaim it from TERFS and Sairas trans mother is even able to summon one.
I see some people call this movie “cringe” but I mostly think that it is becuase the people who slander this movie seldoml want to accept it on it’s own terms.
Lesbian space princess has just sadly become a punching bag, “sacrificial trash” some would say. There is really nothing about the movie that makes it deserve this level of discussion.
It is nice to see the counter movement that has sort of formed around lesbian space princess saying that it is in fact okay, but the net shouldn’t be set up in a way that bad actors can just walk in and paint an okay movie as if it was The Room because it features gay characters and don’t look supreme.
This is the same thing that happened with High Guardian Spice and Q force and more. I think it’s okay to dislike these projects but the the reaction is not the same as we see with verifiably worse shows. The only reason I can come up with is that people are narrow minded and ignorant. That’s not really the most fun conclusion to get to but that’s where we are.
The only thing that could be good about this whole situation is that at least more people hopefully has seen it than they have before.
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