Traversing the technicolour cosmos, real-life couple and film-making co-creatives Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese subvert the hero’s journey, find the fun in anxiety, and craft a colourful sci-fi world ruled by queer chaos.
In the Gay-laxy, in the kingdom of Clitopolis, an anxious and introverted Princess Saira misses her ex. In Lesbian Space Princess, the self-loathing title character must summon her feminist battle axe to save her situationship from incel aliens in normie space.
En route to her badass bounty-hunter ex, Kiki, Saira allies with a problematic ship from the 21st century, kisses a goth folk musician named Willow, and gets lost in an intergalactic feelings spiral inside the bong-shaped night club, "S Club 17".
What unfolds is a designedly unrestrained and wickedly funny psychedelic Cartoon Network pastiche, exploding genre conventions and reassembling them with a rainbow-coloured toolkit.
The movie’s inception came to Hough Hobbs in a post-shower epiphany. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, she recalled, "I stormed off and had a shower. And there, in the fog, it emerged, three words: Lesbian. Space. Princess." Those three words sparked a slightly chaotic writing process between the pair, whose backgrounds in film diverge significantly.
Hough Hobbs is an animator who drew on the cartoon logic of Invader Zim, Steven Universe and The Revolutionary Girl Utena, while Varghese comes from a live-action background and took inspiration from rom-com classics, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Bridesmaids and Legally Blonde. Two very distinct ways to read the film and two very distinct influences on it.
"To some degree, we did work in different rooms," Varghese says. "Emma would create the bones. I need something there to mould and work with."
"I’d write: ‘and then they talk about something here, and the goo would attack them, and they learn something,’ then Leela would come in and make it funny," Hough Hobbs adds.
That blend of cartoon absurdism and emotional realism is what makes Lesbian Space Princess tick. Even its worldbuilding - maximalist, comically self-aware, and "probably full of plot holes" - is grounded in this DIY ethos.
"There’s Gay Space, where there are probably as many planets as there are queer identities, and there’s Normie Space, which is the rest of the universe," Hough Hobbs explains.
"Some of it doesn’t make sense," Varghese admits. "I’m sure there’s, like, 1000 holes in it. My creative process is very unconscious - piecing stuff together and vibing with it."
A lot of this was down to budgetary scope.
"It’s not like we had a Star Wars text crawl at the start, explaining ‘Clitopolis is a feminist utopia for lesbians of all kinds’," laughs Hough Hobbs. "We had 10 backgrounds and six scenes."
Though budget constraints shaped the film’s structure, they didn’t limit its visual ambition.
The rainbow-coloured dreamscape of the gaylaxy is full of musical montages and dream sequences, and the richly detailed hand-drawn animation feels like a zine exploded in zero-gravity.
In one stunning sequence, when Princess Saira gets sucked into a dark psychedelic nightmare to retrieve the Labrys, the texture becomes fuzzy, the geometry bends, the sound design swells, and what was once pastel and punchy becomes shadowy and surreal.
Underneath the pastel palette lies a story about self-acceptance. Here, the voice casting was crucial.
"Shabana [Azeez] was the only person who didn’t do a caricature of anxiety," Hough Hobbs says. "Finding the relatability in the crying instead of the whininess. We lucked out with Shabana."
Varghese adds, "We were conscious that Saira could be an annoying, self-pitying character, so we made sure to have little moments that captured glimpses of her quirky personality."
Although Lesbian Space Princess may take place in a faraway galaxy, it’s a personal story for the creative pair, who wanted to express the importance of loving yourself before you end up with a partner.
"The film is composed of lots of tiny snippets from our lives," Hough Hobbs says. "The way the characters talk - they’re real."
"We’ve been space princesses," Varghese adds, half-joking. "Saira is a mix of the two of us."
Whether the next adventure picks up in Clitopolis or Normie Space remains to be seen - although a roguelite dating sim spin-off starring Kiki the Destroyer is apparently in development.
• Lesbian Space Princess screens as part of Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival at The Regent Theatre, tonight at 8.15pm.
