Lesbian Space Princess review: Australia’s Berlinale champion shines

We’ve all been through a bad breakup. But it’s not every day that Straight White Maliens abduct your freshly AWOL ex. Or that your sentient vulva is so unbothered by your predicament that it breaks into song and dance. Or that you have to figure out how to manifest a double-headed axe from your wotsit.

This is the tongue-in-every-cheek premise of Lesbian Space Princess, South Australian filmmaking duo Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese’s uproariously silly, anarchic and totally NSFW yet surprisingly wholesome debut animated feature.

Disney this is not, packed as it is with very Aussie insult-hurling and an omnishambles of genitalia jokes. But this bawdy sci-fi voyage in the Rick and Morty by way of Adventure Time mould has an intergalactic heart that’s as much a beam-me-up-Scotty for loving yourself enough to be loved in return as it is about horny dirtbags.

The film scooped up the Teddy Award for best LGBTQIA+ feature at this year’s Berlinale, where a gobsmacked Hobbs and Varghese were rewarded with the pink bear statuette as well as an enthusiastic hug from queer hero Toddy Haynes, who was honoured with a lifetime achievement award.

But does Lesbian Space Princess live up to the buzz (lightyear)?

Lesbian Space Princess: instantly endearing

You bet! It’s chaotic good. Shabana Azeez is instantly endearing, voicing the lead role of practical magic-loving (the skill, though probably the film, too) Princess Saira. A sweet-natured dork and a bit of a clingy shut-in with terminal confidence levels, she has thrown her entire personality into loving her girlfriend, no-nonsense bounty hunter babe Kiki (Bernie Van Tiel).

Watch the Lesbian Space Princess trailer.

The trouble is, that sort of adoration is a huge turn-off for the fly-by-night Kiki. So much so she bails in the opening moments, immediately confounding the rom-com vibes and condemning Saira to a fate worse than death: attending the lesbian ball solo. Again. Thrown by her mums (Madeleine Sami and Jordan Raskopoulos), the queens of the allegedly hard-to-find Clitopolis, it’s Saira’s entire world.

But Kiki’s kidnap is about to expand Saira’s horizons as she’s forced to embark on a planet-hopping rescue mission to find the hilarious incel trio that is the Straight White Maliens. As voiced by the Aunty Donna boys Mark Bonanno, Broden Kelly and Zachary Ruane, these dudebros without a clue are using Kiki as bait. They want to get hold of the royal labrys, the Amazonian weapon of legend Saira has the power to summon, She-Ra-like, from her core. If only she would listen to her gut.

Bouncing from brilliantly conceived oddball planet to planet, Lesbian Space Princess is a frenetic, fun adventure where the jokes – both visual and verbal – make landfall at an astounding rate. So if you reckon one’s not too crash hot, it’ll be forgotten when the next one makes a deep impact.

Along the way, Saira will contend with a ship’s computer – voiced by Australian acting royalty Richard Roxburgh – that can’t quite compute feminism and whose lesbian-centric small talk extends to asking what they make of Blue is the Warmest Colour, the notoriously fraught production by Abdellatif Kechiche.

Drag star Kween Kong inhabits a fierce club queen, and Saira will also uncover a ray of light via non-binary, guitar-strumming emo Willow (Gemma Chua-Tran). The Buffy the Vampire Slayer energy is real, alongside a raft of anime and other pop culture nods in this easter egg-rich bonanza.

Lesbian Space Princess: top marks

It’s the seemingly dumb stuff that will have you screeching most, like the SWM’s chick magnet, a giant magnet adorned with bewildered chooks clucking in exasperation. Or when the numpties kidnap a jobbing actor instead of a lesbian based on mishearing thespian. Top marks for doubling down and pointing out that every lesbian in The L Word was a thespian.

But for all this joyous tomfoolery, there’s a bittersweet undercurrent that deals with the black dog inside all of us, barking at our perceived failures and nipping our heels with the fangs of self-doubt. As Saira gains confidence as she battles to free Kiki, she begins to realise that she needs to free herself from the chains of external validation. And maybe the pretty clingy Willow, too.

It’s this aspect and the predominantly women of colour-led cast and crew that enriches beyond its whacky humour. Hobbs and Varghese’s film rattles every cage in a clustertruck of love for the art that’s been painstakingly animated by a small but mighty Adelaide crew. Their Berlinale triumph led to a very pointed speech that gets to the emboldened heart of Lesbian Space Princess. Despite what Creative Australia would have us believe, art IS political.

All power to this promising young partnership, and I’ll leave the last word to them:

‘We were so privileged to make this film on the stolen lands of the Karna people of the Adelaide plains, and in Australia, our First Nations people were displaced in their own land and a modern parallel is occurring now in Gaza and the West Bank perpetrated by the state of Israel, facilitated by the governments of Australia, Germany, the United States and more. And as queer people, and as queer filmmakers, we are not free until we are all free.’

Lesbian Space Princess was screened as part of the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival. It will release in cinemas later in 2025.

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