Lesbian Space Princess turns the manosphere into space villains for UK cinemas

A princess who has never been allowed to leave her home planet is pushed into open space to rescue the bounty-hunter ex-girlfriend she has not stopped loving, and the creatures stalking them both are, with no metaphorical distance at all, incels. That is the working premise of Lesbian Space Princess, an Australian animated comedy that builds an entire galaxy out of a very online culture war and refuses to be coy about naming it.

The film matters less for its logline than for its nerve. Most mainstream comedy treats manosphere politics as something to gesture at from a safe distance. This one turns radicalised masculinity into the actual antagonist species and sends a queer protagonist straight through it. What lands is a coming-of-age story disguised as a space chase, where leaving the house and crossing a hostile galaxy turn out to be the same act of courage.

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The voice cast reads as a statement of intent rather than a marquee. Shabana Azeez plays Saira, the sheltered princess; Gemma Chua-Tran voices Willow, the ex worth crossing a galaxy for; Richard Roxburgh lends gravel to a sentient and openly Problematic Ship; and drag performer Kween Kong turns up as Blade. Jordan Raskopoulos and Madeleine Sami voice the two queens who rule Saira’s overprotected home, a same-sex royal household played for warmth as much as comedy. These are Australian comedy and performance names, not imported stars, and the choice tells you what the film values: texture, timing and queer-scene specificity over wattage.

Leela Varghese and Emma Hough Hobbs write and direct their first feature here, arriving from the country’s short-form animation and live comedy circuit. The hand-drawn, deliberately scrappy look, all wobbling lines, hot colour and a design language closer to a sketchbook than a studio pipeline, is a decision rather than an apology for a small budget. It lets the film move at the speed of a joke and keeps the tone ungoverned, which is exactly the point of a comedy this loose.

What holds it together is the literalisation. The ship gaslights. The villains recruit. The princess has to learn that being kept safe and having a life are not the same thing. By making online radicalisation a place you can be chased through rather than a topic to be discussed, the film gives its politics a body and its jokes a target, and mostly avoids the lecture its premise could so easily collapse into.

The register helps. This is raunchy, fast and unembarrassed, closer in spirit to adult-animation comedy than to the earnest message-movie its subject usually attracts. The jokes are filthy when they want to be and sincere when it counts, and the emotional spine, a young woman learning that the people who kept her small were not the same as the people who kept her safe, is played straight underneath the chaos. That tonal split is the hardest thing the film attempts, and it is what separates it from a sketch stretched to feature length.

None of that guarantees the film clears its own bar. An 87-minute engine built largely on gags and reference has to keep finding new gears, and the deliberately rough aesthetic will read to some viewers as limitation rather than style. The title is its own gamble, a magnet for the audience it wants and a filter for everyone else, and a comedy this specific risks preaching to the already-converted. Whether the satire bites or simply flatters depends on how hard the back half is willing to push.

The backing tells its own story. Screen Australia and the South Australian Film Corporation funded it, We Made a Thing Studios produced it, and Umbrella Entertainment carried it into Australian cinemas before it moved to streaming at home. It has spent a long stretch on the international circuit, from Berlinale’s youth strand to Annecy, SXSW London, Karlovy Vary and Melbourne, accumulating the kind of goodwill that small, identity-forward animation needs to earn a release beyond its borders. The British theatrical window is the test of whether that goodwill converts into ticket-buyers, and whether a manosphere send-up can find an audience outside a festival room.

Lesbian Space Princess reaches British cinemas on 19 June, running 87 minutes, after a festival run that began at the Berlin International Film Festival and an Australian release that has already reached streaming. Distribution at that scale is rare for an independent animated feature of this size, and rarer still for one this pointed about its targets. It is the kind of comedy willing to name the thing it is satirising and build a world around it. On that bet, it earns the look.

Tags: animation

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