Lesbian Space Princess

Lesbian Space Princess is an Australian adult animated science-fiction comedy, the debut feature written and directed by Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese. It follows Saira, a sheltered, chronically anxious princess of the queer utopian planet Clitopolis, whose two-week relationship with the swaggering bounty hunter Kiki ends in a very public breakup at her own birthday party.

When Kiki is abducted by a trio of aliens called the Straight White Maliens, Saira is forced out of the only world she has ever known and into a galactic rescue mission. Along the way she picks up unlikely companions — a jaded former gay-pop idol turned goth spacefarer named Willow, and the fearless drag performer Blade — while trying to summon a power she has never been able to access.

Running 87 minutes and pitched, in the directors' own words, as something that "looks like a cartoon but feels like an anime," the film wraps a sincere story about self-worth and anxiety inside deliberately silly world-building, sex-positive gags and a dense layer of queer in-jokes. It premiered in the Panorama section of the 75th Berlinale in February 2025.

The film's central argument is that you cannot be rescued into self-worth by someone else loving you. Saira begins as a woman who has outsourced her entire sense of value to a girlfriend, and the quest structure — usually a machine for winning back the beloved — is repurposed as a machine for dismantling that belief. Her magical weapon, the labrys, literally will not materialise while she doubts herself, making self-esteem the film's only functioning technology.

Alongside this, the directors have been explicit about a second aim: making a feature-length animation in which queer, and specifically BIPOC queer, characters are simply seen — centred, funny, horny, neurotic and heroic — rather than explained or justified to a straight audience. The villains are a joke precisely because the film refuses to treat the straight gaze as a serious cosmic force; their power turns out to be entirely dependent on wanting to be wanted.

The result is a film that argues for identity as pleasure rather than defence: the happy ending is not a couple, but a person who is content alone.

The ending as triumph. The most straightforward reading takes Saira's return to Clitopolis, single and content, as a genuine victory — a romance that ends by rejecting romance, insisting that the healthiest outcome for someone who has never existed outside a relationship is to learn to exist alone.

Arriving as one of the very few feature-length animations built from the ground up for a queer audience, the film's significance is partly structural: the directors have described making it precisely because that gap existed, and because they wanted a queer story told from a BIPOC perspective rather than a mainstream one. Its festival run confirmed the appetite — a Panorama premiere at the 75th Berlinale followed by the Teddy Award, with the jury citing "a deliciously subversive vision of a future that is so unabashedly queer in both form and content."

At home in Australia it became a notable awards-season story, drawing seven AACTA nominations including Best Film and winning two — an unusual showing for an independent adult animation. Released in Australia on 11 September 2025 and picked up for the United States by Cineverse, it travelled well beyond the festival circuit, and lines from the film circulated online as memes, giving it a small second life in queer internet culture.

Its lineage runs through adult television animation and magical-girl anime rather than studio family features, and its lasting argument to the industry is commercial as much as artistic: that an animated feature can be explicitly, unapologetically queer in form — jokes, references, world-building — and still win major prizes.

Critical reception was broadly positive, with the film's biggest institutional endorsements coming from festivals — the Teddy Award at the Berlinale and seven AACTA nominations including Best Film, converting into two wins. Praise has clustered around its energy, the density and specificity of its queer humour, the voice work (Shabana Azeez's anxious, sincere Saira and the Aunty Donna villains in particular), and the sheer novelty of a feature animation aimed unapologetically at this audience.

The main criticism is a mismatch between the transgressive packaging and a familiar interior: several reviewers found it fundamentally conventional in its narrative conceits, with sensibilities called thoroughly inoffensive and a portrayal of lesbianism likened to Heartstopper — daring in title, safe in structure. General audiences have been correspondingly split, with an IMDb user rating around 6.1 suggesting that viewers drawn in by the premise did not all find the execution as radical as advertised.

Verdict: a warm, joke-dense, genuinely groundbreaking piece of representation whose classic coming-of-age skeleton is either its accessible strength or its unambitious limitation, depending on what the title led you to expect.