There were other Barbie movies. Before the one that didn’t quite live up to the existential dread promised by its trailer, there was an entire parade of them, each an incremental step forward in the standard of its computer animation. As the series progressed, so too their storylines shed the cocoon-like strictures of fairy tales, fluttering into wider vistas of teenage self-discovery, often to the accompaniment of an artificial sweetener new wave soundtrack.

In the best of respects, Lesbian Space Princess, the opening feature in this year’s SCENE festival of LGBTQ+ film and television in Manchester, feels of a piece with that lineage. The debut screen outing of writer/directors Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese, it deviates from the Barbie movies’ tweenage kicks through both its greater hormonal candour and a line animation style closer in tone to SpongeBob SquarePants than Rick & Morty.

And, of course, in having a lesbian protagonist. With a largely lesbian supporting cast. Indeed, Lesbian Space Princess is set predominantly in the Safe Space – the pun is the film’s – of an alternative queer timeline. That the gleefully improbable plot – in which Saira the titular princess must manifest the ‘Royal Labrys’ in order to rescue her self-centred ex-girlfriend, Kiki, from the clutches of the Straight White Maliens – fails to collapse into its holes owes much both to its emotional sure-footedness and light speed rapidity of its gags. Much like the original Naked Gun franchise, not all of the jokes land, but their sheer velocity – both visual and verbal – is irresistible.

At heart, it might have something serious to say, but no small part of the film’s winning ways is that it never takes itself entirely seriously. The ship which Saira commandeers to pursue her quest, voiced by Richard Roxburgh, exhibiting as it does the patronising paternalism of an unreconstructed male, is afforded the latitude to roll its metaphorical eyes at such tropes as the Sapphic folk singer (even as the narrative also makes short work of her Sheeran-esque male balladeer counterpart).

Moreover, the literally two-dimensional Straight White Maliens – animated like refugees from Flatland who lack the depth of the female characters – while the nominal villains of the piece, aren’t necessarily Saira’s only antagonists. Indeed, for all the excess of their off-camera initial awfulness, in person they have much of the bickering ineffectuality of Viz comic’s Pathetic Sharks, intent on acquiring the Labrys to power an equally literal Chick Magnet which seems as likely to work as one of Wile E. Coyote’s same-day delivery ACME contraptions. They’re also, appropriately enough, the straight men for the film’s finest five minutes of comic misunderstanding, hingeing on the smallest slip of the tongue between ‘lesbian’ and ‘thespian’.

Endearing in a more straightforward way is Gemma Chua-Tran’s Willow, in her own words a former ‘prisoner of Gay Pop’, now intent on a more Emo solo career. Beguiled by Saira’s magical prowess with a deck of cards, she emerges as an underdog rival to Kiki, presenting a triangular dilemma.

Inevitably, of course, it’s Saira’s inner journey that’s more important than the many amusing diversions of the outer one, allowing her to resolve the Willow/Kiki dichotomy, bringing her story, and with it the film, to its emotionally resonant conclusion. Like its heroine’s sleight-of-hand, the film’s cartoonishly unsubtle patina conceals a depth of more nuanced deftness. No one gets what they want, but more or less everybody gets what they need.

Barbie would be proud. And, quite possibly, out.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: Lesbian Space Princess, We Made a Thing Studios