‘Lesbian Space Princess’ Directors Leela Varghese and Emma Hough Hobbs Talk Their New Queer Sci-Fi Comedy
Talking about adult animation often conjures up images of the usual: The Simpsons, Family Guy, Futurama, South Park, Ricky and Morty, to name a few. They’re all crucial pieces of media, yes, but they’re also very focused on white male experiences. But Australian directors Leela Varghese and Emma Hough Hobbs are joining a growing group of animators pushing back against hegemony. Their new animated film Lesbian Space Princess is queer, funny, grown-up, and just what the heart needs, especially in dark times like today.
In the film, “An introverted space princess is forced to leave her home planet on an inter-gay-lactic mission to save her bounty hunter ex-girlfriend from the Straight White Maliens.”
We spoke with Varghese and Hobbs about Cardcaptor Sakura, crafting Saira’s character, and reveling in queer joy.
Dread Central: I’m so excited to talk to you about Lesbian Space Princess. It warms my cold, dead heart, so thank you so much. How do you guys feel about it being out in the world? I mean, that’s got to be so exciting.
Leela Varghese: Yeah, I think it’s been such a long journey, and it’s almost like this relief to just get it out and have it be accessible to people. I feel like, because sort of all over the world, we’ve had people asking about where it’s going to be. So it’s really nice that we can share it with audiences that haven’t seen it yet.
Emma Hough Hobbs: Iconic release day. I love that it’s releasing on Halloween. In Australia, it was September 11, and in America, it’s Halloween.
DC: So, how did the two of you link up to make this movie? Tell me from the beginning how the two of you came together.
LV: We were hooking up because we’re a couple. [Laughs]
DC: Hell yeah. Love that.
LV: But no, we’d been dating for a year, and then Emma, you are always joking, “Let’s ruin this by working together.”
EHH: After one year of dating, I was like, “This is going really well. Let’s ruin it and make a movie together.”
DC: It seems like it went OK for the most part. I mean, it’s not like movie-making is hard or anything. [Laughs] So Emma, you are the animator on the film, right?
EHH: Yeah, I was the lead animator, and we were working with two animators who animated half the film each. Then I did a little section in the middle, so it was cool.
DC: So, how did you get into animation? What was your entry point as a kid? What was the thing that got you into wanting to be an animator and work in animation?
EHH: So I grew up only watching animation. I basically refused to watch anything live-action. And my grandmother at some point brought home a VHS of Cardcaptor Sakura, which is this queer anime.
DC Oh, I know Cardcaptor Sakura. Oh yeah. I was an anime girl. I still am.
EHH: And so then it was just full weeb mode growing up. Then, eventually, I was going to do maths and science, but then I made my way to film school somehow and just started submitting all of my film assignments as animations because I was too anxious to work with other people. And I was like, I’m just going to do this in Photoshop.
DC: That’s a mood right there, though.
EHH: Then it was just kind of a hobby. And then when we were dating, it was like, “Oh, this animation thing.” My films could probably be a bit funnier, and they would be funnier if we made them together, because Leela is a comedian.
LV: My favorite part about Emma’s backstory with the animation stuff is that the reason you had the Cardcaptor Sakura VHS is that it was from a garage sale. So Emma’s grandparents used to just come home with these anime DVDs because they’d go to garage sales quite a lot. I find that such a cute element. It’s like just by chance Emma loves anime because her grandparents were like, “Oh, that looks kind of fun,” and brought it home. And then Emma, I just imagine a little Emma being like, “What is this?” And then watching it, and then her whole life just changes forever because she watches an anime.
DC: It’s almost like the world turns on when you watch it. You’re like, “Wait, oh, the thing I’ve been looking for, it’s here.” It’s so cool.
YLV: Yeah, it is crazy. And by chance,.I wonder if your whole life would’ve been different. Your grandparents had come home with some other form of movie.
EHH: I would have found anime one way or another. [Laughs]
DC: So wait, Leela, did Emma introduce you to anime? Was that something you were familiar with in your childhood slash early adulthood?
LV: Only in the way that everyone’s familiar with it. We grew up watching quite different animation. I watched a lot of the mainstream animation, like The Simpsons, Futurama, and CatDog. And every kid grows up on animation. So my experiences with animation were coming at it from a different lens. But I’m a live-action director, and so I come from that background. I also did live musical comedy, and so Lesbian Space Princess was like the mesh of the two of us together.
DC: That’s so cool to get to combine the two of your loves into one gay ass movie. Wow, that’s an incredible experience. Difficult, obviously, but it’s so cool to see it all come together because Leela, I know that you’re a comedian and you write a lot of comedy. What was it like then, coming together and mashing your minds together and creating the story and figuring out where to start?
LV: It was really fun. I think animation is a medium that you fall in love with. However, I think for me, my relationship with it is attached to Emma. My interest in making animation is making our animated content together.
I just have a huge respect for working with animators and having animators be involved in the storytelling and leading the creation of stories. Because I think a lot of live-action directors just decide they’re going to make an animation, and they don’t come from that background. I never would’ve crossed over unless it was me and Emma. And so I just kind of fell in love with it.
It was like we were teaching each other different things because she’s teaching me about directing animation, what’s possible, what’s not possible. And then I was teaching her about writing a screenplay and dialogue. She’s actually never written dialogue, comedy dialogue, ever before in a screenplay. So it was this big learning experience. And then I did have a kind of connection to animation because just before I had voiced a character in an Australian kids’ show. So I had been in the VO booth and seen that side of directing. So that also really helped a lot with jumping into directing for animation.
DC: Yeah, that’s going to be such a wild difference. That’s got to be such an interesting way to shift your brain and learning a different way to approach directing.
LV: It is extremely different. It’s really different. It’s very edit based. A lot of the magic happens in the edit, and it’s a lot of throwing mud at the wall. We got some great advice from the director of the kids’ series I was working on because he was explaining that the actors aren’t always in the same room. For our film, only Auntie Donna were in the same room together. With the rest of the actors, you’re trying to create the sense that they’re in the same room together. So he gave us this great advice about getting a big variety of each line. You never know what’s going to make it feel really good together.
I think that was such a good piece of advice because whenever we’d get performances, we’d always just get quite a range, so that we always had a lot to play with when we were trying to make the magic of what worked in terms of performances together.
DC: Oh, cool. But also, wow, that edit must have been so intense. Rewarding, but still intense. Good Lord. I can only imagine.
EHH: Lesbian Space Princess was the film of a hundred edits because we did the animatic with the scratch track, and then we re-edited the animatic to give to the animators when we had the voice records. Then we had to reassemble it with the animation, and then we had to do some VFX, and then we also had to tighten the edit right at the end because it was like, “OK, well, the voice actors have been animated. We’ve got characters, but the pacing is off.” And so it was also in a different program every time. I feel like 80% of our budget went towards software costs.
DC: I was going to say, for animating, I feel all of your costs is just getting software!
EHH: Yeah. I was trying to convince, because we animated in Toon Boom, I was trying to convince them I would make a haute couture Toon Boom gown for Berlin if they gave it to us for free, but they didn’t go for it.
DC: But then how did you guys start working together to develop the look of your characters, the style, and also just the vibes of every character? What was that process like, and where did you start? Who was your first character that you really locked in on the design?
LV: Because Emma is the animator and it’s her style, it’s all led by Emma. Then it was just about collaborating together. So you’d go off and sketch.
EHH: Yeah, I just did three sketches one day for Saira, Willow, and Kiki.
LV: But Saira was the first, because we did that for the very initial pitch.
EHH: Yeah, and she also changed the most. Everyone else was kind of approximately the same. They’re the Holy Trinity of gay dykey fashion. You’ve got Saira in sweatpants and a hoodie. You’ve got Willow, goth baddie, and then Kiki is the dyke of the lot. So it was just like with the carabiner and stuff. Every gay person who sees this movie dresses like one of these three.
LV: A big thing that I was giving guidance on was making sure the characters didn’t just feel like they were characters that were basically drawn as white characters painted a different color. So we always really wanted to make sure that they felt like they looked like they were from different ethnicities, which was also a part of something that I crave to see in animation.
DC: You make it look so easy in this, and I love that diversity of queerness, but also of different kinds of identities.
LV: Yeah!
DC: One of my favorite things in Lesbian Space Princess is these little elements that aren’t necessarily part of the story, but are really funny. My favorite is the Little Dancing Vagina, and whenever you show her, music starts playing. I love those little moments in the film of just these little characters that come and go. Do you have a favorite one that y’all created that you really just were excited about and gives you joy whenever you see it on screen?
LV: I love The Tumbleweed that’s smiling, it’s voiced by Laurie Belle, who’s a comedian friend of mine. I also love the Happy Come because that’s voiced by Ellis, one of our animators. That used to have a whole song with it, but it got cut from the movie.
DC: I love that. Emma, what about you? Did you have one?
EHH: I love the guitarist who does not look anything like Ed Sheeran. And I also love the cocaine guy with the mohawk.
DC: I love those little moments in this movie that add flavor to that world-building.
EHH: All of these bit roles are also our friends, so it’s fun for us. Most of the animation team is in the film via these bit roles.
LV: Yeah, we kind of forced everybody to. [Laughs] So one of our background artists, ants, is the one who does the sniff of the cocaine. He designed that character as well. And then Maddie does the chick magnet. When you hear “Incoming chicks, incoming chicks,” that’s Maddie, who’s the other background artist. And then Cheyenne is the couple that gets eaten by a shark.
DC: And I love the jokes. I mean, Leela, you’re a comedian, and I love the balance here. I wanted to hear about writing these jokes and figuring out how funny you wanted to be and how sincere, because I do think this is such a sincere film on top of being very funny.
LV: In many ways, all the jokes are a mesh of the two of us. Everything went through both of us, and a lot of the humor that’s referential is Emma, and then me, I’m more obsessed with dialogue and making sure that the bones of the whole movie is funny. That the dialogue and the way people are talking to each other is not only funny, but also feels not feels right, that it feels authentic, and that you feel like people are talking. So it sounds really funny, but this question is always a funny one to me. I don’t really overthink it that much.
But we were also always reminded to make sure the movie had heart from our script mentor. To be honest, the first version of the script was just kind of just bits, just silly the whole way through. And then she was like, “You guys really need to figure out what this movie is about. You need to implement that.” She was like, “I think if it’s going to mean something to people, it has to be funny. But it also has to feel like people understand what you’re saying, and it has to mean something to people on top of just being funny.” We were lucky that we had great guidance in that sense.
DC: That’s amazing. Well, and I love Saira’s character. She is all of us, and we also want to punch her and be like, “Get your shit together, girlfriend.” I wanted to hear about approaching Saira’s character and making her such an interesting, sympathetic, pathetic, but not too pathetic creature.
LV: I think that for me, I think that a lot of that is just Shabana Azeez who plays her. We’re best friends. We’ve been known since her. I directed the second short film she ever did, and one of our friends directed the first short film.
We were very conscious of how annoying Saira could come across, and I think it was about making sure the casting felt authentic in the anxiety. Shabana could play that in a way that was, didn’t feel like a caricature.
On top of that, in the directing, we wanted to make sure Saira’s character had quirky elements. We were always, in the directing and the performances, looking for little things that could elevate what we perhaps had even already written on the page to make her more real. Just little ways that she might say something. We started getting her to do the House Bunny voice every so often when she felt nervous. She does a weird little voice and making funny little jokes to herself.
EHH: And even we were riffing with the animators. It’s like every time the ship crashes, she always just ends up in a really stupid position as well.
LV: She’s quite pathetic, but then in some moments, she can be a little bit sassy and stick up for herself, whether it’s out loud or in the way that she looks. But she’s not a complete pushover. She still kind of talks back to the ship, even though she lets the ship boss her around at the beginning. She never stops going forward, as well.
EHH: Yeah, that’s the thing. She’s not this hero, heroic, confident character. She’s more relatable, especially to maybe more introverted people like us. But she is just always moving forward with what she needs to do.
LV: And she’s not afraid to cry while she does that, which is very true to our real lives. We cry whilst we do things. So yeah, because I feel
DC: That’s what I love about her. She cries through everything, but she still does it. That made me, as a crybaby, feel good. I was like, she still does it with tears in her eyes, but she gets it done. You know what I mean? Mine doesn’t
LV: Crying doesn’t make you less strong.
EHH: It’s like the Hulk. He’s like, “I’m always angry.” She’s like, “I’m always afraid.” [Laughs]
DC: I’m always anxious and crying. Well, I have to wrap up, but Leila and Emma, thank you so much. This movie is just such a piece of queer joy that I’m so obsessed with, so I’m so excited to have this out in the world. Thank you so much.
LV: Thank you so much for talking to us. It’s so exciting to be sharing it in the US!
Lesbian Space Princess is now in select theaters. It comes to streaming on November 18, 2025.
Categorized: Interviews
