Creator/Director: Peter Chung
Studio: Colossal Pictures, MTV Animation
Completed on 13/08/20
***SPOILERS***
Completed on 13/08/20
***SPOILERS***
This show is a trip and a half. You can easily get lost or confused watching it but it's so intriguing and so cool that it's definitely worth it. It also came at a strange time for the genre and formed a great foundation for what animation aimed at adults should have been for decades to come. All of that makes it bitterly disappointing that there is so little else out there like it.
The production and history of Æon Flux is slightly strange. It was initially a set of 2-5 minute shorts across 2 seasons of an experimental animated clip show by MTV, called Liquid Television (which also birthed Beavis and Butthead). It then went on to get a 'third' season of its own, with 10 full-length (22 minutes) episodes. To me, it's still unclear whether all these episodes are connected - there are some that are definitely standalone but once or twice, there are references to older characters and events. This is probably the show's greatest enabler and constraint (because it isn't really a strength/weakness in itself).
The creators took full advantage of the license this gave them; episodes aren't just independent of each other but sometimes feel like they've each got a series worth of context behind them... but they don't. The world- and character-building needed for some of the impactful moment is glossed over and the show gets to take the glory without putting in the graft. It's a bit of a cheat but they did it and it works - fair play. There is a Star-Wars-style prologue before each episode, which does a great job of introducing the plot but the characters with these seemingly deep, elaborate backstories just get dropped in at random. It doesn't detract too much from how enjoyable the show is but it is strange.
That said, the creators made the absolute most of the liberties they took. Each episode can hook you in and completely captivate you. This is possibly the least quantifiable statement I'll ever use in one of these blogs but: so many moments in this series make you feel something. Through the combination of the design and colour work, the trippy, spaced-out music, the sharp dialogue and the straight-up mad, imaginative nature of the storylines, you get moments that really do give you feelings of wonder, disgust, intrigue, contempt, amazement and so much more. That's hard to do and Chung and co. did it really well. The team behind the show was clearly very clever and there's no question they were well ahead of their time.
The stories themselves are good but don't do anything amazing. Some are pretty simple with a twist or two but others definitely try to do too much. They all present interesting and always-relevent themes though; totalitarianism, autonomy, identity, rebellion, class, technology, nature etc. I enjoyed the show's very progressive attitudes towards sex and relationships but it definitely went overboard with completely unnecessary sexual moments. The characters within the stories are also seemingly complicated but the disjointed nature of the stories means you don't get any depth of understanding of any of them. So similar to the storylines, it's a sort of faux complication that they have. They're mostly very interesting still and the love-hate relationship between the two main characters is pretty cool too.
Lastly, the art and animation are what really cements the show's identity (and why I imagine it just didn't work as a live action film). Everything is stylised almost to the maximum amount possible; long, slinky characters with exaggerated muscles, proportions, bellies and whatever else the artists wanted to use to make you feel that little bit uneasy while watching. They adopted a similarly exaggerated animation style, which adds to the feeling of the show but also feels like a shortcut to me. They make the most out of key poses and are clearly light on the in-betweens. It's a little bit jittery, like everything else in the show, so it definitely works. My very personal preference would have been to still go for smooth animation with the unique art style but that just wouldn't have been Aeon Flux.
Overall, the show is weird and confusing but cool and interesting. Everything about it is unusual but it works in perfect harmony. For people who think that adult animation should be more than Bojack Horseman and South Park, this definitely offers a glimmer of hope and a reminder of what we could have had.