#Aeon flux movie#
#Aeon flux series#

This emphasis on artful ambiguity and rhetorical sleight-of-hand remained when Chung made the leap to fully voiced characters and storylines with a final season of half-hour episodes. “I want them to be as clear a portrayal of an ambiguous event as possible.”

“My stories have ambiguity, so I don’t want them to be ambiguous portrayals of an ambiguous event,” Chung said in an interview with Art of the Title back in 2017. Instead, the animator speaks to the audience through designed environments, dynamic camera angles, and elaborate, expressive actions and gestures. Spy-like action series, and combining such far-flung points of inspiration as Franco-Belgian comics, cyberpunk fiction, and Gnosticism, the original 12-minute pilot and its five-episode second season are nearly absent of spoken dialogue. What exactly is Aeon aiming to accomplish here? What did these soldiers do to provoke such an attack? Who exactly are the “good” guys and who are the “bad” guys in this situation?Įverything about Æon Flux revolves around subverting expectations and inspiring the viewer to scrutinize beyond the surface of a first impression. It turns out, our heroine might not in fact be a heroine at all. A group of custodians with mops looks on from the sidelines as Aeon marches forward, shooting off-screen with reckless abandon. Surrounding him are other bodies, too many to count, lying in a massive pool of blood and heaped into dozens of mountains of corpses.

#Aeon flux movie#

Acting as a grisly counterpoint to the action movie heroics of the first, Chung frames the episode from the vantage point of one of Aeon’s innumerable and anonymous adversaries, opening with a dying man experiencing a Steambot Willie-esque hallucination as he succumbs to his wounds. Æon Flux’s second segment completely reverses the dynamics.

#Aeon flux series#

Even the thunderous orchestral score was, according to series composer Drew Neumann, explicitly designed to deceive the audience by invoking John Williams’ Raiders of the Lost Ark theme … but “broken.” At first glance, the first two-minute segment appears to perpetuate the same tired conventions of so-called “adult” animation of which I would accuse the first season of Love, Death & Robots: an overreliance on surface-level violence and scantily clad sexual imagery in service of the male gaze. Premiering on MTV’s experimental animation variety show Liquid Television in 1991, Æon Flux follows a dominatrix-assassin as she shoots her way through winding corridors of a vast and seemingly impregnable complex while on an unspecified mission. More contemporary incarnations of the genre (including Love, Death,& Robots) could learn from the precedent that creator Peter Chung and his team set nearly 30 years ago. Ballard and Harlan Ellison, and the addition of Jennifer Yuh Nelson ( Kung Fu Panda 2), who joins series creator Tim Miller ( Deadpool) as co-executive producer and directs “Pop Squad,” one of this season’s standout installments, all seems to have helped the series to grow.īut there’s still the issue of classifying Love, Death & Robots as “adult” animation, a description that, however well meaning, inadvertently frames the medium as one intended “for kids.” How then do we even go about defining “adult” animation, let alone good “adult” animation? My definition comes from one particular series: Peter’s Chung’s avant-garde sci-fi series Æon Flux.

Luckily, Love, Death & Robots season 2 improves upon the first, with eight shorts that cut down on the gratuitous nudity and violence and are speculative in a way that’s actually mature. There was nothing beneath their shiny surfaces. For a series that claims maturity, the majority of season 1’s otherwise beautifully animated shorts felt like exercises in adolescent hyper-fixation, with only blood, boobs, and gore as a thematic through-line. I enjoyed some of the first wave of episodes, especially Albert Mielgo’s “The Witness” and Robert Valley’s “Zima Blue,” but the sales pitch of animation for “mature, messed-up” adults made me cringe. My reaction to a second season of Netflix’s animated anthology series Love, Death & Robots was preemptive exhaustion.