DISTANT FUTURE MONTH #7: Aeon Flux, by Peter Chung (1991)

Type of Media: Animation

Today, MTV is best known for being not as good as it used to be. If you’ve had a conversation about MTV, someone has probably said something along the lines of “Hey, remember when Music Television was good and USED TO ACTUALLY PLAY MUSIC!?” And though I’m skeptical of blind nostalgia, I do kinda wish modern MTV was more like it used to be. But I don’t miss the music videos or the VJs or the early reality shows like Road Rules. No, what I miss is MTV Animation. From the early 90s to the early 2000s, MTV was a bastion of great animated series. It gave us Beavis and Butthead and Daria, The Maxx and Clone High, Liquid Television and Cartoon Sushi, but probably its greatest contribution to the animation world was Aeon Flux.

Aeon Flux started as a series of shorts deconstructing action movies, with no dialogue and Aeon acting as a parody of an action star. In the pilot episode she mows down masked soldiers at the beginning while heroic music plays, before the view zooms out out to reveal mounds of dead bodies and rivers of blood. One dying soldier takes off her mask and notices one of her comrades is still breathing, and uses her gun to prop his head up to keep it out of the gore pooling on the floor. As Aeon nears her goal, a statesman she’s trying to assassinate, she steps on a tack and falls off a ledge to her death. The short revelled in Aeon’s senseless violence that ultimately signifies nothing.

However, when it got picked up as a full series Aeon Flux evolved into something more complex, fleshed-out, and… well, weird. The characters started talking and the universe gained some history. Old clumsy Aeon gave way to a new capable, calculating Aeon, agent of the anarchist territory of Monica. She also gained a nemesis in Trevor Goodchild, the aspiring dictator of the technologically advanced republic of Bregna, and with this dichotomy the series went from sneering at action movies to contemplating the merits of freedom and control in an acid-laced vision of the future.

Aeon became a representation of independence, self-motivated and acting according to her own whims. She has her own agenda, dresses how she likes, and pursues her goals relentlessly, often directly hurting more people than directly she helps. Meanwhile Trevor wants to help as many people as possible, but to do it he exploits technology and biological anomalies to control his Breen subjects. He’s also a massive hypocrite, and privately uses Bregna’s resources to indulge his sexual fetishes (which often involve Aeon). The brief glimpses we get of everyday life in Monica and Bregna show a choice between living completely free among ruins or being trapped in a gleaming city with a strong social safety net.

It’s a very trippy show, with stories involving lizards that produce memory-wiping drugs, a captured politician whose stomach has been turned into a portal to a romantic bedroom, and a couple of bird-human hybrids that people find irresistibly sexy. To make things even more disorienting the plots are isolated from one another, with no larger continuity between them. It sports a very fluid animation, using a large variety of camera angles that sometimes distort the already stretched out-looking characters even further, and creator Peter Chung has a knack for producing memorable images. The short opening credits, which show a fly landing on a woman’s vacant eye before she traps it with her lashes and rolls her eyeball forward to inspect it, will stick in your mind for a while.

Back when it premiered in the 90s Aeon Flux was very different from other cartoons. Although looking at promo art may suggest it’s a spy thriller with a sexy protagonist for teen boys to drool over, actually watching an episode reveals Aeon Flux to be far more esoteric than that. Characters have philosophical conversations, there are a lot of references to Gnosticism, and sex in the show is often concerned with power dynamics between characters rather than just titillation. Compared to its animated contemporaries it’s a show that feels so much more mature. If you grew up on 90s animation and appreciated the weirder ones like Rocko’s Modern Life, give Aeon Flux a look.