This one was a recommendation from our cinephile while we were in the middle of talking about unusual animated films and it’s obscure enough that I doubt that I would have heard of it in any other way. It’s a Danish film made by director Anders Morgenthaler who apparently made his reputation from a newspaper-published comic strip. It’s also very much an adult film as it has explicit sex scenes and very unusually includes a significant amount of real-life footage.
August is a missionary and he has recently learned that his sister has died and left behind a 5-year old daughter. Partly from memory flashbacks and partly from old videos that he finds, we learn that after being forced to fend for themselves due to being orphaned, his sister Christina is led into the pornography business by her boyfriend Charlie. Her videos are a massive success and earns a great deal of money for Charlie but Christina’s life becomes ever more debauched and drug-addled. He recovers the daughter Mia from a brothel where Christina apparently spent her last months and discovers that the little girl has been abused. Enraged, he embarks on a campaign of vengeance against the pornographers and is determined to wipe out every last trace of the smutty videos that Christina starred in.
All this feels eerily reminiscent of a Frank Miller comic book including a gritty art style. The degree of abusive sex that it is willing to show is shocking for an animated feature that isn’t hentai and it rounds this off with bloody hyper-violence. While I acknowledge that making this film must have taken a great deal of courage, I think absent some original angle there’s nothing artistically that interesting about yet another revenge fantasy. The subject matter itself may be adult but the way this film engages with it is distinctly immature. This isn’t to say that there are some powerful moments here, such as when August discovers that the five-year old Mia must have been subjected to abuse herself or the horror one feels when such a little girl treats sex in such a blasé manner. Unfortunately August has no idea what to do about this other than to strike out with his fists, as if all problems could so easily be solved with violence and the film even presents his path as a series of video game-like bosses before he is allowed to confront the big boss Charlie.
Beyond this superficiality, Princess also suffers from major problems with its structure and the moral agency of its characters. August apparently has significant combat skills and is capable of obtaining a bomb, yet we see nothing from his backstory that would explain this. The film presents Christina as a victim and there is no doubt that she has been horrifically used and abused by Charlie and his friends. Yet in every scene that we see of her she is always shown to be complicit in everything that Charlie does. As harmful as the things done to her are, she appears to actually enjoy the sex and to be happy that she is a famous porn star. It’s clear that if she has to be saved, it’s also from herself as well as from Charlie. Seen from this lens, the film’s ending is just awful as it appears to show her being redeemed without proving to the audience that she has earned it. The worst part is probably that it builds up Charlie as some mysterious character for no real reason but then cheats the audience out of the final and much needed confrontation with him. Both August and Mia need to be able to confront Charlie in the end to work out what they feel about him. Without this, there’s no sense of catharsis and the film feels incomplete.
As eager as I am to watch animated films deal with difficult subjects like sex and pornography Princess is just too juvenile an effort to be worthwhile. You’d be better off just going back to watch Sin City again.