Fantasia Review: Zsazsa Zaturnnah is the best superhero movie in years

You know that feeling when you're watching a movie and you immediately feel, Damn....this is exactly my shit? That was me watching the deliriously funny, queer, campy, strange Zsazsa Zaturnnah, the new superhero feature from  Rocksetsheep Studio and director Avid Liongoren playing as part of Fantasia's Animation Plus section. 

Based on Carlo Vergara's beloved comic book, which has previously been adapted into a stage musical and a live-action film, Zsazsa Zaturnnah (subtitled vs. the Amazonians of Planet X) is just about the silliest movie I've seen this year. But beneath all the colorful, wild, and weird shenanigans, this movie also has a giant heart, and a lot to say about community, femininity, and queerness. Like its fellow Annecy alum Jim Queen, it manages to combine super gay comedy with moments of poignancy. It's a perfect cocktail of a movie that goes down easy and lingers. It left me buzzing.

Ada is a gay hairdresser living in a small town, working alongside his trusty (and somewhat chaotic) assistant/best friend Didi. Business isn't exactly booming. Nor are their love lives. But Ada and Didi, who are both very fem-presenting while using he/him pronouns, are doing their best to make things work. Didi constantly pushes Ada to dream bigger, maybe even to make a move to the big city. But Ada is reluctant to consider a movie. This is where he grew up. He lives in the house where he was raised, a house that he's renovated, though it's still haunted by the ghosts of his parents, particularly his homophobic father who abused him at any glimpse of femininity.

In other flashbacks, we see slices of another life Ada has lived, or maybe survived: a relationship with an abusive man where Ada was fully presenting as a woman, with long hair and a smartly tailored suit. Despite his best efforts in that life to make his partner happy, Ada still didn't measure up. It's no wonder that, in the present, Ada is guarded with his heart, completely oblivious to the interest of his hunky neighbor Dodong (and when I say hunky, I mean hunky). He's made it through many trials and tribulations, and doesn't want to risk being hurt -- emotionally or physically -- again.

Enter: the meteorite. A glowing rock from space crash-lands into Ada's house, bearing the mysterious word "ZATURNNAH" on it. Didi, being the little weirdo he is, immediately is like, You need to eat that. He's heard tell of swallowing space rocks to gain superpowers. Ada reluctantly goes along with the bit, and promptly transforms into the towering, stunning Zsazsa, a powerful (and female) superhero with incredible strength and a bevy of other abilities. She'll need them, as the meteorite has also led a ship full of Amazonistas (extremely cool-looking women from another planet brandishing a bunch of cool weapons) to Earth on their quest to castrate and kill all men. 

The question of what exactly the stone is doing is central to the film. Is it simply a trans-ing stone, which will change the swallower's gender? Or is it more revelatory than that, turning the user into what they want to be, what they envision themself as? It's such a rich part of the lore here, especially when taken alongside Ada's flashbacks: the father who punished his son for playing with a doll or wearing a dress, the partner who abused his Ada to the point of shedding his feminine identity. Where exactly Ada's current gender lives and where it might go aren't fully stated, which adds a level of complexity to the character. Is he a so-called "egg"? Will becoming this female superhero allow him to step more boldly in a direction of transition, or satisfy the feminine part of himself in and of itself? I love the way the film wrestles with Ada's identity without fully answering it, a reminder that gender is a construct, one that can be rebuilt, customized, renovated, and changed.

So the film is a home run on the fronts of campy comedy and queer identity. And it also hits as a superhero movie. Zsazsa is such a fun hero, both as we watch her figure out her powers (in a classic training montage that made me think of Disney's Hercules) and as we see her fully come into her own. The film deploys a ton of monsters for her to face off with, including a giant frog, an eggplant monster, and a zombie horde. The action scenes are really fun, with smartly-placed blips of blood and comedy, so they pop and fizz just as they should. 

Through this superhero journey, Ada/Zsazsa comes into his/her own skin, emboldening the townsfolk to contribute to their own protection and becoming more enmeshed/accepted into the community. You could argue that Zsazsa Zaturnnah is the ultimate "It Gets Better" movie, showing a gay man rising from the ashes of trauma to become a more fully-realized, powerful, and beloved member of society. By the time the credits rolled, I was even a little misty. This is a movie that plays all of its cards right, and does so generously, never holding back, always going for the goofy double entendre, and unafraid to wear its heart on its sleeve. It's a fantastic adventure, and the one of the best superhero movies in years.