Æon Flux premiered on MTV's Liquid Television in 1991 as a series of short animated segments with no dialogue. The protagonist — a tall, impossibly flexible assassin in a black bodysuit — died at the end of every episode. Not metaphorically. She died. Then the next episode started and she was alive again with no explanation. Peter Chung, the Korean-American animator who created the show, has said that the recurring death was his way of making the audience confront the disposability of action heroes. MTV's audience, which was mostly teenagers watching at midnight, probably just thought it was cool.
Liquid Television was a strange show in a way that MTV no longer permits. It was an anthology of experimental animation — claymation, rotoscope, hand-drawn — that aired in the gap between music videos and seemed to exist primarily because someone at the network had a budget they didn't know what to do with. Beavis and Butt-Head came from Liquid Television. So did Joe Normal. But Æon Flux was the one that stuck in people's heads because it looked like nothing else on television.
Chung's visual style was angular, elongated, and influenced by European comics — Moebius, in particular. The animation was hand-drawn with a fluidity that made the action sequences feel weightless. Æon's design — the proportions, the costume, the way she moved — was sexual in a way that was both obvious and genuinely unsettling. She wasn't designed to be appealing. She was designed to be compelling, which is a different thing.
The full series ran for one season on MTV in 1995. Ten episodes, this time with dialogue, which Chung later said he regretted adding. Then it was gone. A 2005 live-action film starring Charlize Theron bore almost no resemblance to the original. Chung was not involved in a meaningful way.
This tee is from the original era. Before the film, before the retrospectives. The animation on cotton.
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