Shorts

Pentola by Leo Černic Film Review: Queer Superheroes Animated

Vassilis Kroustallis 10 July 2024

Pentola by Leo Cernic animation short still

What mainstream Hollywood films tease about, but never deliver -a queer superhero- is now left to the independent animation to fill the bill. Slovenian Leo Černic made a festival sensation in 2022-2023 with his 7-minute, 2D animation film 'Pentola', parading the animation and short film festival world (including a competition place at the student section of Animafest Zagreb)

A production of Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia Animazione (Turin), the student film 'Pentola' tells the story of a small middle-aged man who leaves his wife Titti for Batman.

Pentola in Leo Černic's universe is not your average candidate for superhero; bald, insignificant, and with an inferiority complex we first meet him getting swallowed up in the bean soup that his wife (a much-tested stereotype of the strong but harsh woman figure in the Italian films) has prepared. His role in the patriarchal system is the inverse of what we should have expected; a middle-aged man who needs to suffer his partner's abuse, hopefully trying a different life.

But things can also change for Pentola; his meeting with Batman proves to be a revelation. Černic rightly focuses not on a three-act dramatic structure but moves the pendulum from home oppression to sky and stellar ebullience. The concept of flying works as a (modest) queer dance extravaganza, with flower buds signifying the budding attraction between the two superheroes.

Voice acting (by Leo Černic himself) enhances the delicate parody of the genre; the sound design finely corresponds to the celestial theme and the ending brings us back to the trappings of a marriage you never wished to have in the first place.

A hymn to queer freedom as a superhero task, 'Pentola' builds successfully a universe in which "discreet men" need to navigate and turns it into a dreamy, queer comedy. It gets its beats right, and its male characters in a comfort zone that operates above Earth. A delicate film, full of longing and bursting iconography.