Aeon Flux is a character and series of shorts created by master animator and writer Peter Chung. The series held a five-minute spot on the last segment of Liquid Television, MTV's bizarre animated hodgepodge, for its two year duration.
In some cases, a full story would take place within those five minutes, but more often a serial narrative would continue between several episodes, making it very hard for the audience to catch on to the subtle nuances of the plots. Not until after two full-length video collections of the Aeon Flux segments were released did audiences really get a chance to fully absorb the depth of what goes on with the characters in these stories.
Aeon is a sexy and hardcore double agent, often fighting for her own (usually selfish) desires set against the backdrop of a constant, violent war between two colonies: Bregna and Monica. Monican agents are the rebels on the outside; Breen residents live as prisoners in a walled city-state controlled by a bizarre, twisted leader named Trevor Goodchild. Some Breens are arrogantly high-class and happy while most are desperate to escape. Attempts to cross between Bregna and Monica typically result in death or dismemberment.
Trevor himself is plagued by flights of fancy and rules sporadically with an oft-crazed, oft-bored demeanor. His subjects mean little more than guinea pigs for his own experiments in human behavior, and he is full of contradictions. He, like Aeon, is forever nursing some fantasy and the two of them share an erotic and strange lover-enemy relationship where mind games abound.
Each episode starts fresh with a new story either starring or somehow involving our dominatrix-styled heroine, and she often dies or fails. The peripheral characters all run deep and add so much to the realistic telling of and meaning behind every bizarre scenario.
Aeon Flux is one of the most intelligent, creative and deep animated series to come out of the early 90's. Part of this allure is its way of touching on an extremely wide array of both erotic fetishes and the varied tendencies of human nature. The narratives are erotic, ultra-violent, tragic, philisophical, smart, at times supernatural. Sadly, I believe the character and series was a few years before its time. After the too-short-lived era of Liquid Television came to an end, Aeon Flux ended with it. Despite talk of an animated series and the early stage development of an interactive CD-Rom game, all things Aeon Flux eventually fell by the wayside.