Before the holiness of Achilles’s thighs, Patroclus opens his mouth in worship.

To those familiar with classical literature, this image of amorous reverence should bring to mind the devotional language that surrounds the sexual offering of the thighs evoked by one of the most memorable if heavily debated fragments from Aeschylus’s Myrmidons, the first tragedy in the mostly lost trilogy that the ancient Greek dramatist is thought to have devoted to the glories and griefs Achilles experienced before the walls of Troy: “And you did not respect the sacred honour of the thigh-bond, ungrateful that you were for those countless kisses!,” the fragments reads.[1] To those familiar with animated representations of queerness, however, the image of Patroclus’s carnal devotion will probably bring to mind the vivid sex scene that marks the literal climax of the erotically charged relationship at the heart of Achilles (1995), Barry JC Purves’s stop-motion retelling of the very mythological narratives from which Aeschylus’s trilogy originated.

In this scene (Fig.1), two puppets modelled after the aesthetics of ancient Greek sculptures give “flesh” to the mythological couple. Over a monophonic melody redolent of liturgical plainchant, they caress, kiss, and probe each other’s bodies while twelve cross-dissolve transitions mirror the frictional coupling of sexual congress. The material aesthetics of the cross-dissolve gradually erode the polarisation of sexual roles (i.e. top and bottom) viewers might have come to expect as a result of how the film, from the beginning, represents Achilles and Patroclus by calling upon structures of age asymmetry, ones that hark back to the well-known physiognomy that regulated the social acceptance of same-sex intimacy within the institutional frameworks of classical pederasty (i.e. older lover vs younger beloved). Graphic yet elegant in its depiction of Achilles and Patroclus’s (homo)sexuality, the scene brings visibility to the very carnal love that Homer’s Iliad arguably implied, a circumstance that perpetuates the millennia-long process of erotic (re)definition by which Western culture, since at least the time of Aeschylus’s now fragmentary tragedy, has tried to contend with the reticence that the Homeric source displayed before the romantic life of its central hero. In the process, the scene delivers what is arguably the earliest and, in many ways, still most explicit representation of queer intimacy to be found across Western animation, pornographic media set aside.[2] This latter achievement is one of the many accomplishments behind the body of work of an animation auteur who has not only tested and expanded the aesthetic and narrative horizons of the animated form but who, through a unique marriage of formal experimentalism, exquisite craftsmanship, and learned intertextuality, has also articulated one of the most sustained interrogations of queerness and desire one can find in the Western animated canon.  

The trajectory of this queer body of work can be traced back to the late 1980s when, after over a decade of commercial animation work for studios such as Cosgrove Hall Productions and Aardman Animations, Purves was invited to write and direct his first animated short as part of Aardman’s Lip Synch (1989-1990), an anthological series that, like the majority of Purves’s early work and much English animation in the 1990s, relied on the economic support of UK’s Channel 4. An exploration of the narrative capacity of pantomime, the five-minute-long Next: The Infinite Variety Show (1989) features a (re)animated William Shakespeare, who, alone on stage, auditions for his life in front of a rather unimpressed Peter Hall, using nothing but body language, a number of stage props and all the technical expedients allowed by stop-motion animation to walk the director and the viewer through his entire dramatic oeuvre (Fig.2). Blending craft and wit, the film anticipates the two recurrent motifs that have since characterised Purves’s work: namely, an interest for the narrative and aesthetic affordances of the mise en abîme, particularly one concerned with the inner workings of theatrical forms, and a fascination with biographical story-telling, particularly one that returns to figures that have played a significant role in the cultural ecology of queerness. While the biographical impetus of Purves’s cinema is most apparent in the later films of Purves’s filmography, the director’s interest in the narrative possibility of the mise en abîme shines through all of the four films Purves came to produce after Next: namely, Screen Play (1992), Rigoletto (1993), Achilles (1995), and Gilbert and Sullivan: The Very Models (1998). All four of these films are formally self-reflexive, borrowing from the conventions of historically and culturally different traditions of theatrical practice.

The Oscar-nominated Screen Play (Fig.3), for instance, uses the stylistic grammar of both Kabuki and Bunraku theatre as well as British sign language to reimagine the legend of the so-called “willow pattern,” a popular orientalist motif seen across Western—particularly English—tableware. A story of forbidden love, the legend is here retold by the elderly Naoki, who reminisces about the early days of his relationship with Takako, the daughter of a disapproving Japanese nobleman, chronicling the dramatic escape by which the lovers managed to elude Takako’s arranged marriage to a samurai. The use of theatrical lighting, sliding panels and a revolving turntable allows the film to recreate the fluid ebbs and flows of Naoki’s memories, which supersede one another, captured via a sustained long take that goes uninterrupted until the cheated samurai, after years of relentless pursuit, catches up with the lovers, precipitating a tragic and gory epilogue as the violent agency of montage and the abrupt immediacy of the present return the story to a more conventionally cinematic mode of storytelling.

This interplay between dramatic and cinematic storytelling returns in Purves’s following film, Rigoletto (Fig.4), which continues Purves’s engagement with the language and culture of the stage, taking opera as its form and subject. A faithful if abridged adaptation of Verdi’s masterpiece of the same name, the film follows the sexual exploits of the Duke of Mantua, an incorrigible libertine who, one day, sets his eyes on Gilda, the maiden daughter of the titular court jester, prompting an unravelling of lives and loyalties that inevitably ends in tragedy. Featuring a choral ensemble, an intricate multilevel set, acrobatic camera moves and a cast of principal puppets that makes extensive use of complex breathing mechanisms to emulate the vocal and physical expressivity of the singers here accompanied by the Orchestra and Chorus of the Welsh National Opera, Rigoletto remains the most technically ambitious of Purves’s films to date, its scale a testament to the operatic breath of a creativity recurrently tempered by restrictive budgets and precarious funding infrastructures.      

More measured in its approach to musical theatre, Gilbert and Sullivan: The Very Models (Fig.5) follows in the pattern of stripped-down storytelling perfected by the earlier, BAFTA-nominated Achilles, which structured itself around the conventions of the ancient Greek tragedy. By mobilising a pastiche of music taken from across the oeuvre born of the collaboration between the dramatist W. S. Gilbert and the composer Arthur Sullivan, the film deploys a marriage metaphor together with vocal and vestmental forms of cross-dressing to recount the life and works of the two preeminent masters of English operetta, the mise en abîme here blurring the line between life and art. With its coupling of dramatic reflexivity and non-fictional subject matter, this film serves as a bridge between the more “theatrical” films Purves produced during the 1990s and the biographical animations that have dominated Purves’s filmography in the more recent years. The first of these biographical films, Tchaikovsky—an Elegy (2011) interweaves excerpts from the diaries and letters of the composer who, arguably more than any other figure in the history of Western music, has had the reception of his life and work shaped by the public knowledge of his homosexuality, with excerpts from the composer’s oeuvre. The result is a somewhat (auto)biographical film wherein the subjectivity of the animator (who, in the English version, gives voice to the composer’s thoughts) seems to merge with the subjectivity of the subject of representation, the boundary between life and work here once again brought to the point of erosion (Fig.6). The second of this biographical films, No Ordinary Joe (2021), also returns to an historical subject, integrating puppet animation and live action to explore the unlikely relationship between the gender renegade Joe Carstairs and her inanimate life-companion, the doll Lord Tod Wadley (Fig.7).   

With the exception of Plume (2010), an exploration of the impact of trauma told through the allegory of a winged man who, after falling from flight, finds himself ravaged by demonic looking creatures in a maelstrom of violence that leaves his ability to fly forever changed (Fig.8), this outlined body of work recurs to intertextual modes of storytelling, returning viewers to cultural sites known for their long histories of queer reception. Queerness, in this sense, permeates Purves’s oeuvre by virtue of the historical figures at the heart of films like Tchaikovsky and No Ordinary Joe, but also by virtue of the discourses that have codified the cultural standing of art forms such as kabuki, opera and operetta. It is the matrix of discourses activated by Purves’s intertextuality that makes Purves’s work a particularly fertile site for scholars of queer animation, though the obvious starting point for this kind of scholarship ultimately remains Achilles: the film that, more than any other animation in this oeuvre, reveals an explicit commitment to the interrogation of queer desire via the vivid celebration of what, paraphrasing Aeschylus, one might regard as the sacred bond of the thigh.

[1] Aeschylus, Fragments, trans. by Alan H. Sommerstein (Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 145.

[2] I look at the significance the film bears for the study of queer animation in “The Queerness of Animation: Barry JC Purves and the Supplementarity of Form,” forthcoming in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Vol 47 (1).