October 24, 2025

La Petite Mort et la Renaissance de "Vulvine Reine d'Extase"

This week, we examine the risqué 2022 Gobelins short which refused to die.

by Toussaint Egan

This week, we're continuing our spotlight on some of our favorite shorts produced by Gobelins alumni. Coming off of the kaleidoscopic carnivale that is Sundown, we now turn our attention to one of the most impressive (and controversial) Gobelins graduation films in recent memory: Vulvina Queen of Ecstasy (or, "Vulvine Reine d’Extase"). 

Co-directed by Clémence Andre, Nawel Bahamou, Ming Chieh Chang, Théo Guyot, and Mary Yanko, the 7-minute short follows the harrowing story of the titular ruler of a desert kingdom whose husband dies mid-coitus. When the spectre of death appears to collect his soul before promptly vanishing, Vulvina unexpectedly becomes enamored with the psychopomp. Desperate, she perpetrates an escalating series of killings and eventual indiscriminate massacres to summon and sustain her would-be lover’s presence indefinitely. Vulvina's single-minded carnal campaign, however, ultimately proves to be her own undoing, as all living things are inevitably fated to one day shed their mortal coil — even the mistress of death itself.

"We started with the idea to try to keep the fun during the production because it's kind of hard to maintain good relations with five co-directors," Guyot told me over email. "We each wrote different small stories every day until one pleased us all. For the story, we wanted to make an immoral erotic short film, taking inspiration from painters like Gustave Moreau and Yoshitaka Amano. Walerian Borowczyk's 1973 film Immoral Tales was also a source of inspiration. The idea was to make a beautiful erotic movie, staying as far as possible from a bland hentai look. As Georges Bataille once said, 'Pornography is eroticism that fails on the poetic level.'"

Vulvina Queen of Ecstasy is the very antithesis of bland. The extravagant color palette and background design evoke comparison to the likes of Marcell Jankovics's Son of the White Mare, Eiichi Yamamoto’s Belladonna of Sadness, and even Eyvind Earle’s art direction for 1959's Sleeping Beauty. And if the production team were aiming for the epitome of "profane" and "immoral," they certainly achieved that and then some. With no spoken dialogue whatsoever, Vulvina wastes no time in conveying to the audience her utter lack of morals or the myopia of her motivations. She’s vain, cruel, and utterly uninhibited in not only exposing those traits to the world, but exercising them to end the lives of untold numbers of casualties in service of satiating her own desires and appetites. Vulvina is the epitome of a libertine; a villainous erotic protagonist worthy of de Sade himself.

Those same qualities were the intrinsic cause for the short’s difficult rollout. On November 17, 2022, Vulvina Queen of Ecstasy was the seventh of the 10 graduation projects released on Gobelins' YouTube Channel. The film was promptly delisted from the platform that day and now remains hidden on the playlist for that year's graduate shorts. On November 19th, the short was uploaded onto Vimeo before it too was deleted from there. Finally, the team resorted to uploading Vulvina Queen of Ecstasy onto Pornhub, where once again, it was deleted in December. As if that weren't enough, according to Guyot, the film was also rejected for the first public projection of the graduation films for that year as well.

Eventually, it was none other than Catsuka — that venerable institution of world animation news — that came to the rescue. In light of the film's embattled distribution hurdles, the French animation website agreed to host Vulvina Queen of Ecstacy on its sub-site Catsuka Player, an archive of over 5,000 animated short films on April 22, 2023, where it has remained unlisted but available to watch for whoever wishes to seeks it out. Art and animation should be made available to receptive audiences, and the same could be said for erotic art and animation. Catsuka's decision to host the short is a testament to the site’s principles and integrity; the film went on to screen at multiple festivals and is now available to stream on Amazon Prime in France.

Vulvina's tumultuous premiere did nothing to diminish the prospects or careers of its creators. Andre is currently a freelance animator, having worked in Japan for over a year and published two Webtoon series (Blood in Love, Saint Angel and the Heaven Knights) since graduating from Gobelins. Guyot is currently working on a new short film based on the theme of softness as a philosophical concept. Bahamou pitched an animated TV series called Inspector, Your Pants! in 2023 and still works as a freelancer, Chang went on to work on three episodes of 2024's Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft; and Yanko has gone on to co-direct a music video for SIAMES, a 2-minute adaptation of Voltaire’s The Princess of Babylon commissioned by France Television, and is currently working on Kateryna, a 14-minute animated documentary of the Russian-Ukrainian war through the lens of social media.

Regardless of one's own feelings might be with regard to the validity of erotic or transgressive art, the simple truth is that Vulvina Queen of Ecstasy is a masterful work of animation that speaks volumes to the combined knowledge, talent, and skill of its creators. It deserves to be seen and made available to audiences willing to appraise its merits and qualities, not to be indefinitely suppressed by a social media algorithm.

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Vulvina Queen of Ecstasy (NSFW) is available to stream on Catsuka Player.