Revolutionary Girl Utena

Revolutionary Girl Utena: Adolescence of Utena

revolutionary girl utena 1997. TV series. (39 X 30 min.) Fantasy/comedy/drama/romance. dir Kunihiko Ikuhara.

revolutionary girl utena: adolescence of utena 1999. Movie. 87 min. Fantasy/drama/romance. org Chiho Saito and Be-Papas (manga). dir Kunihiko Ikuhara. scr Yoji Enokido, others. mus Shinkichi Mitsumune, J.A. Seazar. des Shinya Hasegawa, Shichiro Kobayashi. -jd

An avant-garde deconstruction of fairy-tale romance, Revolutionary Girl Utena is an impressive experiment in symbolic storytelling with unique music and imagery, from the director of the Sailor Moon series.

In a fairy-tale prologue, we are introduced to Utena, a sad young girl lost in grief over the death of her parents. A handsome prince, moved by her plight, gives her a ring with a rose crest, promising that they will meet again someday. Little Utena is so impressed by her encounter with the prince that she decides to grow up to become a prince herself! A voiceover ponders: “But was that really such a good idea?”

Flash forward to several years later, as Utena Tenjou enters the exclusive Ohtori Academy as a transfer student, and immediately creates a sensation. Instead of the standard blouse and skirt worn by the other female students, she insists on wearing a unique outfit, a modified boy’s school uniform jacket over tight red shorts. Respected by boys for her prowess at sports, and worshipped by girls for her androgynous style, Utena becomes an idol to her fellow students, but soon runs afoul of the Student Council, whose primary occupation is fighting duels with each other for possession of the beautiful Rose Bride, a young woman named Anthy Himemiya. Utena’s ring, similar to those worn by the Student Council members, entitles her to enter the dueling arena. Before she knows it she has defeated her first challenger and become engaged to the Rose Bride.

Utena and Anthy become good friends, settling into a lifestyle of domestic bliss while Utena defends her bride against challengers from the Student Council and the rest of the student body. But the question of the Rose Ring still remains—was her prince once a member of the Student Council? Was he really Akio, Anthy’s brother and the chairman of the Academy, who resembles her memories of the Prince? And what is the true relationship between Anthy and Akio, a link that seems to go beyond brother and sister, all the way back to the origin of the Prince himself?

The movie version, Adolescence of Utena, is a condensed retelling of the TV story that freely rewrites the histories and motivations of the characters and builds up to a radically different conclusion. Utena is more bitter and wounded here, and Anthy more aggressive and direct, making their relationship closer to one of equals. Utena’s desire to be a prince is presented more as her attempt to hide from her own sexuality than a refusal to adhere to gender roles. The film is also more blatant in suggesting a romantic connection between the two women, who are mostly presented in the TV series as friends.

Utena’s character designs are very distinctive. Both male and female characters are impossibly slender supermodel look-alikes, with long, elegant limbs, pointed chins, and huge eyes. Anthy and her brother Akio are dark-skinned, but most other characters are pale, and with unrealistic hair colors, such as blue, green, purple, or pink. (Utena’s hair is bright pink.) The majority of the student body wear uniforms that wouldn’t be too out of place at a Japanese private school—girls in puff-sleeved blouses and short skirts, boys in simple green uniforms—but the Student Council members are tricked out in elaborate, military-style jackets with epaulets on the shoulders. The Rose Bride wears a full-skirted red gown and tiara, like a fairy-tale princess.

The overall visual style of Revolutionary Girl Utena is different from virtually anything else in anime. The artwork is very stylized, and images are framed in unusual ways for mood or allegorical meaning. Character introductions and other significant moments are shown within decorative black frames and anchored by spinning roses. Elaborate rituals are constantly repeated, such as the ascent to the dueling ground through a special gate and spiral staircase (replaced later in the series with an elevator). Another recurring motif is a pair of gossiping shadow puppets who pop up to comment on the main story with the preamble “Do you know? Do you know? Have you heard the news?” The shadow puppets often pantomime a little scene symbolizing the drama about to unfold in the second half of the episode.

The setting of the Ohtori Academy itself is surreal, like a fantasy version of an Italian city, with winding streets, towers, rotundas, and Venice’s Bridge of Sighs. Above the dueling ground hangs an upside down fairy-tale castle, its turrets and glowing spires pointing toward the duelists like crystals on a massive chandelier. An understated computer graphic shows the castle spinning in the sky like a gear in a huge machine. Adolescence of Utena emphasizes the artificiality of the Academy even more, reducing the backgrounds and buildings to abstract stage sets, with weird Expressionist perspectives, moving flats sliding back and forth, and flying catwalks ascending and descending in every direction like Escher prints. In both versions of the story, music is a huge element, an unusual mixture of hauntingly beautiful orchestral pieces and head-banging heavy metal with discordant voices chanting in a chorus over the duels.

Be-Papas, the studio formed just for the production of Utena, consists of director Kunihiko Ikuhara, manga artist Chiho Saito, animator Shinya Hasegawa, writer Yoji Enokido, and producer Yu­ichiro Oguro. Ikuhara directed the movie Sailor Moon R: Promise of the Rose, and the Sailor Moon anime TV series through Sailor Moon SuperS.

Right from its opening prologue, Revolutionary Girl Utena sets out to deconstruct fairy-tale clichés. Utena, the girl who wants to be a prince, is a refreshing and empowering figure from the moment she appears, but the show doesn’t settle for mere gender bending. Instead, it suggests that being a prince is just as limiting as the role of princess, since it too, is part of the same system. The Academy and its Student Council are locked in a trap, fighting pointless battles over the Rose Bride instead of following through on their motto to “smash the shell of the world” and bring the world revolution. Each individual duelist is a failed rebel of a sort, unable to resist the undertow of societal expectation. Even Utena proves vulnerable to temptation, when Akio enters the picture and begins to play to her more girlish side. What girl doesn’t want to be a princess after all?

Anthy the Rose Bride is a counter-example to Utena’s modern feminism. The Rose Bride’s entire personality is submissive to the tastes of the current dueling champion—while paired with Utena, she is sweet and generous, fond of flowers and animals. But it’s pointed out that these lovable qualities may ultimately be no more than a reflection of Utena’s own desires, and as the story draws to its wrenching conclusion, Anthy proves stubbornly resistant to Utena’s attempts to liberate her. No prince can save Anthy from a system designed to enslave her—only Anthy herself can do that.

If the story sounds overserious, the anime’s presentation is anything but. Utena is often very funny, using an eclectic cast of oddball characters in high-school-style cliques to poke gentle fun at practically every aspect of male and female relations. It’s also a relentlessly sexy show, featuring anything and everything that can be interpreted as suggestive or symbolic. Red sports cars erupt from the ground in phallic fashion during duels. Male characters lounge with their jackets open to reveal smooth, bare chests, and take photographs of each other. The Sword of Dios is drawn from the Rose Bride’s chest as she swoons in her owner’s arms.

As for Adolescence of Utena, the movie is at once more abstract in its symbolism and more straightforward in its narrative. For those left uncertain by the hardly coy approach of the TV series, the movie makes it clear that the main conflict of the drama concerns the characters’ attitudes toward sex. Nearly every intimate conversation is conducted in the nude, and characters’ histories of sexual assault or abuse are made abundantly—though artistically—clear. Meanwhile, the imagery of the movie represents the Academy as a literal machine, whose gnashing gears threaten to grind the rebellious lovers into pulp during their final escape attempt to “the outside world.” Transforming into a sleek pink sports car, the movie’s recurring symbol of sexuality, Utena begins a mad dash for freedom with Anthy at the wheel. Rather than carrying its rejection of prince and princess fantasies to the logical extreme as in the TV series, the movie gives Anthy and Utena the gift of a fairy-tale ending of their own.

Practically any episode centering around the ditzy character Nanami can be counted on for comedy, but “Cowbell of Happiness,” where Nanami receives a cowbell in the mail and wears it, assuming it to be jewelry, until she begins to transform into a cow herself, and “Nanami’s Egg,” where she naïvely believes that she’s laid an egg, are hard to top for sheer surreality.

Adolescence of Utena’s most startling sequence is Utena’s transformation into a slick pink sportscar that Anthy must drive in order to escape the Academy. As they speed down a seemingly endless highway, a fantasy castle appears on the horizon, then rises above the roadway like a huge supertanker ship, complete with sound effects. The castle is now a machine, a grinding behemoth on wheels that tries to crush the car beneath its gears.

Adolescence of Utena played at the 26th Annual San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival in 2002, with director Kunihiko Ikuhara in attendance, and has been screened at several other international venues such as the Future Film Festival in Bologna, Italy, the Nation Film Theater in London, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

The lyrics to the “Absolute Destiny Apocalypse” song that plays over the duels change to reflect the specific meaning of each duelist’s challenge, and the overall series’ message. This is also true of the movie—the lyrics for the first duel, for example, emphasize time and tradition (“I feel the Middle Ages inside myself”) while the onscreen dialogue reminds the viewer of Utena’s modern attitudes (“What woman wants to be treated like a possession?”).

The mantra recited by the duelists is a paraphrase of a quote from Demian, by Herman Hesse: “If it cannot break its egg’s shell, a chick will die without being born. We are the chick. The world is our egg. If we don’t crack the world’s shell, we will die without being born. Smash the world’s shell! For the revolution of the world!”

violence The duels are bloodless, but the horrific origin story of the Rose Bride is anything but. nudity There is frequent female nudity, but it is stylized rather than realistic or graphic. There are also a lot of bare male chests. The movie’s nudity is more explicit, and the implications of rape (both male and female), incest, and same-sex physical relationships are more overt.