Shameful Otaku Secret!

Well, it’s over. Thirty-nine disorienting episodes later, Revolutionary Girl Utena has ended for me. There’s a lot to digest, and sometimes the pace at which bizarreness is thrown at you can be a little much. So not only am I confident that I’ll watch Utena again, I think right now I can only manage a pretty surface-level post.

So, here are the 10 (surface level) reasons to love Revolutionary Girl Utena. Be warned a thousand times, if you haven’t seen the full series, there will be spoilers. Most are vague, but they’re there.

10. Balls

Be-Papas didn’t exactly come out of nowhere. Kunihiko Ikuhara and co. were hardly amateurs. But it still amounts to a debut work, and it’s one of JC Staff’s first TV productions to boot.

Yet Utena comes out of the gate with a sense of purpose that few veteran productions come close to. The confidence is almost ridiculous, giving Be-Papas the sheer gall to try a million things that no one else had really done before. That sense of putting one’s balls on the table and saying “here you go, this is what I have” is what allowed all the other elements of this list to exist. So here’s to Be-Papas’ giant brass ones.

9. Surrealism

Symbolism in anime is nothing new. And to be honest, much of the symbolism in Utena is simple stuff. But rather than being incidental or enhancing, it’s everywhere, making the line between reality and allegory appropriately nonexistant. The series is packed so densely with out-of-context imagery that playing “spot the symbol” is a fun game, and playing “spot the red herring” can be even more fun. Sometimes the images only color the experience, sometimes they provide a direct line to the allegory of the overall story, and sometimes… well, here’s Ikuhara on one of the big questions:

“[Mickey’s] stopwatch contains the key to open all the mysteries of the world. And Mickey is the only one who knows that. So I don’t know what it is either.”

In the same interview, he treats Nanami’s egg similarly, so you have to wonder — either Ikuhara doesn’t want us to get the answers easily, or he doesn’t even have them all. And that would be fine, too.

8. Repetition

I did a whole post on Utena’s repetition patterns and how they mirror the practice in visual design. And that was just the Student Council Saga. The series continues to use repetition through each arc, to awesome effect. It’s amazing how much mileage Ikuhara got out of so little new footage per episode. The repetitive sequences don’t seem rote or tiring — in fact, for me they were exciting in themselves.

The beginning of “Absolute Destiny Apocalypse.” A Black Rose candidate descending the elevator. Touga saying “Listen? Do you hear it?” These are the culmination of a story, the satisfying climax to the buildup of the first part of each episode. The repetition also reinforces how similar each plan by End of the World to wreck Utena really is, and how futile those plans are every time. And of course, it enforces just how different the final duel really is.

7. Sex

It’s amazing really, how much you can get away with when you don’t explicitly say or show too much. To me, the sexual element in Utena could be shockingly overt at times, but without any showing tits or actual penis talk (unless you count “polishing your sword”), it slides right by. Sex is a lot of things in Utena, but usually it’s a means to an end. The characters (many of whom are just middle school students) casually use sex as a tool to get back at each other, or as a weapon to destroy innocence and nobility.

And Akio’s car? Those scenes made me feel like a middle-aged housewife reading Danielle Steel, all fanning myself and loosening my collar.

The sexual ambiguity of the characters further enhances the air of debauchery: Everyone pretty much seems ready to fuck everyone else, regardless of gender. Wakaba’s innocent yuri crush on Utena sets the homoerotic baseline, with the other extreme covered by Touga and Akio’s chest-groping photo sessions.

6. More Shoujo than Shoujo

That all makes me think: A lot of this long-haired beefcake shit and rosy borders are probably par for the course with flowery girls’ manga, but shoujo is really just a base context for Utena. Ikuhara uses that as a framework and then both expands and subverts it, often in the same moment. You know what moments I mean, right? How about when Utena and Anthy symmetrically lay down in their beds, silhouetted in a dramatic arched-back pose? Or the mirror image of that same pose starring Akio and Touga as they watch a duel… from a gilded bed? It’s both a Gurren-Lagann-esque inflation of shoujo elements and a hilarious parody of them. And that brings me to…

5. Humor

What does Utena have in common with another symbol-heavy hit of the 90s? Well, quite a lot, including Be-Papas member Yoji Enokido. But one thing it has that Anno’s ode to misanthropy lacks is an ever-present sense of humor. Utena is rich in both standard anime humor and in parody of its genre. And what about those Nanami episodes?

4. Nanami

Yes, Nanami. She’s exemplary of Be-Papas’ subversive methods: they masked story and character development in seemingly throwaway comedy filler episodes. Ultimately Nanami was an important lens through which to view Akio and Anthy’s relationship, but that lens was polished by her constant comedic abuse at the hands of elephants, runaway horses, curry powder, and of course her beloved Touga-Onii-sama.

3. Chu-Chu

Nuff said, but if you need help: Watch the final episode. Ikuhara says that Chu-Chu tried to be more like Akio so that Anthy would like him, but at the end he removes his tie and earring in the world’s cutest gesture of independence and change.

2. The melancholy of coming of age

There’s plenty of anime that could be described as “coming of age” stories. But the best of them always have a unique way of getting that same timeless idea across. For some reason, Utena’s end reminded me of Philip Pullman’s vicious indictment of C.S. Lewis. He attacked Narnia not for its religiosity but for what he saw as condemnation of the very idea growing up. Utena does strike me at first blush as taking up the Narnian (that is, traditional) side of the argument. Loss of innocence is not necessarily as bad a thing in be-Papas’s world as in Lewis’s (although it happened to Utena in a manipulative, not-so-nice way), but growing up does mean the abandonment of certain strengths that only the pure can have. I suppose it’s open to interpretation whether Anthy was right, that Utena can’t be her prince because she’s a girl, but I’ll save any more musing on this for when I have enough words for a post in itself. I would love to hear others’ thoughts on this, beyond the obvious.

1. J.A. Seazer

Seazer’s importance to the anime can’t be understated. It’s even possible that Ikuhara’s whole idea of an anime about revolutionizing the world was generated by Seazer’s music, even if Seazer’s purpose was a bit more specific than Utena’s pretty abstract kind of revolution. And in turn, Utena brought the 1960s countercultural icon back into the limelight for the first time in many years.

If you doubt how much Seazer’s music colored Revolutionary Girl Utena, just imagine it without, or maybe with some other more traditional anime music. Suddenly the vibrantly surreal and representative world becomes a little more normal and shallow. Seazer’s bizarre imagery — inscrutable lists of items found at the apocalypse, obsessive meditations on the human body, and symbols borrowed from religions around the world — is the cornerstone to the multi-tiered fortress of Utena’s allegorical storyline.

So…

The sound that races through the End Of This Post

These ten things just came to me without much thought, but there’s plenty more to love about Utena. Not to mention, any of these ten items could make a post in itself, and hopefully some will someday. Is there anything you particularly liked about Revolutionary Girl Utena that I missed? Or do you just hate Chu-Chu (you heartless bastard)?

Posted Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 2:57 pm
Categories: fantasy, shoujo
Tags: Be-Papas,JC staff,Kunihiko Ikuhara,revolutionary girl utena