Revolutionary Girl Utena 1: The sugary pink birthday cake of kickass fantasy anime.
SCREENCAP MEGAPOST.
It’s what I do. If you want a wall of text, you’re in the wrong place. In other news, former President Bush declared last week that Betsuni is his preferred aniblog for heavy use of visual-aids.
(I must apologize if my screencaps for Utena look more like screencraps. This is for various reasons, and does not reflect the glory of the remastered episodes.)
A short while ago, DigitalBoy invited anyone who was interested to participate in a community-wide project of blogging Revolutionary Girl Utena. The show is (supposedly) famous among anime fans for being funny, badass, and all-around awesome in general.
Before reading DigitalBoy’s post, I had zero knowledge of Utena other than hearing the name occasionally on various websites, and had never heard anything that would encourage me to pursue it. Normally I wouldn’t be open-minded enough to pick this show up when more recent series are waiting to be caught up on. However, I feel this is an opportunity to introduce myself to the ‘sphere members who are following DigitalBoy’s call to arms, and so have taken up the cause alongside him.
Together, we shall embark upon an epic journey along with the readers to meet this girl, Utena, and follow her as she revolutionizes the world with the power of friendship, roses, and good old-fashioned ass-kicking. Anibloggers, if you haven’t seen this yet, hop onboard the bandwagon and join us for the ride as DigitalBoy remembers love and I discover it for the first time.
Now without further introduction: Revolutionary Girl Utena: Episode 1 – The Rose Bride.
Girly…
What kind of show is this again?
Was the Sword of Akasha in Code Geass a shout-out to this? \:^o
Where did this sudden burst of badass come from!? :^O
Fighting on horseback in the midst of destruction! :^D
The introduction is played straight at first. Princess’ parents died, and a prince errant comes along while she’s despairing and tells her to never lose the strength which is keeping her alive amidst such tragedy. The prince gives her a ring, imparts some words of comfort and encouragement, and walks off into the horizon like a badass, having filled his quota of WWJD moments for the day.
Then the narration takes a sudden shift toward the goofy, and we learn the princess was so overwhelmed by the prince’s GARness that she determined to be just like him, right down to the masculine-form title of “prince”. I guess this kinda makes sense considering the medieval time period, since princesses couldn’t do any of the cool stuff princes and knights were known to do on a daily basis. Still, looking at the serious Les Yay in the Opening, I can’t help but think the encounter was responsible for her choosing to be a lesbian.
The prince is so GAR, he not only makes men gay for him, but he makes women want to switch genders just to be like him!!! This level of GAR is unprecedented! I can only hope he doesn’t disappoint when we next meet him.
Lesbian confirmation.
Good God, Wakaba looks like Padme from Cartoon Network’s Clone Wars mini-series. Just goes to show how awful and outdated that show’s character designs were for its time.
The music is surprisingly excellent for such an old show. This piece has a lot of pomp.
The glasses on this teacher remind me of Miss Bitters from Invader ZIM.
She dresses like a Gundam character. Awesome.
MY EARS!!!
Utena owns this screechy bitch with an All There In The Manual moment.
THE PETALS MAKE IT MORE EPIC.
This is like watching the SOS Brigade destroy a sports team’s morale through dubious means. Except it’s only one girl. Sad.
“Miss Utena, please use my towel!”
If emulating the prince means turning girls into lesbians, then I’d say she’s doing well so far.
VILLAINOUS CUR!!! Oh no he di-in’t!
Who is this guy? And who does his hair? He must know Sephiroth and Jin Uzuki from the Epic Bangs barber shop.
*Glomp*
The Sleeping Beauty-picture frame pops up whenever someone cool is on camera. lol
“You’re WAY cooler than any of those guys can be!”
Yep, she’s successfully duplicated the prince’s sexual orientation-confusing GARness.
:O This student council meeting is so epic, the “Merkabah” theme from Xenosaga even makes an appearance. Student council meetings are Serious Business.
Wouldn’t it sound better to name your ambiguously ominous organization, “Apocalypse”? Also, shouldn’t people be questioning the intentions of said benefactor with a name like that?
What is the stopwatch for??? Dramatic randomness.
I HAVE TO BE A GOOD WIFE.
Utena, your strength and badassery has ensnared my heart! You are the mirror through which a man can judge his true worth.
Also, this is a beautiful piano piece.
It’s time to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and Utena’s all out of gum.
Utena challenges Saionji to a duel in the forbidden forest. Apparently Saionji thinks Utena is the new duelist everyone is apparently waiting for. Apparently. Does that make her the unwitting Chosen One spoken of in prophecy?
Trippy Greek theatre-chorus. @_@
Enter the Chamber of Secrets.
The Absolute Destiny: Apocalypse theme is unsettling, if not creepy. The heavy-metal guitar is awesome, but the 80s anime theme is too campy for the song to be scary. The lyrics are one more reason to suspect the Sword of Akasha is a shout-out to this structure, though. Google Akashic Record if you don’t get the connection.
This here castle is upside-down. o.O
The council has some kind of social Darwinism thing going on with their Rose Bride. I don’t really get what’s going on, at any rate. Neither does Utena.
What are the windows for?
OH SH**! He just pulled a sword out of her chest! It’s like X!
I’ll hand it to Saionji: He’s villainous in all the right places. He’s got the hair and he condescends to the hero(ine) like a pro in this scene.
“The holy actor, forever cast into hell.” ← With Big-O on the brain, I get the feeling Utena is Jesus In Purgatory. Revolutionary Girl Utena shows up on TVtropes’ Gnosticism page, so she literally might be.
BADASS!!! Don’t mess with this pink-haired princess, she’ll F you up!
…the harder the fall.
I think he’s intent on 1up-ing the prince for title of most GAR.
O__O What’s up with this guy’s legs?
The guitar for this song is freaking metal. I can’t get enough of it.
Adultery.
Next time, on Revolutionary Girl Utena: BANG AGAIN!
Final thoughts:
Like Canaan, I don’t really know where the plot is going after the first episode, but what I’ve seen has me coming back for more.
The animation has some (obviously) outdated character designs, but they still look better than the cartoony style of the 80s. The frame rate is quite excellent. I don’t know what the old version of Utena looked like, but the remastered edition is gorgeous, with characters and scenery in full technicolor splendor the way they were meant to be.
The action hasn’t yet reached the apocalyptic bar set by the Opening, but the sword fight between Saionji and Utena was cool in its own right. Viewers versed in the art of the sword will be delighted to know that the duels in Utena are as quick and dirty as they are in real life; No Flynning here, as outcomes are decided in a matter of seconds.
Utena herself is an interesting person, which is good because the rest of the characters aren’t (except maybe Touga, who seems to always know when the camera is focused on him from beyond the fourth wall). Utena is very girly, yet she manages to have more badass moments than all the male cast members combined. She most definitely shakes up the traditional stereotypes of how a girl should behave.
I dig the sexy black and red Gundam outfit, but the pink hair throws me off. I cannot approve of this desecration of badassery. Blue and metallic-purple are fine, but pink is too sugary to take seriously, especially when combined with those freaky eyes that are conspicuously missing their pupils. (Is everyone in this show under mind control?)
As revolutionary as Utena is, she fails to trump Canaan as my current favorite poster girl for strong women, and if that’s biased on appearance, then so be it. Canaan is just too intense to be 1up-ed by Utena’s candyland-character design. Still, surpassing Canaan’s Grammaton Cleric-badassitude would be quite a feat for anyone, so this does not detract much from Utena’s own brand of badass. Ignoring the sparkly foofery that plagues so many fantasy anime, Utena is intensely noble and kickass in her own right, and would be right at home on the Jedi Council.
As a whole, I love Revolutionary Girl Utena so far. It’s gay. It’s hilarious. It’s badass. It’s camp.
Watch it.
rofl, great post. though Utena is a lot less lesbian than it first appears, and way less lesbian than Canaan. But I had fun reading your remarks.
I hope you know, that whole ‘story from long ago’ really is Utena’s backstory. So it’s not from medieval times :p.
Also you keep mentioning 80s, but I hope you know this show aired in 1998. It only looks older because of a combination of crappy animation and an art director who likes things hand-drawn and worked on most of the best 80s shows.
But yeah, Utena has one of the best soundtracks ever. If you liked anything you heard, there’s only more and better to come! After all, Utena literally made up it’s own music genre (“chorus rock” invented by J.A.Seazer for this soundtrack)
Wow 1998? I Did Not Do The Research, sorry heh. I was referring to medieval times because the whole show has that knights and princesses romantic feel to it. And it doesn’t have giant robots and pizza hut, so I assume it actually does take place in that sort of time era, albeit an alternate universe of apocalyptic staircases and upside-down castles.
If Utena invented chorus rock then I’m in love with this show forever. E Nomine, Therion, and Symphony X are my vices.
indeed. But yeah, Utena take splace in modern day. Prepare to see a lot of cars.
I gave up on Utena after the second episode. The show wasn’t going anywhere fast, the concept of dueling to cut off another’s rose to win and the mentioning of the word “revolution” every four goddamn line pissed me off to the point of insanity. No offense to any Utena fans out there, but I really don’t like the series. It’s not just the crappy animation, which looks alot like a water down slideshow of Code Geass, but the storyline wasn’t that enticing. Some of the greatest stories ever told were just released a couple of years prior (cough Dragonball Z and Gundam Wing) with far superior character developments and storylines.
If more people knew about our blog, you would have just opened pandora’s box to a shitstorm of hate. Nice.
I actually think the animation is great so far. The Shin-chan expressions are goofy at times but you gotta remember the era (or rather, the director, according to DigitalBoy). I hope the storyline is more interesting than you suggest; Utena is one of those shows that are a lot deeper than they look on the surface. Or So I Hear.
>the concept of dueling to cut off another’s rose to win and the mentioning of the word “revolution” every four goddamn line pissed me off to the point of insanity
Huh, crazier things have happened in anime.
>It’s not just the crappy animation, which looks alot like a water down slideshow of Code Geass
The animation is not particularly amazing but no way is it crappy. Or maybe you’re talking about art? Utena’s aesthetics are top-notch to this day and age.
>Some of the greatest stories ever told were just released a couple of years prior (cough Dragonball Z and Gundam Wing) with far superior character developments and storylines.
Oh. My. God. :O
“Crazier things have happened in anime.”
It isn’t nearly as bad as saying “Maximize!!!” every time you transform lol. I think the times they mention “revolution” are quite appropriate, given that it IS their ultimate goal to actually revolutionize the world.
I also am enjoying the animation. The pink hair still gets to me a bit, but the frame rate is always top-notch and the architecture of the academy is totally sweet. In particular, the doorway/staircase montage is freaking EPIC. Also the part where they pull the sword of Dios out of Anthy. It has an almost esoteric creepiness to it, thanks to the blazing hot animation on that sequence.
As for Dragonball Z, I never watched it. I hear the original Dragonball was heavily based on Chinese mythology, so I wouldn’t harsh on it too much. Gundam Wing also had a substantial share of camp, but again I would not burn the storyline: It was excellent, if not as operatic as the original Gundam. I don’t think it’s fair to call anything “greatest story ever” since there are so many kinds of stories, and some just can’t be compared like apples and oranges.
I want to believe you are joking.
WAI?