Revolutionary Girl Utena Review

Kunihiko Ikuhara left Sailor Moon, formed Be Papas with the writer Yoji Enokido and the designer Shinya Hasegawa, and made the strangest show ever handed a teatime slot. Its method is repetition. The same elevator, the same endless spiral staircase, the same rose crest cracking open, the same J.A. Seazer choral track howling nonsense Latin over the duel, week after week, until the ritual stops reading as a budget saving cycle and starts reading as the point: this school runs on a script, and everyone in it is performing a role written by somebody older.

J.C.Staff did not have the money for anything else, and the show converts the shortage into meaning better than richer productions convert their surplus. The Black Rose arc is the finest stretch, a run of confession episodes in a descending elevator where minor characters are given three minutes to say what they actually want and are destroyed for it. The Nanami episodes go the other way and are broad, cruel farce, one of them entirely about a cowbell.

What holds it is Anthy. She spends most of the series smiling, agreeing and handing over her sword, and the final act makes the case that this compliance was the most active choice in the building. Utena arrives to rescue her and cannot; Anthy has to walk out herself. Almost every anime since about girls, roles and violence is drawing on this and none of them has bettered the ending.