[Februaryuri 2025] Revolutionary Girl Utena
(base post1 on Februaryuri 2025 here!)
Revolutionary Girl Utena (Shoujo Kakumei Utena) (1997)
+
The Adolescence of Utena (Adolescence Mokushiroku) (1999)
by studio J.C.Staff, directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara, written by Youji Enokido, and overall made by the creative team Be-Papas
39 episodes + one 90-minute movie
Summary
Years and years ago, as she lost both her parents, Utena Tenjou was rescued from her grief by a prince on a white horse. He wiped her tears, and praised her strength, and gave her a ring adorned with a rose crest so that one day she may be reunited with him again. The thing is, Utena was so impressed by that prince that she vowed to become a prince herself!
But was this really a good idea...?
Utena is now a student at Ohtogi Academy, insistently wearing the boys' uniform and being a dashing and gallant school prince. The rose ring still to her finger, she tries to find back the prince from her memories.
One day, a friend of hers is ridiculed by a jerk of a member of the student council, and so Utena challenges the latter to a duel. Little does she know that all members of the student council wear a rose ring just like hers, and that to them, duels are no laughing matter: they are actual swordfights in a strange arena behind the school accessible using that ring. Moreover, the current winner becomes engaged with a strange classmate of them, Anthy Himemiya, a weirdly submissive girl that the other duelists call the Rose Bride.
Utena doesn't care about all this Rose Bride business. Apparently Anthy docilely obeys whoever she is engaged to, and she seems to have no freedom and no will of her own, but Utena just won't accept any of this. Soon, they become engaged - but really, Anthy should just do as she pleases.
But can our protagonist just shrug this system off once she's stepped into it? And how is it all related to her fairytale prince in the first place?
Utena may have to defend Anthy in a lot of duels still, since her status attracts many a greedy duelist. After all, it is said that when the time comes, whoever is engaged to the Rose Bride will be granted the power of miracles, the power to revolutionize the world...
CW (very heavy)
Utena contains a very heavy list of content warnings that are all addressed. They represent what the show fights against and are very much its core topic - but it takes time for them to be tackled, and they are directly shown, which can be very triggering. This includes, interspersed throughout the show:- pressure to conform to a gender binary and gender roles
- toxic masculinity all around
- one female character treated as an empty shell and a trophy
- internalized and external homophobia
- physical and emotional abuse in relationships
- incest between brother and sister (two distinct sets of relationships; one of them is somewhat romanticized as an incestuous crush, and played for laughs for a long time before being directly addressed in the third arc; the other is a constant terrifying background element starting from the second arc)
- grooming and depictions of an older male character luring in, manipulating and abusing (physically, sexually, emotionally) most of the entire cast, who are all underage
- sexual abuse and assault and threat of assault - sometimes heavily implied, sometimes shown to various extents
- one scene of suicide attempt from jumping from a balcony in a late episode
- two particularly difficult to watch episodes, with ep 30 focused on an underage character slowly giving in to grooming tactics; and ep 33 showing more of that grooming, and a few shots of a rape scene from the rapist's perspective
Comment
(This will be a long one. After a long time thinking, I determined that the best way to help you judge if you wanted to try Utena, and to stick to it, was to give you its very broad structure so that you'd know what to expect. The alternative was to offer an enthusiastic jumble of its themes juxtaposed with extremely worrying content warnings and a "but they're addressed and well-handled and it's really interesting", but I wasn't sure it would really help - and I kinda did that in my 24 things I liked in 2024 already. So, this long thing instead. You may also consider reading this tumblr post by Yasha that tries to answer the question "Should you watch Utena?" and is really worth a read. Its influence transpires in what I wrote below.)
Revolutionary Girl Utena (in what follows, Utena) carries such a legacy and had such a profound impact on so many shows that have come since, that it's almost dizzying to tackle2. I would not recommend it to everyone; but I would definitely recommend it to a lot of people.
But let us start at the beginning.
Utena is weird. It appears at first like some old shoujo anime, with swordfighting, an androgynous protagonist, flowers, and a fairy tale intro; there's even a ball episode early on to cement that feeling. It seems formulaic and repetitive to some extent, too: most episodes feature a new duelist to fight and win against in a very ritualized scene of duel, and they are interspersed with more silly "filler" episodes in-between (some of them honestly pretty random, though in a fun way).
But Utena is also rather surrealist really soon, with a lot of unexplained reocurring elements and sequences that we slowly get used to without necessarily grasping what they're trying to tell: strange shadow plays! Spinning roses! Epic music with obscure lyrics! And much more!
The thing is, it is a very layered piece of fiction: through repetition, it purposefully creates an entire language of visual and auditive cues, and slowly teaches it to us. Throughout its run, it gets its audience used to its symbols, before slowly twisting them in various ways - sometimes to suddenly make their meaning clearer, sometimes to throw us off and play with our expectations.
This may be the first thing to ask when considering watching Utena: are you ready for something with a repetitive formula of duels, and some unexplained elements, and characters with unclear motives, with the promise that a good amount of it should still be enticing, and will end up making more sense in the long run?
A good test is probably the end of the show's first arc, after twelve episodes. Said first arc slowly and somewhat loosely lays the groundwork of the series and the main reocurring characters, and its end is a first climax to the series that should mean something and strike hard, both regarding the characters and the series' themes on gender, gender roles and normality. If you're not on board then, Utena may not be for you. And that's perfectly ok: you don't have to watch its 39 episodes, notably if you don't find something in the themes or the characters or the aesthetic or the surrealist shoujo vibes to grab you and push you forward.
But if you are on board as the first arc ends, oh boy.
The second arc, episodes 13 to 24, introduces more characters, more stakes, and more weird stuff. It's a rather self-contained part with big themes of jealousy and grief that is a bit creepy and uncanny at times and may leave you with more questions than answers; but surreptitiously, it also shapes up the series toward the third and last arc.
What I need to warn you against, what I needed to warn you against sooner already, is that Utena notably talks about incest. This initially takes the form of a pretentious rich girl type of character who very blatantly crushes on her brother, an old trope that the show doesn't seem to comment on at first - it's just there, for better or for worse, and you kinda have to put up with it. In arc 2, the show introduces an entirely distinct incestuous element that is presented as much, much more unsettling and horrible; and for a long while, that one is also just there, like a terrifying, repetitive, barely-implied threat. And it's also ok if it's too hard for you to put up with that. I'd understand. The only thing I can promise is that these get addressed.
Because in arc 3, episode 25 and beyond, the show finally looks you in the eye and says: yup, this is really happening, and it is atrocious, and we know it. This is part of a wider patriarchal system of abuse, of grooming, of influence, and we know it.
And we also know that resisting this influence is nigh-impossible, and that escaping this system too, because this is how it prays on you.
And the show shows that to you.
It hurts. I won't lie, some late episodes of Utena really hurt. The underlying abuse (of all kinds, which includes sexual, physical and emotional abuse) is suddenly in plain sight, and it's terrifying. It's also directly addressed as the core theme of the series, with incredible nuance, enmeshed into a big deconstruction of its fairytale elements.
Utena talks about how easy it is to default to victim-blaming. It completely shatters a victim/abuser binary, by showing characters that are victims of abuse and simultaneously reproduce or enable the same predatory tactics on others. It addresses how toxic masculinity takes root. It shows all the gears of a phallocratic system of power, what maintains it, what draws people to it, and how it guilt-trips you.
And it shows characters messed up by all that, fighting against all that, and failing sometimes, and trying still.
I have not recovered from this level of lucidity (and things hitting horribly close to home) coming from a 1997 anime that had mostly been sold to me as that one extremely influencial old yuri work.
I mean, it is also unquestionably yuri. It's clear right from the opening, which has many a sapphic shot and some meaningful handholding, that Utena and Anthy are somehow "meant to end together". But this is in actuality much less of a romance that you may expect it to be from basically everything around the show. It's definitely not a meet-cute. It's more of a "how to forge, amidst abuse, bonds of trust and love", the latter not being limited to but eventually encompassing romantic love. The importance is more on the strength of that bond than on romance, if that makes sense.
(As a side note, most Utena's cast is really queer, though it's either extremely repressed (and only expressed through loaded homoerotic metaphorical sex scenes) or unrequited, or both. Poor kids.)
With all this, I wouldn't say Utena is flawless. Considering the construction of the show, at the end of the day I'm not entirely sure what many non-core character arcs are trying to tell me, or if I agree with all of that. Sometimes, I would have preferred clearer ending messages and stances coming from the show around the uncomfortable topics it handles; and the ending of some of them does rub me the wrong way.
The fact that a lot of its cast is technically around 14 and in middle school is also extra disturbing.
Extra paragraphs of me spiraling into thoughts
Watching Utena also made me think a lot about its approach, its decision to show such a detailed and direct account of abuse and predatory tactics, and representations of abuse in general. What Utena does, all the inner workings of the atrocities it shows, contributes to the reinforcement and transmission of its message about condemning and fighting them, and that is incredibly important, and it makes it what it is. Yet I wonder how necessary it is for the series to somewhat traumatize its audience at times. This is not to say it should not; sometimes, in controlled settings, we might need stories that hurt, to help us make sense of moments that hurt us. But could any less triggering way of doing so be as resounding? How does its approach compare to other works that would convey similar messages?
Similarly, the way Utena develops metaphorical associations that it then wields to keep you in fear is fascinatingly done - and it's often also set in place to be repurposed and subverted later down the line - but is this fear factor necessary to experience this directly as the audience? By the same token, as many of these metaphors are still aesthetizations, when is such aesthetization desirable? How much does the sense of distance they provide may help us analyze and digest otherwise too horrible topics, and how much of it may estrange us from the gravity of what they depict in the first place? I don't know. All these are open considerations beamed directly from my brain.
In any case, Utena the way it happened had an absurdly huge impact on animation that is still lasting today3. Its nuanced and well-handled message around its core cast is profoundly important, and valuable, and still feels revolutionary these days - it changed people, and is still doing so. It changed me, 27 years after it aired.
It is also a profoundly strange and funny and terrifying ride, mind you, full of in-jokes and of deliciously cryptic stuff one could analyze and catalog for years. But I think I keep the light it cast on some of my past, and the way its ending episodes struck me like lightning, more than anything else.
I'm not sure it will have any impact on you. I don't want to oversell it. You may just find it weird. You may be unable to watch it, because it's too heavy - it is, and you have to take care of yourself first.
But if you want something strange, something layered, something to engage with and to take apart, something to understand the inner workings of patriarchy with, something queer that goes into a lot of dark places, or something that may suddenly turn into a tool to analyze unhealthy relationships in your life; and if you feel like caring for yourself after the harshest parts, Utena may be for you.
What I mean is: I'm not sure Utena is something eternal, but it's been alive and kicking for almost 30 years by now, and I hope you too get to understand why.
Extra
This comment is already way too long. There is so much more I could say. Here are a few paragraphs of other things worth saying.
First: I must mention the movie, The Adolescence of Utena. You should watch it too, but preferably after the series4. It is a retelling and alternate version of it, but faster and weirder (yes, that is possible). Due to its limited time, it feels like a speedrun, with very little symbolism explained - as it is assumed you know it and are used to it from the series, and the movie plays with that a lot - and at the same time an extreme straightforwardness regarding a lot of its plot, as everything needs to be out in the open really quick.
It is also different: a lot of its characters feel like distinct versions from the ones they used to be in the series, played by slightly different actors, with somewhat different backstories - like telling two distinct stories from the same core fairytale-that-deconstructs-fairytales. The movie clearly loses nuance along the way, but trades it for some extraordinary visual sequences and more explicit yuri, and its core intent and message never leave its sight.
It's just that the road toward it is dialed up to eleven, in beautiful and surprisingly hilarious ways.
Second: if you end up liking Utena, there is so much more to explore - and I'm only at the beginning, as I finished all of this in January, so this paragraph will necessarily be briefer than what its topic could arguably span (the answer being: entire articles).
There is notably a manga that was made alongside the development of the series by Chiho Saito - a member of the Be-Papas, the creative team built to make Utena - which is yet another telling of the story. It has significant diverging elements from the series, from what I heard, mirroring the divergence in points of view around what sort of story Utena should be between Saito and team founder Kunihiko Ikuhara who supervised the series itself.
After the end of Utena, the members of the Be-Papas went their separate ways to create lots of other things. Though I have yet to dive into a lot of that, you may want to look into their respective trajectories. Ikuhara's in particular has been enthusiastically followed by many, and you can probably find many detailed studies of his clear love of surreal symbolism throughout his body of work5.
There are also things to be said on how Utena draws inspiration from Japanese queer theater, notably the Tararazuka Revue6 and Shuuji Terayama's works; you can read this really detailed article by Clover DeMerritt on AnimeFeminist that covers so, so much of this.
And with all of that, here is ohtori.nu, a website built and maintained for decades by Utena fans Vanna and Yasha, which contains virtually anything Utena you may ask for, and a still active community to boot. It may possibly be your best ally in understanding and obsessing over this show. You may notably find in its forum a compendium of Utena-related works, including the series/movie/manga trio, but also so much more like musicals and light novels.
The deep dive is yours.
Third: just to provide a bit of my own experience, I started watching Utena in April 2024, from an initiative I saw on the Internet7 (and initiating from the forum at ohtori.nu, Empty Movement), suggesting to do that "as it aired, except 27 years later" - as if every Tuesday unlocked a new episode available for watching. The ride lasted until December 24th, and frankly, it really was something. Having a week between two episodes meant time to puzzle over the latest's details, to space out the duels so that the structure didn't feel too repetitive, and to soak in it as an anime companion throughout the whole year. Around the end of the series, it also meant a week to cool down and heal from particularly triggering episodes. I'm not sure that frequency may work for you, but it really contributed to my own viewing.
Also, I kinda recommend not going into this alone: I suggest either having on hand someone who already watched the series to message with your theories and reactions and all, or someone else to watch the series with, to ponder together and support each other. Not that there's always something to analyze, but it helps to stay engaged with it all; and for some episodes, you may want someone to listen to you.
I am, as you can see, clearly behind my originally intended schedule of reviews for this month. I ended up getting sick during the first week of February, and have been experiencing a particularly big dip in mental health too. In the end, all this precise scheduling I intended was well and good, but I'll try to be kinder with myself and go at the pace I can go. Thank you for your patience, in any case.↩
Still, Utena remains weirdly niche in some ways. It could be a name known at least in passing by so many people with even a vague knowledge of anime, and so many queer people, like, say, Sailor Moon for instance (on the anime adaptation of which Utena director Ikuhara also worked); and it is not. As it was purposefully made not for commercial success but as an experimental piece of art, I suppose that plays into it.↩
Among the clearest cases of inspiration yuri-wise, I can notably mention Revue Starlight, that I should cover later this month, and which has secret surrealist duels happening for some unclear eternal reward, and ALSO a dialled-up-to-eleven movie followup; or Gundam: The Witch From Mercury which has literally duels to marry a bride girl and the other girl protagonist unknowingly getting engaged with her through this process. I suspect there is also some influence of it on a bit of Madoka Magica's scenario, somehow. Among sapphic US cartoons, Steven Universe wears a lot of Utena's motives on its sleeve (roses, swords, seriously a good chunk of things around Pearl), and has several clear references to it that I can't unsee now. She-ra and the Princesses of Power has an entire part of its ending mimicking directly shot by shot some of Utena's; and The Owl House has a small Utena cameo on a book among other things. Utena's influence just reaches so much stuff.↩
I once saw an extremely apt Reddit comment (here) that the correct way to watch Utena was to start with the series; the fun way was to start with the movie. I can't agree more.↩
This notably includes Yuri Kuma Arashi, that we will focus on later this month.↩
We'll come back to that with Revue Starlight at least a little, probably.↩
By which I mean the now-defunct social media website cohost. The initiative was ported there from Empty Movement by user xenofem; I'd like to thank her for that.↩