'The Adolescence of Utena' by Ikuhara Kunihiko (幾原邦彦)

Gallery of screen captures
Rating: 4.5/5

As usual, I trust that Google will let you find anything you need to know about this movie, so I will just go ahead and post my comments.

[Spoilers ahead]

1) This movie is really top-notch in terms of art direction. Whereas the anime series of Utena has a lot of fluff and filler, in this movie every frame is carefully laid out and every line is spoken for a purpose .

Ohtori Academy (the boarding school in which the story is set) seems to be a city of youth situated in the sky in this movie, and it is a pure stroke of genius that its architectural components are not only beautifully designed but also moving from second to second - you get the impression that the landscape is in flux just as the self-identities of the adolescent characters are in flux. It also builds the anticipation that what floats in the sky must come down to earth at some point.

The movie is so subtle that even the buildings and the interiors are telling you a story. Thematically, there is a lot of ascending and descending, which all seem to allude to sexual experience and desire one way or other. For example, the moment you see young Touga descending the staircase of his home, you just know that his innocence is about to be defiled.

Furthermore, all the vertical movements of ascending and descending seem to be a deliberate contrast to the horizontal movements of the fight scenes (the car race, the fencing matches etc). 

2) I suppose if read on a superficial level, you may take the story to be an echo of feminist sentiments. In a way, the story pronounces that 'The Prince is Dead' much in the same vein that Nietzsche pronounced 'God is Dead'. 

I once read a definition of an atheist as someone who walks away from church, but he walks away from church with his eyes fixed on church and with his back facing towards where he is going. To put it another way, atheism cannot stand on its own - it has to define itself against Christianity, whereas Christianity does not have to define itself against anything.

By the same analogy, I wonder if what passes for feminism in Utena is in a similar fix. You can walk away from the Prince, but you walk away with your eyes fixed on the Prince and with your back towards where you are going. In this context, a young woman's strength is defined against masculine strength -

i) Utena has to become the Prince herself because 'the Prince is dead'

ii) Utena and Anthy leave the collapsing Castle of Eternity and the Prince behind in a we-don't-need-you-anymore sort of vein

Either way, strengh in a woman is characterized by -

i) emulation of men

ii) rejection of men

So in the end, it's still all about men. That, ladies and gentlmen, is perhaps the problem with works in the shoujo or even josei genre to this day.

Comments

[Mitch H.]

I can't remember much fluff or filler in the TV version of Utena, aside from the obligatory recap episodes, and even there, the first recap episode was a sleek marvel of the species.

Unless you consider ritualistic repetition to be "filler"?

BTW, Adolescence of Utena was a movie, not an OAV. And personally, I found it a lot more self-indulgent and incoherent than the series.

[Ialda]

(OVA ?)

You have a point, Utena is not about feminism per se, but more about (but not limited to) feminism in the context of fairy tales and shoujo stories. A commentary on the tons of shoujo mangas out there where the girl is psychologically and physically dominated by the male lead.

I have the impression that Rose of Versailles was much more feminist than Utena. In the first chapter of the manga , during the Fersen fiasco Oscar kept lamenting how she has been forced to abandon her feminity. But as the manga progress, we see her clearly more at ease with her role and who she is, she is glad to be able to live as a true individual and not as a typical spouse.

About the landscape : another proof that Kobayashi Shichiro is a master. I wonder how he worked with Ikuhara and how much all of this symbolism was determined by Utena's director ?

>Mitch : maybe, maybe not.
For me AM is a retelling (compressed, hence the incoherences), a great parody and a sequel (more precisely another iteration of the legend of the witch and the princess who wanted to become a prince) to the original series. All the three at the same time. As if it was a dream dreamed by Ikuhara, it's something which not necessarly make sense at a conscious level.

(...and come on, who need coherence with a scene like "Toki ni Ai wa" ?)

[Wabi Sabi]

I beg your pardon. ^-^ It's a movie - I will amend the post later.

Mitch H:

I thought the movie is coherent enough, though you have to watch carefully to see the coherence. For example, when Utena chases after Touga in the rose garden, first you see him in the opposite side but on the same ground level, but then you see Utena running up a staircase to meet him and the next thing you know she has already run past him. There is a lot of sly camera work there, but the camera work also stresses the very same point Utena tells Touga in that scene - that she may have been chasing after him at some point in the past but she has now outgrown him.

The whole movie is full of such details which drop hints to the audience. If you pick up the hints then it starts to make sense.

Ialda:

I haven't read the manga of 'The Rose of Versailles' but I know that Julius does the same thing in Ikeda-sensei's 'The Window of Orpheus'.

To me, this Utena movie is a great experimental exercise in style and surrealism. I think in some aspects it is an improvement of the manga and the TV series. The depiction of Juri, for example. The schoolgirls call Juri 'the Prince' and the only times we see the schoolgirls fangirling is when Juri fights in fencing matches (never at the male characters). It is also said that Juri is potentially a rival to Utena (because they both take after 'the Prince'). The point is, the schoolgirls (read countless young women) idolize Juri, as opposed to any of the male characters.

When Juri and Utena fights in the fencing match, Utena 'transforms' into 'the Prince' and Juri loses the match. It makes you wonder why Juri fails in an allegorical sense, or what Utena has that Juri does not have. I have to sleep on this.

(If you don't mind, I will delete the duplicate comments later. ^-^)

[Wabi Sabi]

Actually Utena does have something Juri does not have - the sword she draws from the heart of Anthy.

If you suppose Anthy stands for femininity and if Utena draws her sword (a symbol of masculinity) from Anthy, and thereby becomes more feminine herself (her hair becomes longer, just as she appears originally in the TV series/manga), isn't it a neat statement that a woman becomes more feminine/more herself by drawing on the masculinity that is hidden within her femininity?

[TheBigN]

I'd like to think of it as less challenging masculinity, but paving one's path through femininity. Utena is a female empowerment fairy tale, you could say. :3