Long Live the Revolution

I have been contemplating writing this review for a long time.  I even took a shot at it once or twice before now.  Hopefully, this will be the last attempt and the first real success.  I know that it's pretty firmly on the long side, but it sums up most of what I wanted to say on the subject, and what I thought was worth saying.  I find it’s hard to write about especially complex things, even when you love them.  Sometimes the love is what makes it difficult.

*             *             *

A friend of mine in basic training recommended Revolutionary Girl Utena to me.  This would have been back in late 2000, or else very, very early in 2001.  If you know anything about Utena, or about basic training, or both, you can well imagine that this would be the last place you might normally expect someone to recommend something like Utena to you.  But he offered to loan me his tapes of the series once we both had permanent duty stations, if we could keep in touch.  I didn’t manage to keep in touch, because as it turns out I’m lousy at that kind of thing, and while I regret it, it’s probably just as well for him in one sense.  It would have been hell getting those tapes back from me once I’d gotten good and hooked.

I had seen the Utena movie at a convention, back when it was big in the fansub community (this was back when fansubs were on VHS), and while I had loved the absolute poetry of its artwork, the way it dealt with themes as deep and dark as the center of the heart, I had very little idea what much of it had actually meant.  I knew there was a TV series that this movie was somehow connected to, and had heard of it before, but further information eluded me.

Still, I had my own interest, a keen fascination, and a solid, reliable recommendation to motivate me.  So when I saw the first 13 episodes — the first arc of the story — on DVD at Otakon in 2001, I didn’t hesitate to buy them.  I bought a lot of things at that Otakon, but that first story arc of Utena was by far the most memorable.

Among other things, Utena marked my first real foray into the realm of shoujo anime.  I had explored that territory before, in an extremely limited way.  I was a fan of CLAMP, having read what existed of Magic Knight Rayearth and X at that time, but those examples hardly count.  CLAMP has often straddled the line between shoujo and shounen (this was particularly evident with the dark and moody X), and they have always stood apart from what I often think of as “typical” (probably “stereotypical” would be more accurate) shoujo fare.  And it doesn’t get much more shoujo than Revolutionary Girl Utena.  My preference in anime has traditionally been for the weird and the dark and the thoughtful.  It’s why I gravitated toward Akira, and Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evangelion at the time, and why I am enthralled by anime like Wolf’s Rain and Kara no Kyoukai and Puella Magi Madoka Magica today.  So on the surface of things, Revolutionary Girl Utena looked like it would be a major departure, being all pink and fanciful and fairy-tale wonderful.

Imagine my surprise.

*             *             *

For a while there, I was a sort of Revolutionary Girl Utena evangelist.  Several years ago, I was attending an anime club at a college where, oddly enough, I had never, ever been a student.  I petitioned the club president to allow viewing sessions after normal club hours, where a niche group of us could watch things that might not have a very broad appeal without any risk of alienating the club members who were there mainly because they liked Naruto and Bleach.  This was a sort of compromise we had reached.  She wanted to hijack the club’s viewing schedule to watch Utena, because she had never seen it but had a burning desire to do so, and I wasn’t willing to loan her the DVDs (you will have to trust that my selfishness was the wiser course in this situation).  I still wanted there to be a club to go to on Friday nights, and I discovered that we still technically were allowed to use the clubroom for two hours after club normally ended.  The arrangement practically made itself.

After Utena viewing sessions, we would usually head over to a nearby Steak ‘n Shake to talk about the series, or about whatever came to mind.  It was through this group that I met one of my best friends.  There’s probably a moral in there somewhere, but I’m not going after it.

*             *             *

So…  About Revolutionary Girl Utena.

There are some media — anime, books, films, TV shows, video games, works of art — which reward subsequent viewing, and Revolutionary Girl Utena is one of these.  There are some that practically require multiple viewing, and Utena is one of these, as well.

It’s difficult to describe.  It is impossible to summarize in any short form (and it would be cumbersome to the point of uselessness do so in any long form), and it is probably equally impossible to provide even a short synopsis.  Still, because I am stubborn, or stupid, or something, I will try.

Utena Tenjou is a girl just entering high school, and she attends the private and very prestigious Otori Academy.  Otori Academy is practically a world unto itself; very, very little occurs off-campus. 

Utena is, perhaps, not a normal girl.  She wears a boy’s school uniform, and on her left ring finger, she wears a rose signet ring.  When asked, she says simply that her Prince gave it to her.  But unlike so many of the young girls around her, Utena is not the sort to wait for her Prince Charming.  She wants to meet him again, of course.  Whoever he is, it’s evident even from early on that he was responsible for saving her from a very personal sort of certain doom.  But to Utena, he is also an inspiration.  She has decided that she will be a Prince like him, that she will live nobly, courageously, heroically.

One day, the captain of the kendo team, Kyoichi Saionji, carelessly breaks her best friend’s heart.  He compounds this sin by making a public joke of it.  Utena challenges him to a duel.  Being the sort of domineering, sneeringly prideful person he is, Saionji would normally ignore this challenge.  But he sees her ring.  Strangely enough, he wears one just like it — it happens to match the school’s emblem, and every member of the Student Council wears a ring just like it.  Saionji changes his mind, and tells Utena that he will meet her in the forest behind the school after classes are finished.  He is dismissive of her concerns that the forest is off limits, as though those who wear the Rose Seal are not bound by the same rules as others.

What she finds when she goes there is a staircase leading up to a dueling arena in the sky, above which, impossibly, is suspended an upside-down castle with its foundation seemingly in the clouds.  It is in this arena that the Duelists — those who wear the Rose Seal — meet and duel, in the hope that if they can become a champion, they will be granted the power to revolutionize the world.  This has been promised to them by an individual known only as The End of the World.  To the best of anyone’s knowledge, this person is never met, never seen, never heard; he is known only through letters, which instruct the Duelists on when they will go to the arena.

Utena presents a problem, though, in her very presence.  She has received no letters, and has no idea about The End of the World, or about the power to revolutionize the world for which the Duelists all strive.  Yet she clearly operates by End of the World’s mandate, since she has the Rose Seal, and no one can enter the arena without one.

And so Utena finds herself drawn into something that is both strange and dark and wonderful, by turns and all at once.

At its most basic, Revolutionary Girl Utena is a metaphor, an allegory.  For what, I will leave it to you to determine.  Half of the reward for watching is the discovery of its meaning. 

The series sets up a sort of ritual, early on, which helps bolster its sense of meaning and imparts an air of mysticism.  A more superficial analysis would dismiss this as formula, but no.  Ritual really is it.  There is a sense of heavy, grave purpose behind the repeated actions, a sense of significance.  Revolutionary Girl Utena is practically turgid with meaning.  These things are done because they impart a sense of importance, of weight, to the proceedings.  They are like the parts of a Catholic Mass. 

The strength of a ritual lies in its sameness, its repetition.  But it also serves to set a standard.  So when things change, the impact is more keenly felt.  So when the established ritual changes, you feel not only interest, but a vague sense of alarm.  Something upsets the natural order, turns the world a bit sideways, and the change signifies insecurity.  Because that is the other thing ritual accomplishes.  The motions, repeated often enough, seem almost meaningless.  Their constant and reliable form becomes a comfort, freeing you to ponder the deeper mysteries toward which they gesture.  The change to this established order, the upheaval, signifies danger — to life, to mind, to the very sense and essence of one’s self.

The word “apocalypse” pops up quite frequently throughout Utena.  It’s right there in the song that plays each time Utena ascends to the arena: “Absolute Destiny: Apocalypse”.  And there is definitely the feeling of a certain and inevitable doom as the series winds toward its climax. 

“Apocalypse” is a very apt word for the end of Utena, both of the series and the movie.  We all know the common meaning, of course.  Catastrophe, disaster, widespread (particularly on a global scale) destruction.  Doomsday, essentially.  But the word has an older meaning, and that is “revelation”.  That was, in fact, its original meaning, before the only thing it got associated with was the disaster hinted at in the Book of Revelations.  That’s linguistic drift for you.  But back to the point: “apocalypse” is the word to describe Utena, in both the modern and in the much older definitions.  For at the heart of Revolutionary Girl Utena is a revelation, and it may very well destroy worlds, in a real and personal sense.

*             *             *

In some ways, Utena has all the hallmarks of its era.  The animation is minimal, which has typically been characteristic of shoujo anime for as long as I can remember, and some of it does get reused or retraced.  This isn’t the crime it might normally be.  The focus of shoujo is usually set on the relationships between characters, and you don’t need a lot of fancy animation techniques for that.  And while a more cynical person would be tempted to take all the things I said about ritual up above and use it as evidence of something much more mundane at work — budget constraints, perhaps — I tend to think that if it wasn’t a deliberate stylistic choice, then it was either a happy coincidence, or else one of those situations where the limitations of a production, instead of hampering it, help to inspire it. 

While on one level, it does occur to me that the characters in Utena don’t usually behave in the way normal people do – people don’t normally challenge each other to duels — their behavior is to some extent stylized.  The actions can’t be subtle and nuanced, because they would either be possibly misunderstood, or else never be noticed.  Like a stage actor, the actions must be great instead, so we can see and completely understand the meaning.

But if the words and actions are grandiose, the characters still retain the subtlety of normal people.  If their words and actions are at times grandiose to the point of improbability, their feelings, with all the layers of meaning and subtlety, are absolutely real.  And that is part of the mastery of Utena, that the essential feelings, thoughts and ideas come through clearly despite the limitations, and because the people making this thing used the limitations smartly when and where they could.

The story itself, as mentioned above, is complex, symbolic, and many-layered.  You can understand it well enough on a single viewing.  But there are things that you see differently after you’ve seen the series through once.  There are things that were mysterious before that now have clear meaning.  There are subtle bits of foreshadowing here and there that the show just moves right over; you almost have to know what to look for or what’s coming ahead in order to see them.  There’s a particularly neat bit done with a row of photos toward the end of the second story arc that I didn’t notice at all until I was on my third run through the show.  So while you can pick up the essential meaning of the show in one pass, I do think subsequent viewings are best for full appreciation.

*             *             *

I should mention it at some point, so I suppose now is as good a time as any.  I may write about it in more depth some other time, but right now we’re going with the short version, so here goes:

There is a Revolutionary Girl Utena movie.  It tries to cover the same basic themes as the TV series, but in a much different way, and in a heavily altered setting.  The Otori campus looks like something out of an Escher painting.  The themes and relationships between the characters in the movie are more obvious, most likely due to the movie being somewhere under an hour and a half (as opposed to nearly 20 or so for the series), but for those less willing to sit and ponder and ruminate on things, that might actually be a benefit.  The ending to the movie is terrible — I get the metaphor, but I think it’s horribly, clumsily handled, completely out of line with the general tone of the series (and of the movie immediately prior to the ending), and most of the time, I just turn the movie off at a certain point. 

Still, the movie is absolutely, amazingly one hundred-percent drop-dead gorgeous.  It should be running on an endless loop in a gallery somewhere.  (That might be hyperbole.  Possibly).

*             *             *

Now, I want you to understand, in this next section, that I am typically a pro-dub sort of anime fan (please, save your pitchforks and torches for another time).  I’m going to take a moment to talk about the English dub here, because it certainly deserves a mention.

The dub is fucking awful. 

To describe it in more precise terms than that—to find terms precise enough—would exhaust the thesaurus, and I’m not about to do that.  I am neither Stephenie Meyer nor Christopher Paolini; I can’t write with one hand on the keyboard and the other busily searching for synonyms.

It’s difficult to put my finger on the exact nature of the problem with the Utena dub.  It isn’t that it’s poorly acted—it’s not even acted.  Some of the actors recite their lines in the same way that you might read a storybook to a small child, reading things in an overemphasized way and accenting your syllables too hard because you’ve never been to acting school or done any professional acting, so you don’t know any better.  Except nobody here has that excuse.  Other characters’ voices just seem to be a bad fit for their roles, or they’re altering their voices in an attempt to sound different (and failing miserably).

In a note to a friend, I described the English dub of Utena as follows:

“There is no dub.  I know the DVDs all have a dub option, but this is a mistake.  A dub may have been recorded at some point, and it may even have been good, but it was for some reason removed, at the point of manufacture, and therefore before the DVD menu options could be altered to reflect the change.  What exists in its place sounds deceptively like English dubbing, but carries, buried within it, a subtle subliminal command that will, with increased exposure, drive you to claw your own ears out.”

I mean, there are worse dubs out there.  The Fist of the North Star movie has a godawful English dub.  But that movie couldn’t be dubbed any other way.  To dub that movie with serious acting from serious actors who performed like they meant it would have been an absolute disaster.  The ridiculous dubbing of that movie is part of what makes it bearable.

Utena, by contrast, absolutely requires a skillful dub.  I guess that’s my problem, really.  There are all sorts of implications and fine distinctions and a range of subtle emotions that the dialogue needs to carry.  Then here comes the English voice case, stumbling and bumbling and fumbling their way through it, with their heavy overemphasis and breathless whisper-shouts and mismatched voices, turning what ought to be a serious, deep and layered character drama into something more like a fifth-grade school play.

And some of these actors are good!  Crispin Freeman is in this thing, and he’s on my short list of voice actors I’d like to meet in real life.  But he sounds like he was acting through a concussion here.

*             *             *

Finally, I’m going to take a few moments to talk about the various releases that Revolutionary Girl Utena has seen over the years.  There have really just been three.

The first release was on VHS, sometime in the mid-90s, and consisted of the first 13 half-hour episodes, released across four VHS tapes (par for the course at the time), of the whole 39-episode series.  It went no further than that, and for several years, those 13 episodes were all we had to go on in the U.S., unless you wanted to go the fansub route.  And let me tell you, that was an extremely dodgy practice in those days.  It wasn’t as if digital fansubs were even possible at that time, after all.

The story I heard regarding this was that Be-Papas, the company that made Revolutionary Girl Utena in Japan, believed that the U.S. market for their show would be pretty small, and so they charged a fairly small fee to Software Sculptors to license it.  Because Murphy’s Law is the one ruling principle of the universe, Utena actually managed to achieve a fair degree of success.  This is not a bad thing in itself, but of course it was impossible for Be-Papas not to find this out, and that was the problem.  So when Software Sculptors went back to Be-Papas to negotiate the rights for the rest of the series, Be-Papas decided they wanted a bigger slice of that pie.  Software Sculptors was either unwilling or unable to pay Be-Papas’s price.  Of course, one side or the other must have changed their minds at some point, because in the early 2000s, we got the movie, and then started getting the rest of the series.

After the VHS tapes, there was the first DVD release, which basically covered the same ground as the original VHS release.  The DVD release of these first 13 episodes is frankly atrocious.  On the one hand, those episodes, the first story arc of the series, are contained on two DVDs.  Economy is always a plus. 

That about does it for the positivies.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Software Sculptors simply took the VHS tapes and recorded them onto DVD.  The episodes are divided only into halves.  There are no separate chapter divisions for the credits; chapters only go either to the halfway point of the current episode, or to the beginning of the next.  So unless you really, really like “Rinbu Revolution”, you’ll need to manually fast-forward through it.  I know, I know; talk about your First World Problems.  But literally no other anime DVDs I have ever owned worked in this way.  Even back then.

The subtitles are also a wreck.  Dialogue text is a paler yellow than is usual for subtitles, and the borders around the letters are thin enough that the dialogue sometimes gets lost in the background.  It doesn’t happen a lot, but it does happen often enough to be notable.  The text for the song lyrics is the more usual style for subtitles, and is in a bolder green text. 

The real problem with these DVD releases, though — the one issue that could excuse the other problems if it wasn’t such a problem itself — is the poor transfer quality.  There’s a kind of jitteriness to the picture which I tend to associate with VHS.  You don’t notice it as much when everything’s in motion, but Utena is the type of show that has lots of long, contemplative stills and slow panning shots.  There’s also a kind of fuzzy, murky quality to everything, and the colors overall seem a bit washed out.  It seems minimal at first, but watching later discs throws it into contrast.

Between the poor transfer quality, the lazy chapter breaks, the sparse menus and the sub-par subtitling effort, I suspect that my comparison of the DVDs’ quality to the VHS is much less of a joke than I’d like.  The DVD release of the first 13 episodes makes only the most basic concessions to the benefits of the DVD format.  Granted, the DVD format itself was a somewhat newfangled thing when the Utena DVDs were first coming out, but the level of “quality” on display here is frankly ridiculous.

The only excuse I can think of for this is that perhaps, with the rumored shaky relationship between Software Sculptors and Be-Papas regarding the equally rumored newer and much-higher price Be-Papas demanded for further episodes, Software Sculptors may not have had access to more high-quality video to copy onto the DVDs.  Perhaps the reason this first DVD release is so bare-bones is because they were trying desperately to scrounge up the cash necessary to get the rest of Utena into the States.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that I have, in all seriousness, watched pirated Taiwanese fansubs of anime that have more attractive menus and a bigger suite of features.

Thankfully, from this point forward, the DVD releases get better.  From Episode 14 onward, the video quality is much crisper, the colors are sharper, the chapter selections are in line with what seems to have become the standard for anime on DVD, and the subtitles are respectable.  The English dub is still as awful as it ever was, but what can you do?  At least they’re consistent.

The third and final release is a much more recent one, coming to us through The Right Stuf International and Nozomi, and oh my God, is this ever the sort of thing Utena always deserved.

It’s available in a series of three box sets, split by story arc (more or less).  The first one contains the entire Student Council arc, the second contains the Black Rose arc, and the third contains the Apocalypse arc as well as the movie.  Each one comes with a small booklet which contains background information on the making of the show, and also brief interviews with director Kunihiko Ikuhara.

The video has been completely remastered.  Colors are brighter and bolder, and lines are crisper.  As much as the original Software Sculptors DVDs seemed like a giant leap in quality after Episode 13, these constitute a yet more tremendous leap.  The animation is still pretty sparse, but Utena still has it where it counts, and if you’re looking for a beautifully animated Utena, I mean, the movie is right there.

The sound has also been remastered.  Some of the effects have changed, for the better of course.  The bells that signal the duel sounded like a decent approximation of bells, in the previous additions (if a little tinny), but now they are no longer approximations; they are honest-to-God real bells ringing, or the next closest thing, and it is wonderful.  Some of the music is also a little different.  The songs are all the same, but there seems to be a slight difference in the mixing.  Parts that were drowned out before are brought forward to enhance the original sound.  It’s not noticeable in every piece of music—probably not in most of the music—but there are definite changes here and there.

I am of two minds on these changes.

Part of me is absolutely thrilled at this set.  It’s basically the definitive Utena compilation, and I had no compunctions about giving my previous set away to a friend who is fairly new to anime, and since I am something of an Utena evangelist, I felt as though this was a good way to spread the word.  “Here: Have 39 episodes and one movie of raw excellence.”

Another part of me, smaller but still significant, feels a little odd watching and hearing the new box set, because there are large parts of Utena that I am familiar with from multiple viewings.  My brain fixes on certain images, certain sounds, and these are different.  My main issue in this sense is with the visuals—the sound still has some getting used to, but I can appreciate its superiority with little trouble.  But I had come to love the oddly pale visuals of the series as a whole.  I doubt that it was ever an artistic choice, but I felt that they lent the series a sense of insubstantiality that oddly worked.  It made things seem just slightly removed from reality, as if the whole thing took place in a realm where things and events mattered less than thoughts and feelings, and that light and airy feeling, that insubstantiality, placed the emphasis of the story on the latter rather than the former.

This is not a gripe, exactly.  Not really.  It’s more just a thought.

*             *             *

In case it wasn’t abundantly clear by this point, Revolutionary Girl Utena is probably my favorite anime, period, and I am happy to recommend to anyone open-minded enough to watch it.