So this morning, Sigil shared a link to this.
The opening to ‘Revolutionary Girl Utena’, done with cartoon horses. Even aside from the obvious ‘we replaced humans with horses’ this looked… strange, and weird. Weird enough that I hunted up the real opening.
Ten seconds in, I had determined that that this show was about two things: legs and roses. Forty seconds in, I realized it was also about a lesbian couple. When I said that this looked really kind of intriguing, a half dozen people were all “oh my god you’ve never seen Utena you will totally love Utena how can you never have seen Utena”.
(The answer to the last is a combination of several factors.
1. I have only learnt how to actually watch Japanese TV cartoons in the past decade; I’m very much part of the American animation culture that loves simple designs that can be very fully animated. Japanese cartoons tend to have much more complex designs and very limited animation; for years all I could really see was the myriad shortcuts they were taking, and nothing else.
2. All the rampaging otaku I’ve ever known always insisted that you HAVE to watch the subtitled version of anything from Japan. I hate watching subtitled cartoons; I want to actually look at the animation. If I’m gonna read, I’d rather go read a book or a comic. Plus I really get no nuance or emotion out of Japanese dialogue.
3. On top of that cultural chasm, there’s gender issues. Utena is strongly coded as being For Girls, and I’ve always steered away from media coded that way. In part because my tastes were formed along somewhat masculine lines before the gender dysphoria started to bubble up, in part because watching something that aggressively feminine seemed like the media-consumption equivalent of dressing my entire life in pink ruffles. Which I felt is especially unfortunate when you’re a transwoman who may not pass that well, which I was for a while.)
I’d vaguely heard of Utena for a while. Seeing this intro and reading the Wikipedia page on the series made me decide to check it out. And maybe some other stuff in the Magical Girl genre as well.
I am beginning to think that this was the same kind of flip decision as Alice’s decision to follow a talking rabbit down a hole.
I watched the first two episodes on Youtube, still lying in bed. Got up with the intent of watching the next couple sitting in a comfy chair while eating breakfast, and maybe being a lazy slug and spending half the day binging on most of what I could find on youtube. But I was defeated by my iPads deciding they didn’t want to watch anything on YT any more once I’d gotten up.
I mentioned this on Twitter, and now it seems I’m gonna have the whole series dumped on me via IM tonight (and maybe a couple others as well – maybe Great Magical Girl Anime, maybe just Great Anime). Or I could spend fifty dollars to see it via iTunes but apparently nobody involved in actually making it would get a piece of the money that way so whatever.
Anyway: here is my tweets whilst watching the first two episodes, along with some additional thoughts. More later when I get later episodes; this is an interesting show that seems to be actively deconstructing itself. Which is always good.
I am watching “Revolutionary Girl Utena”. It is about legs and roses.
It is probably about time I dig into the Japanese “Magical Girl” tradition. Apparently this is a very self-aware instance of that?
I love how Utena is just constantly and unapologetically positioned as a love interest for the ladies.
A friend noted that it’s full of weirdness and symbolism, and most importantly, ADOLESCENCE. With which I concurred.
Anthy’s incredibly blasé response to her being the champion’s slave is fucking creepy.
What is this creepy monkey mouse. It scares me.
Oh man are these shadow puppets going “do you know do you know” going to be a repeated thing. YES.
wondering if I’m starting research for a magical girl story five years from now
I’m gonna end up singing along to “Absolute Destiny Apocalypse” by the end of this, aren’t i.
Sudden realization that this is probably where Scott Pilgrim pulling a sword from his heart comes from. Somehow it’s a lot creepier when the sword comes out of the heart of an ultra submissive woman.
Anthy needs to learn how to pick better dommes, sheesh.
Really love the cinematography in the scene starting at 9:57 in ep 2. Disorienting. It puts me in mind of that scene in Chinatown where the camera slowly circles around the characters, but done in a very graphical way. (Honestly I’m finding that I’m dissecting this almost as much as a ‘motion comic book’ as a cartoon. That’s an attitude I’ll have to remember whenever I want to watch most anime, I think. It makes the part of my brain bitching about how few actual drawings there are shut right the hell up.)
Oddly enough I also kinda want to compare the highly symbolic Utena to the highly symbolic Promethea, now that I’m in the studio. (I’d just taken 3/5 of Promethea out of the library and read it last night; looking down at the books with a head full of Utena, I realized you could totally sum up Promethea as “Alan Moore teaches you about Crowley and the Kabbalah via a Majgickal Girl.”
All the characters in the first two eps of Utena are anime-Euro. Except for Anthy, the… um… black? Indian? slave. I can’t tell what race she’s intended to be because she has the same stereotypical “pretty” face as everyone else, but… yeah. She’s a much darker color than everyone else and has a little dot on her forehead (I wonder if she had an accent in the original Japanese voices? I doubt I could even tell if she did.). And she’s super servile to whoever wins her in a tournament. PROBLEMATIC.
I do, on the other hand, like how normalized Utena’s gender crossing is. There’s one scene in the beginning where a teacher gives her shit for dressing in a boy’s uniform for the second year in a row, then it’s dropped, and various girls openly swoon over her like she’s the prettiest, sexiest thing in school. This show is really aggressively normalizing some very different modes of feminine sexuality than normal. (Contrast, though, with the fact that her hair is hyper-feminized – long and pink – while super-subby-femmy Anthy has short, butch, blue hair.)
And thinking about it, yeah, my god these characters are super adolescent. Including the way half of them follow all these orders from a mysterious organization named END OF WORLD. I mean okay maybe it sounded a lot better in the original Japanese but damn.
Anyway. That’s it for now. More later, Rita ain’t gonna draw itself.
