HER STORY Helen McCarthy gets ready for Revolutionary Girl Utena
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rom the first episodes of the Revolutionary Girl Utena anime series, director Kunihiko Ikuhara delivers a format packed with new ideas and a number of classic riffs. As a girl, we are told, Utena lost her parents, but remembers being comforted by a gallant prince on a white horse. The impressionable child never forgot the prince’s kindness, and resolved when she grew up to become not a princess, but a prince... She joins the prestigious Otori Academy, the curviest tomboy to ever refuse to wear a sailor suit, and aspired to be an elite duellist. All she needs is a damsel in distress and opponents worthy of her steel.The long climb up to the duellists’ platform is repeated each time Utena goes to fight, echoing the launch sequences of Japanese giant robot shows; second time around there’s a magical girl-type costume change. The frequent bravura displays mask Ikuhara’s dives into a number of minor plotholes, and the constant stylistic chopping is visually akin to being on a boat on the high seas: you never know where the next new wave will take you. By the third episode the director has realised that, just because you can do anything you like in animation, you don’t have to. He starts to select the tricks that work for him (the shadow-play exposition sequences, for example) and discard the ones that don’t. In 1997, as the shockwaves generated by Gainax’s mould-breaking TV series Evangelion began to die down, the Japanese animation magazines awoke to a world in which it was once again possible to put another set of characters on their covers and still sell magazines. They began to hunt for something to fill the void.
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It had to be something that looked completely different, but felt approximately the same at heart. That was not because the generation of Eva clones then springing up lacked the twisted inspiration or desperate drive of the original; the motive was much less complex. Anime magazines sold themselves on their covers. Obviously, magazines want to carry the most popular series, but they also want to be the first to break the Next Big Thing, and to give a helping hand to the anime companies and their own balance sheets by drawing in new fans and keeping the existing ones interested. To compete for customers’ attention, the Next Big Thing has to look as unlike the previous hit as possible.After Eva, anime needed something sexy, colourful, playful, with a different kind of tension. Along came Revolutionary Girl Utena, hitting Japanese TV like a breath of rose-scented air after the blood-soaked teenage torture garden that was Evangelion. Yet Utena carried its own blood spatter pattern, not from a robot weapon but from a blade buried in a girl’s heart.For months, Utena dominated the covers and lead features of the three major anime magazines – zappy Animedia, thoughtful Animage and the legendary Newtype, whose loyalty to the Gundam multiverse didn’t prevent it hyping new hits. Creepy, delusional adults didn’t dominate this show; teenagers drove the plot. Heroine Utena was nothing like Eva’s broken blossoms; she was cute, sexy, forthright and positive, convinced that someday her prince will come, determined that when he arrives he’ll find a comrade worthy of his respect. The story piled in girls, uniforms, swords, cross-dressing, neo-European settings, intrigue and romance in an elite boarding school beyond Harry Potter’s wildest dreams.
