Revolutionary Girl Utena

• 1. Introduction

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  Revolutionary Girl Utena begins with a teenage girl in a boys' school uniform who raises a sword to win another girl's hand. Her name is Utena Tenjou, and the prize is Anthy Himemiya, a mysterious student known as the Rose Bride. Anthy is said to hold the power to revolutionize the world. Viewers in Japan first met them on TV Tokyo, in a weekly run that began on the 2nd of April 1997 and ended on the 24th of December.

  The story is dressed in the clothes of a fairy tale, with princes, castles and swordplay. Yet the people who made it set out to take those stories apart. Why did a planned commercial hit turn into something far stranger? Who is the prince from Utena's past? And what does it mean to rescue someone when nobody has explained what she needs rescuing from?

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• 2. Five Men and a Manga Artist

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  In 1996, director Kunihiko Ikuhara left Toei Animation, the studio where he had spent years on the Sailor Moon television adaptation. He had joined it as an episode director on Naoko Takeuchi's 1991 manga. Beginning with the second season, Sailor Moon R, he became its series director. He left after Sailor Moon SuperS, frustrated that adapting someone else's work gave him so little creative control. His plan was to make an original series.

  To do it, he assembled a five-member group called Be-Papas. Besides Ikuhara, it held manga artist Chiho Saito, animator and character designer Shinya Hasegawa, writer Yōji Enokido, and planner Yūichirō Oguro. Hasegawa and Enokido had already worked with him on Sailor Moon. Enokido wrote many episodes featuring Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune and served as head writer for SuperS. Both men had also contributed to Neon Genesis Evangelion. Saito had never worked in anime. Ikuhara recruited her after seeing an illustration from her manga Magnolia Waltz on a magazine cover, and he decided to build the series' look on her artwork.

  The early goal was not art-house at all. Ikuhara first imagined a mainstream shōjo series that could ride the commercial success of Sailor Moon. Saito recalled the first meetings as being about making something people would like and that would turn a profit. The pitch shown to financiers was titled Revolutionary Girl Utena Kiss. It centered on female warriors called the Neo Elegansar, who fought against the end of the world. Oguro said the team eventually settled on a romantic action show starring a pretty girl in boys' clothes, with a Takarazuka style. The school setting came early, while the duels and the Rose Bride arrived later.

  The group spent six months planning after Saito joined, working out the story and how her drawing style could survive the move into animation. Animage said the series was shaped by Ikuhara's own idiosyncrasies. Its sources included the Takarazuka Revue, the artwork of Jun'ichi Nakahara, Hermann Hesse's novel Demian, and the experimental theater of Shūji Terayama. Saito named the manga Kaze to Ki no Uta and the 1973 film of The Three Musketeers as her own influences. Ikuhara admitted he could not avoid comparisons to Princess Knight and The Rose of Versailles, two shōjo manga with sword-fighting, cross-dressing heroines. He feared being seen as merely parodying them. Saito said the all-male group hired her partly for the same reason, worried that without a woman's perspective they would produce a parody. Her presence kept that worry in check, but it also set her on a collision course with Ikuhara.

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• 3. A Tug of War

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  Shortly after Saito's manga version began serialization in 1996, the broadcast negotiations were settled and production started. Be-Papas served as the main production staff, while the animation itself was made at J.C.Staff in Musashino, Tokyo. Then Ikuhara's ambitions changed. He believed the series needed a unique individuality if it was ever to find an audience. He dropped the idea of a mass-market hit and pursued more non-commercial aims, bringing in avant-garde elements that the original pitch never had.

  Enokido described the atmosphere among the team as an agreeable sense of tension. Oguro was blunter and called it a tug-of-war between Saito and Ikuhara. Saito fought for the original romantic concept, while Ikuhara pushed toward a more esoteric vision. Their sharpest quarrel concerned whether Utena and Anthy should be shown as a romance. At one point the two did not speak to each other for three months. Saito's objection was practical rather than ideological. She believed the mainstream shōjo audience the series was courting would respond poorly to anything but a male-female romance. Ikuhara hid from her how far he meant to take the relationship. In the end, Saito voiced her support for how the series handled it.

  Others shaped the show under Ikuhara. Shingo Kaneko and Tōru Takahashi worked as assistant directors. Kaneko described bringing a cinematic sensibility full of twists and tricks. Takahashi had first been hired as an animator by Hasegawa, since the two attended the same vocational school. He became a director after telling Ikuhara that was his ambition. Hiroshi Nagahama served as conceptual designer and created the dueling area and the buildings of Ohtori Academy. Mamoru Hosoda and Takuya Igarashi were among the storyboard artists. Nagahama compared his work to building a stage set, where only what the audience sees matters. That theatrical thinking would define the look of every duel.

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• 4. Three Sagas

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  The thirty-nine episodes fall into three arcs. The Student Council Saga covers episodes 1-12, the Black Rose Saga covers episodes 13-24, and the Apocalypse Saga covers episodes 25-39.

  The tale starts in Utena's childhood, when a traveling prince gave her a signet ring engraved with a rose. He promised they would meet again, and she vowed to become a prince herself. Years later she attends Ohtori Academy, an exclusive boarding school. There she is pulled into a sword tournament against the Student Council, whose members wear rings identical to hers. Utena wins her first duel. That makes her the fiancée of the Rose Bride, and she must defend the position. She stays in the tournament to protect Anthy from those who want the Rose Bride's power for themselves.

  After she beats the council, a student prodigy named Souji Mikage challenges her. He uses persuasion and a knowledge of psychology to turn other students into duelists. His aim is to kill Anthy and install a terminally ill boy, Mamiya Chida, as the Rose Bride. Utena defeats each of his duelists and then Mikage himself. He vanishes from the school, and the students seem to forget he ever existed. Behind him stands Akio Ohtori, the school's chairman and Anthy's brother, who used Mikage in a scheme to obtain the power of eternity. Mamiya turns out to be Anthy in disguise, helping Akio manipulate Mikage.

  In the final arc, Akio visits each council member and takes them to a place he calls the end of the world. Each returns to face Utena again, and she beats them all. She is then summoned to the arena to meet the prince from her past, and he is Akio. He means to use both girls to gain eternity for himself. Utena duels him to free Anthy, but Anthy, complicit in her brother's plan, stabs Utena through the back. Akio fails to open the sealed gate that holds the power. The badly wounded Utena forces it open and finds Anthy inside. She reaches out, and the two briefly join hands as the arena collapses.

  Utena then disappears from Ohtori Academy, and everyone except Akio and Anthy begins to forget her. Akio remarks that she failed to bring about a revolution and says he will try again. Anthy replies that Utena has only left the school and that she plans to do the same. The series closes with Anthy solemnly vowing to find Utena and walking away from both Akio and Ohtori.

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• 5. Two Halves of a Hero

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  In early development, Ikuhara thought of Utena and Anthy as one character, a girl who wanted to be a prince but also wanted to remain a princess. He later split her in two. Anthy became another Utena, one who by contrast wishes to remain a princess. The pair are best read as two answers to a single question.

  Ikuhara worked hard to make viewers expect that the story would end with Utena saving Anthy. He considered the lingering question of what she saves Anthy from to be the central issue of the series.

  Anthy, as the Rose Bride, takes on the personality of whoever currently holds the title of tournament champion. She seems to have no free will or identity of her own. At first she looks like a classic damsel in distress, passive and demure. As the story moves on, she turns out to hold a central role in controlling both the duels and the school, working alongside her brother Akio.

  Utena herself is a middle-school-aged girl who tries to match the noble bearing of the prince she met as a child. She is courageous, forthright and kind, if somewhat naive and impulsive. Her tomboyish manner marks her out. Ikuhara described her as someone who has both the romance of a girl and the romance of a boy. Her voice actress, Tomoko Kawakami, had previously played boisterous gyaru-type characters, a contrast Animage noted. Kawakami was cast partly because she had not read the character description before auditioning, so she spoke naturally. Other actresses put on a masculine voice. Kawakami said she wanted to convey Utena's friendly, good nature without overdoing the boyishness.

  Five council members stand between Utena and Anthy. They are president Touga Kiryuu, his sister Nanami Kiryuu, vice president Kyouichi Saionji, fencing captain Juri Arisugawa, and the boy genius Miki Kaoru. Most of the cast are adolescents whose arcs follow a coming-of-age pattern. Enokido named characters who try to regress and take back what they can never return as a major theme. Ikuhara said he followed his own rule of never giving a character only one personality.

  Chiho Saito drew the designs from Ikuhara's direction, and Hasegawa adapted them for the screen. He was drawn to the project by her style, with slender bodies, long limbs, pointed chins and large eyes. He also liked its focus on dramatized body movement. Her look departed from the anime-like art popular in manga at the time, which made adapting it a compelling challenge. That emphasis on posed, stylized motion suited what the director wanted next.

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• 6. Theater and Choirs

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  Staff on the series had a name for the decorative black frame anchored by spinning roses: the attention mark. It appears at character introductions and other major plot moments. Enokido called theatrical staging and presentation a core element of the show, and Ikuhara wanted it to feel operatic from early on. Some segments, such as Utena's entrance to the dueling arena, repeat long stretches of animation and music almost unchanged from episode to episode. They echo the recurring transformation scenes of Sailor Moon. Scholar Susan J. Napier compares the ritualized duels to Noh theater.

  Ikuhara directed some early episodes, including "On the Night of the Ball," to be uncomfortably stereotypical of shōjo. He wanted viewers to feel firmly that this was a shōjo manga anime and to learn the tropes the show would later subvert. His broader ambition was an "anime that rounded up all the shōjo manga into one." Napier observes that the series uses princes, castles, romance, beautiful boys and beautiful girls to critique the illusions they offer.

  The songs came from J. A. Seazer, a frequent collaborator of Shūji Terayama. Seazer first wrote them for his own experimental theater company, Banyu Inryoku. He had co-directed and composed for Tenjō Sajiki, the company Terayama founded, and founded Banyu Inryoku as its successor after Terayama died. Ikuhara said that working with Seazer fulfilled a dream from his teenage years. The financiers were strongly against using such avant-garde music. Seazer agreed in part because he was a fan of Sailor Moon.

  Shinkichi Mitsumune scored the series and arranged Seazer's songs. Each episode usually features two of them. One is "Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku," meaning "Absolute Destiny Apocalypse," which plays as Utena enters the arena. The other is unique to the episode and plays during the duel. These duel songs work like a Greek chorus, commenting on the duelists' motives through allegorical lyrics that reach into religious, scientific and arcane subjects. The Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus performed them, and Ikuhara and Mitsumune joined in on some.

  The opening theme, "Rondo-Revolution," was composed by Toshiro Yabuki and written and sung by Masami Okui. Ikuhara told Okui to treat it as the song for the story's last scene, though he had not decided that scene beyond a vague picture of two people parting. He sent her key phrases for the lyrics, including "sunlit garden," "revolutionize," "lose everything," "strip down to nothing at all," and "change the world." Two ending themes were used. "Truth," with lyrics by Shoko Fujibayashi, plays over episodes 1-24, and Maki Kamiya's "Virtual Star Embryology," with lyrics by Seazer, covers episodes 25-38. The final episode closes with a scat version of "Rondo-Revolution" sung by Okui.

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• 7. What It Means

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  Critics have read Utena's wish to become a prince as an ideal, not a literal ambition. It does not mean wanting to be royalty or to change gender. It stands for courage, compassion and strength, a sense of heroic agency. The series sets this against the princess, embodied by Anthy, who is passive, helpless and treated as an object.

  Napier warns that Utena is not simply a work of female empowerment. She and other critics argue that the prince and princess pairing shows how gender roles restrict both women and men. The victims of the system come to enforce its limits on other victims. Being a prince turns out to be just as confining as being a princess, since both come from the same system. At the climax Utena loses her final duel to Akio, and her attempt to save Anthy seems to fail. Yet it leads Anthy to question the rules governing her own performance as princess. Anthy leaves for a world where, in Napier's words, the categories of prince and princess have been deconstructed and do not matter.

  Critic Mari Kotani places Utena in the tradition of the sentō bishōjo, or battling beauty, a type first described by psychologist and critic Tamaki Saitō. In Kotani's view, Utena's design satisfies the eyes of male readers who look for eroticized images of girls. Her cross-dressing and her active role complicate any attempt to objectify her. Kotani sees the series' success in how it merges shōnen's focus on combat with shōjo's focus on romance. That merger, she argues, exposes the structure of sexuality hidden in manga for girls.

  The Student Council's repeated call to crack the world's shell is adapted from Hermann Hesse's 1919 novel Demian, a major work of the bildungsroman. In Ikuhara's stories, characters often chase a device that promises to speed up change. Here it is the end of the world, which proves unreal or powerless and stands for the systems of power and coercion that confine everyone. The series never defines the end of the world, but Ikuhara has linked it to the despair of an adolescent who sees adult social realities shatter a childlike picture of the world. He described revolution as the power to imagine the future and eternity as the power to create an enjoyable future. Enokido said each character seeks a personal version of eternity, a wish to relive the past, which warns against being ruled by sentimentality.

  The series shows several gay and lesbian couples, and its world treats all of them as legitimate and normal. Ikuhara wanted a sense of diversity, and he said this normalization reinforces the core message of freedom of the self. Napier reads the bond between Utena and Anthy as possibly liberating, but also as a metaphor for the need to integrate two sides of the self. In her reading, Utena's urge to save Anthy is itself cloying and overwhelming. Only when Anthy chooses to leave Ohtori does she begin to develop a more integrated personality.

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• 8. Beyond the Series

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  Chiho Saito's manga version ran in the Shogakukan anthology Ciao starting in 1996, before the anime was even in production. Its plot differs sharply from the television show, with more emphasis on the relationship between Utena and Touga. Saito tried to use as much as she could from Enokido's finished scripts, but often had to rely on her own judgment. She went through five editors during the year-and-a-half serialization amid the confusion. Viz Media published the English translation. Saito also drew a one-shot, The Rose Seal, set before Utena arrives at Ohtori. In 2017, for the 20th anniversary, she announced a three-chapter sequel, After the Revolution, which ran in the anthology Flowers from July 2017 to March 2018.

  The film Adolescence of Utena opened in Japanese theaters on the 14th of August 1999. Fans sometimes call it The End of Utena, echoing the 1997 film The End of Evangelion. Its place in the canon is unclear, since it can be read as a separate adaptation or as a sequel. Stage versions began with Comedie Musicale Utena: La Fillette Révolutionnaire in December 1997 at the Hakuhinkan Theater in Tokyo, with an all-female Takarazuka-inspired cast directed by Yūji Mitsuya. Two more followed in 1999 and 2000. In 2018 and 2019 came 2.5D musicals, Bud of the White Rose and Blooming Rose of Deepest Black. Ikuhara called the early stage adaptations extremely cheesy, but supervised the later pair after a producer argued they would introduce the series to a younger generation.

  Ichirō Ōkouchi wrote two light novels with Saito's illustrations, published by Shogakukan in 1997 and 1998. Sega released a Sega Saturn game in 1998, a visual novel with dating-sim elements about a transfer student at Ohtori. The anime's voice cast returned for it.

  In North America, Enoki Films USA first made a proof of concept that gave the characters English names and retitled the series Ursula's Kiss. Central Park Media then won the rights and kept the original title and names. It released the first thirteen episodes on VHS beginning in 1998, but the full series reached DVD only in 2002. After Central Park went bankrupt in 2009, Nozomi Entertainment, under Right Stuf, took the license in 2010. Tomoko Kawakami died of ovarian cancer in June 2011, and Right Stuf dedicated the Apocalypse Saga's DVD release to her. Crunchyroll acquired Right Stuf in 2023. At home, a remaster overseen by Ikuhara reached DVD in 2008 and 2009 and Blu-ray in 2013.

  The series won the Animation Kobe award for best television in 1997. In 2017, a national NHK poll of the hundred greatest anime placed it 30th. Paste ranked it fourth among the best anime ever, and Anime News Network placed the film eighth among anime films. Writer Mike Toole called the television series the most important anime of the 1990s. Later works citing its influence include Revue Starlight, Princess Tutu, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Steven Universe and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. Napier calls it a baroque apocalypse, set against Evangelion's pathological one. It also helped revive interest in Seazer's music. Reflecting on it in 2020, Ikuhara said its sense of freedom and diversity helps explain why its fan base remains so large.

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