Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997)
A while ago I wrote that I love this series way more than I have any right to as a straight guy. Which is, of course, I did somewhat in jest but not without reason. Reading reviews on Utena, you'll find a wide variety of people sharing their personal anecdotes about how much its portrayal of characters and relationships that defy social norms in regards to gender and sexuality means to them as members of gender or sexual minority groups themselves, how it helped them find themselves and come to terms with who they are. Now, like every other good little leftist, there was a point in my life where I contemplated my gender and my sexuality and like most, I didn't come across anything especially interesting. Apart from a brief period in my teens where I identified as asexual, which passed and even though I do enjoy sex, I still find talking or reading about it more fun than actually having it, I'm not anywhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum even by the most generous definition. Which did lead me to some soul searching: Why, exactly, does Utena, an allegorical story about love between to women, one of whom rejects, to some, extent, classical feminity, mean so much to me, a cisgender, heterosexual man?
I watched it in a formative time of my life. My late teens, if I recall correctly. The same time I watched another anime series that got me into anime and still stands as one of my personal favorites, Serial Experiment Lain. But I can articulate why I love Lain quite easily, it encompasses a lot of what had at that point already been some of my favourite themes and stylistic traits in fiction. Surrealism, paranoia, conspiracy theories, psychological horror, angst, social alienation, metaphysics and techno-mysticism. I couldn't be more perfectly in that series' target audience if I tried.
Utena is by all means a less obvious choice. Revolutionary Girl Utena is the story of titular tomboy Utena Tenjou. Utena is a student at Ohtori Academy, a palatial boarding school surrounded by an unnamed town. At this school she comes across Anthy Himemiya, a timid girl tending to the campus' roses. She soon finds out that Anthy is trapped in the position of the so called "Rose Bride" treated as a price in a dueling competition seemingly set up by the student council held in a magical arena on a platform beneath an illusory upside down fairy tale castle. She resolves to liberate her from this inhumane treatment and ends up actually falling in love with her, leading her unravel the dark secrets of Ohtori Academy and its student body as well as the mystery of her faint childhood memory of a fairy tale prince who came to console her after the death of her parents.
So, of course there is still the surrealism and in a sense even the angst, albeit wrapped in a rose scented embrace of sapphic romance, fairy tale symbolism and baroque, neo-clacissist kitsch. But instead of being a story about politics or social dynamics or occult conspiracies (but I repeat myself), Utena is a story about love. I'm not ashamed to admit that love is something I don't know very much about and what I do know about it is rather painful. But nevertheless there is a part of me that considers myself a romantic and I think one of the only reasons I managed to accept that part of myself is because I saw this show at a pivotal point in my life.
So, Utena is a story about love. However, it's not exclusively about the love between Utena and Anthy, although that's obviously at the center of it all. Love, both its kind and its cruel side, the requited and unrequited type, the sincere and the manipulative kind, is in some form or another the driving motivation of every single character. Utena wants to liberate Anthy out of love, while everyone holding her captive is doing it, in their way, for the same reason. And what writer and director Kunihiko Ikuhara so beautifully illustrates is that despite loves potential to corrupt, there is nothing greater than its capacity to redeem.
Ikuhara creates his own audiovisual language, both classical and modern, both operatic and intimate, both baroque and pop. Roses and shadow plays projected on walls to serve as a greek chorus, sports cars and mystical castles, sword fights while the soundtrack is playing an operatic rock song about the darkness of Sodom, biblical symbolism and Disney-esque whimsy next to psychosexual anxiety. The production value of Utena isn't tremendously high (aside from the movie which I... have mixed feelings about) but the vision carries is not just over the finish line but into the the Olympus of not just anime but cinema in general.
Revolutionary Girl Utena is to romance what 2001: A Space Odyssey is to Science-Fiction. It doesn't just follow its genre to its logical conclusion it elevates it to something transcendent, something spiritual. The poet Virgil was the one who coined the phrase "Love conquers all" and british mystic Aleister Crowley was the one who stated that "Love is the law. Love under will" but Kunihiko Ikuhara was the person to expand those into a comprehensive thesis. Utena is dedicated to both its destructive and its redemptive potential. It's a holistic treatise on the idea of romantic love as a metaphysical force (his almost equally brilliant follow-up Mawaru Penguindrum doing something similar for familial love) and a work I find as inspiring now as I did when I first saw it.