Archive for the Saitou Chiho Category


Revolutionary Girl Utena Anime Box Set – Volume 1 Disk 3 (English)

June 25th, 2011

Revolutionary Girl Utena: Student Council Saga Limited Edition SetBy the time you reach the third disc of the Revolutionary Girl Utena Student Council box set, you’ve already developed your ideas about what you think is going on. My ideas and yours may not be the same, but they are all valid. The show is consciously constructed to allow all our ideas to be valid. Now we, as viewers, have to allow each other’s ideas to be valid, too.

I’m going to tell you some of the things I think are going on (bearing in mind that while I know what is going to happen, I wont be talking about that – just what is happening on this disc. What I would REALLY like is to hear what you think is going on in the story. What are your thoughts about The End of the World – no spoilers, remember, just based on this first arc! – or about Touga, or the duels, or Anthy, Utena, whatever.

Okay, so here I go.

The disk begins with Saionji doing something very stupid, and being expelled for it. I have this belief that, in some way, all the members of the Student Council, by becoming members of the Student Council, were essentially consenting to being manipulated by the End of the World.

Which is why I personally find it hardest to watch Nanami being screwed with. She did not give this consent. Miki is innocent, but not unbsubtle. Nanami is a child. She is driven by delusion and fear and has no place in the duels. That Touga offers her up to them was, in my opinion an unforgivable crime.

Up to this point, it would be natural to think that Touga is the master manipulator here. He seems, to Utena at least, to be in control. It’s only at the end of the arc that we and he see that he wasn’t in control at all.

The last two episodes were as amazing as I remembered them to be.

In episode 11, Utena find herself stripped of her confidence, her purpose, her very self by Touga, who uses his good looks, his masculinity and his position to turn her into a “normal” girl, who needs a prince to rescue her.

And most important IMHO, is that in response to losing the duel Utena says simply, “Please don’t take Anthy away from me.” She would give herself up…but not Anthy.

In episode 12, Wakaba slaps some sense into her, by making her realize that “normal” is not normal for Utena. Utena challenges Touga to a rematch to regain herself – the self that wants to be a Prince, not be rescued by one. She defeats Touga without help from Dios or an enchanted sword – she defeats him with nothing but her determination and will. To awesome music. To regain Anthy. NOT to regain the Rose Bride, but to get Anthy back.

Most importantly, at that moment, Anthy is *surprised.* That alone is worth watching the final episodes for.

When the episode (and the first arc) ended, I began spontaneously applauding. Again. As I have every time I have watched this series.

It’s gonna be a long, long, few weeks before the next set arrives!

Thanks again Nozomi/RightStuf for making it possible to watch this remastered version.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 10
Character – 9
Yuri – 4
Service – 1

Overall – 9

The music video for “Revolution Rondo” blew my mind more than anything else in Utena ever has. It was filmed in New York City, which was just…entirely unexpected.

Here’s an interesting aside. On Twitter today I mentioned that what I would love to see is a ridiculously high budget live action version of the moment Utena draws the sword from Anthy. Just that scene. At which, a very good friend of mine from way back mentioned that there is a rumor of a pitch in Hollywood for an Utena movie…and that Variety is supposed to be doing an article about it next month. I guess we’ll see if that article ever happens…. Thanks for the heads up, Rob!

Now it is your turn – what are some of your thoughts on this arc?





Revolutionary Girl Utena Anime Box, Volume 1 set Dub Review by Eric P

June 10th, 2011

Revolutionary Girl Utena: Student Council Saga Limited Edition SetOnce again a Prince steps in to give me a night off! As you may know,  I don’t listen to anime dub tracks. ( And in the case of Revolutionary Girl Utena, with Mitsuishi Kotono, Kawakami Tomoko and Hisakawa Aya in the Japanese voice cast, there is nothing that can convince me to listen to it, sorry.) Luckily, Okazu Superhero and long-time Friend and Supporter of Yuricon, Eric P has gallantly kneeled before us and offered his services as a dub reviewer! Thank you so much Eric!  The floor is all yours…

Before we get started, and so everyone knows, this is a review of the English dub by itself, and not as it is compared to the original Japanese acting (which I have watched). Alright, now let’s get started:

After getting the whole Utena Central Park Media set through a special mailing order for just $100 back in the day, I didn’t know what to expect diving into this series. I watched the first episode subbed for about seven minutes or so, before I decided to start all over and switch to dub. It was not because I disliked the Japanese voice acting. Everything about Utena within those seven minutes—its opening theme song, its animation, artwork, tone, atmosphere, characters—charmed and enchanted me from the get-go. The problem was I felt reading the subtitles distracted me a little too much from taking in the full experience. So the English version was what I watched first, and at the time it worked for me—the mostly low-key acting fitted the story’s weird, surreal tone.

With RightStuf’s re-release I watch the dub again for nostalgia (and for this review), and by now I can acknowledge its flaws. It is a mixed bag, with few weak links sprinkled throughout that gives it a feeling of flucating. It hardly mattered for me the first time since I was so invested in the story and the magic. But for any viewer with high expectations, it could be those weak links that would turn them off and make even the stronger performances sound less strong. The best (worst?) example would be the English voice for Nanami. When talking plainly, she sounds like a spoiled rich girl probably would, but after a short while she comes across too flat in too many moments.

Thankfully the two lead characters, Utena and Anthy, get well-suited English voices. Rachael Lillis as Utena is sufficiently spot-on, and Anthy’s voice by Sharon Becker has a kind of charm to it for me; I always liked how she said “Miss Utena.” There are still points where it seems like the ADR director and the actors were looking at the imagery, interpreting it as vaguely low-key, and were directed accordingly. Unfortunately that does not always work. In the scene where Anthy calls out to Utena during her duel with Miki, the restrained tone just doesn’t fit well at all. Speaking of Miki, while he is not acted badly, his voice still an example of one of those dub voices sounding far older than he’s supposed to be (although , in my opinion, all the characters look like they are in their early 20’s, even though they’re supposed to be 13-15). Fortunately for some, fan-favorite Jury receives a cool-sounding voice. Saionji, the wife-beating creep, sounds suitably creepy, and the shadow-girls sound as mysterious and strange as they come across in the animation. But, without a doubt, the single strongest performance is Toga as voiced by Crispin Freeman, the future veteran of many stellar roles, among them including Alucard from Hellsing and Kyon from Haruhi Suzumiya.

In the end, the dub feels dated, which some may either find oddly charming or off-putting. But, no matter what, the series itself remains as multi-layered and wonderful as it always has been.

It was actually kind of hard determining the final ratings, so here goes…

Ratings:

Overall –  I dance between 6 and 7 on this, so I’ll give it a 6.5

Erica here: Thanks again Eric! Much obliged.





Revolutionary Girl Utena Anime Box Set – Volume 1 Disk 2 (English)

June 9th, 2011

Revolutionary Girl Utena: Student Council Saga Limited Edition SetOne of the most amazing things about Revolutionary Girl Utena is that the heavy-handed symbolism, which was left without specific meaning quite on purpose, can effectively mean anything you want it to mean. As a result, whether you say the series is about adolescence and maturity, or delusion and reality, or hope and despair, or kangaroos and elephants, you are quite correct.

Disk 2 is about all those things. It’s also about one huge whopper of a lie.

This disk begins with the end of Miki’s arc, in which we learn that Kozue’s perspective on Miki’s childhood trauma is quite different – this will remain the case throughout the series. Kozue’s wounds are never Miki’s. And, for the first time, we are able to see the lie in effect…and just how much somebody else’s problem it is for everyone in the series.

This arc is followed by an episode that, based on a short conversation on Twitter, seems to have made quite an impact on fans. As I put it to my wife, in a series full of weirdness, Nanami episodes are profoundly weird. In episodes that include aggressive elephants, Touga boxing a kangaroo and exploding curry and personality switching, the thing that *I* noticed the most was that Miki and Utena have the closest thing to a “normal” conversation that we’ve seen so far in the series, as they discuss Nanami…and even then it’s not all that normal.

And then we move on to Juri. Beautiful, athletic, smart Juri. Juri the jaguar, in whose presence even the teachers quake. Juri, voiced magnificently by Mitsuishi Kotono and who was for many, the first lesbian Yuri character they ever saw in anime. Her episode still wrang me dry. It hurt to watch her so angry – eternally so, as we never really know what will become of her. Hurt, betrayed, too smart to not know what the real problem is. Too angry to not lash out at Utena who does not yet understand that kind of pain. She will, but not yet.

As I watched this disk I realized that the entire series up to this point is predicated upon a single lie. There will be more lies later, but right now – there is one. Saionji and Miki believe – or hope – that it is true. Juri presumes it is a lie, but then Utena defeats her and she will have to lie to herself to continue to presume it is a lie. Touga…well, Touga will come later.

The lie is simple and has already been repeated so many times that probably you don’t think of it as a lie by the second disk.

The lie is…

…that whomever is engaged to the Rose Bride can command her utterly.

Think for a second. When has Anthy ever done *anything* Utena wants her to? She can’t even get Anthy to stop calling her “Utena-sama.” At this point, Anthy isn’t even hiding herself in the lie, because no one around her can see the lie even exists. They all believe or pretend to believe that it is a truth. Anthy simply does whatever best suits the situation to bring about the outcome desired by the End of the World.

Utena’s one real wish for Anthy won’t be expressed for some time to come and it won’t be realized for even longer – so, then, what *does* being engaged to the Rose Bride mean? To find that out, we must keep watching.

I am reminded that Revolutionary Girl Utena did many anime-viewers a harm by being so absurd, so surreal and so amazing – practically Dada-esque in its complex simplicity – that nothing was able to come close for years to some. Maybe, nothing has really come close yet.

True story – I was watching the Utena movie for the first time with a 15 year old who knew nothing of the story. We had rented it from a Japanese video rental store. It was raw. We watched it transfixed and, when the roses began to overflow the dueling ground she turned to me with huge eyes and asked, “This is what anime is all about, isn’t it?” “Yes,” I said. “This is what it is all about.”

Ratings:

Art – 9
Characters – 10
Story – 10
Music – 10
Yuri – 8
Service – 3
Voice acting – 10

Overall – 10

Revolutionary Girl Utena – *this* is what it’s all about.





Revolutionary Girl Utena Anime Box Set – Volume 1 Disk 1 (English)

May 31st, 2011

Slightly more than 10 years ago, anime had already taken over my life. The predominant anime/manga magazine at the time was Animerica which covered what was hot in Japan, and what was starting to trickle over here to the US. At that time, what was hot was a series called Shoujo Kakumei Utena, which was licensed by Central Park Media as Revolutionary Girl Utena. I have great emotional attachment to this series for many reasons. I met some of my best friends in this fandom, CPM was the first company to take Yuricon seriously and was very supportive of us…and it was Utena that I presented at several film festivals, which can arguably be called the beginning of my “career” in Yuri.

When the re-mastered anniversary set of Utena was released in Japan, I expressed skepticism that we’d ever see it, much less at a reasonable price. Thankfully for all of us, I was horribly wrong about that. ^_^ And so here we are, with the remastered Utena, Student Council Arc, in a reasonably priced box set with lovely box design and the extras, both physical and video, from the anniversary set.

Because this series has meant so much to me over the years, I’m fairly sure that nothing I say could even remotely be approached as anything but massively emotional and entirely subjective and I won’t pretend it’s anything else.

If you have never seen the series, you should. If only because it was one of the most unique, genuinely surreal takes on typical magical girl tropes ever. This isn’t deconstruction of the magical girl genre – it represents a wholesale embracing of the most typical elements, with broad nods to its roots in earlier shoujo series. Everything from art to character design can be traced back to something else, but the internal symbolism sets it apart from its predecessors. Just to remind you – the wacky symbolism has no predetermined meaning, is what Ikuhara said to me in an interview. What you think it means, is what it means.

The story, very roughly, is presented as a fairytale. A young girl who was grieving the loss of her parents is “saved” by a Prince and given a token – a ring – that would bring them together once again. So moved by the Prince’s princeliness, the girl was motivated to become a Prince herself. But was that such a good idea? The Shadow Girls (the series’ Greek chorus) ask us.

And we are challenged to answer this question for the entire series. Was it, honestly, a good idea? But we don’t have time to think about it deeply at first, because that girl, Utena, Prince that she is, saves a damsel in distress, ends up having to fight a duel for another damsel, and is drawn into an increasingly bizarre story. As are we.

The duel music is a special thing of its own. When the first notes of “Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku,” the song that accompanies Utena’s transformation scene, started up, I got shivers. I’d forgotten how powerful the music here is. Duel music is an experience, let me tell you. A friend once described the lyrics as a “magical cookbook on acid” and I have to say that I think that sums the lyrics up nicely. Watching this series for the first time in ages, I was instantly sick to death of “The Sunlit Garden” theme all over again, as we all were a decade ago. ^_^

The animation is fantastic – and I notice it has many of the qualities I liked so much in Simoun, with that watercolor look about the backgrounds. The voice cast was top-notch at the time and it stands the test of time – they all still nail their roles.

Which brings me to the…

Scandalous Artbook!

The book included with the box set includes key art designs, essays by the director and other key staff members and…an unattributed essay on shoujo anime and Utena. Within this essay is the unfortunate line “…anomalous breeds of relationships such as homosexuality and incest…” Even as I announced the Yuricon and RightStuf contest to win a copy of the Boxset, someone on Twitter expressed displeasure that RightStuf did not rewrite that line – or at least disclaimer it. In a heated discussion, that person later asked me if I considered it censorship to have changed what they considered to be hate speech.

I thought this conversation important enough to mention here. As you know, freedom of expression is much on mind these days – indeed, every day. So I wanted to make a few points about this essay – and about RightStuf’s rights and responsibilities in relation to it.

Let me first thank the folks at RightStuf, because their reaction was to plainly state they thought that line was ass and that they didn’t agree with it at all.

It’s been many years since we’ve started localizing anime for a western audience and almost universally, fans want the least amount of change possible. TRSI is very good at changing things as little as possible. For the record, yes, if TRSI had rewritten or bowlderized this passage, I would consider it censorship – and I reject utterly the idea that TRSI has the responsibility to change or disclaimer it. They have no responsibility to protect you from having to read an opinion that disagrees with your own.

Now, on to the opinion itself – it may not be your opinion that incest and homosexuality are anomalous forms of relationships, but I think the anime itself presents that opinion. Whether we like it or not, both homosexuality and incest are presented as anomalous concepts – forms of “immature” sexualities. Even the movie, with naked Anthy and Utena street luging down the road kissing, is summarily dismissed by Japanese creators and viewers as not being lesbian – and our insistence that it is lesbian puzzles them. A Japanese viewer at the Tampa LGBT Film Fest said, flat out, that it did not seem lesbian to her, to which I replied that to her it was clearly, obviously, akogare, in which Anthy felt gratefulness and deep admiration for Utena. She nodded strongly at that. I then explained that we don’t *have* an analogous concept to akogare, so it reads lesbian to us.

Aside from whether I agree with that opinion, I think it fair to say that I try not to judge incest as being lesser than any other form of attraction. The commenter who protested was enraged that homosexuality was presented as equivalent to incest. I am not without my specific prejudices, so I won’t blame them for feeling that way, but I don’t agree that they are not, in the context of the anime, anomalous.

Finally, there is the issue of referring to that line as “hate speech.” I’m about to take a plunge that will no doubt come back to bite me in the ass. ^_^ In MY opinion, hate speech is about intent – speech used specifically to insult, intimidate or incite. Calling me a dyke is an insult. Commenting that I’m fucking dyke and should be raped is hate speech, Saying all dykes should die is hate speech. Saying that dykes just need a good man is an (incorrect) opinion. See the difference? The first is meant to offend me. The last is meant to express knowledge and is pretty arguably incorrect, based on personal experience, research and, one hopes, common sense. The middle two are threats and intimidation and are, pretty clearly hate speech. The essay in the artbook is not hate speech. It’s an opinion that can be disagreed with, but it does not intend offense, insult, intimidation or threat. Therefore, I argue that it is not hate speech – it’s just a potentially disagreeable opinion.

In any case, I don’t think TRSI has any responsibility to change that opinion. I did ask them if we knew who had written it. They confirm that the text was presented exactly as it appeared in the Japanese edition and it had no attribution in the original. In other words, it’s it *someone’s* opinion. You are free to disagree with it, of course – certainly I do. However, blaming TRSI for it seems unfair in the extreme. They were doing what we ask them to do – translating things without interfering too much.

Which brings me to the very last issue- there are no honorifics. Other than that, I thought the translation fine and dandy. And, for some reason unknown to myself, the lack of honorifics didn’t bother me this time. No idea why.

As mostly always, I didn’t watch the dub, so if anyone out there wants to review the dub – send it along! We can’t have too many Utena reviews here. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 9
Characters – 8
Story – 8
Yuri – 4 Utena is Wakaba’s Prince, then Anthy’s
Service – If violence against girls is a hot point for you, then 7. Otherwise, 1

Overall – 8

This was a gateway series for a lot of Yuri fans. It’s weird, it’s distressing, it’s magnificent, it’s wtf. It revolutionized the world. It is definitely worth watching.





Yuri Anime/Manga: Revolutionary Girl Utena

January 30th, 2004


Things I’m Not Going to Write About
Part 4

Shoujo Kaukumei Utena (Revolutionary Girl Utena

Created by Ikuhara Kunihiko and Be-Papas, this surreal series is really four slightly different stories, each of which explores a different facet of the characters.

The manga is the most straightforwardly “magical girl” entity. The only yuri in it is Anthy and Utena’s ambiguous, but intense relationship.

For the TV series, this was upped a notch, with the addition of sexuality as a whole as a separate subplot. The TV series explores yuri, yaoi, intergenerational, incestuous and yes, even straight, sexuality, casting few judgements about any of it. In addition, Juri is added to the yuri mix, giving yuri fans yet another uber-cool competent character to admire.

The movie manga is a step sideways, drawing back to the initial Anthy/Utena relatonship, but nodding to proto-yuri novelist Yoshiya Nobuko, and evoking a more intimate feel, since the story is really about the two girls – and their personal quest.

The Utena movie is a step in the opposite direction, opening the world up to a kind of meta-surreality. Again, it’s all about Anthy and Utena, but for once, the subtext is made overt in the infamous, but really very cool, lesbian street luge scene.

Artistically, Utena takes a little getting used to, with its constant nods backwards to early Yuri pioneers Yoshiya Nobuko and Ikeda Riyoko.

(The Marimite anime is doing the same thing to Utena, with eyecatch visuals and music that are strongly reminiscent of the Utena eyecatches, not to mention the striking detail of the birdcage-shaped greenhouse.)

The television series also spins all the conventions of “magical girl” anime out of proportion, forcing the viewer to create their own meanings for the symbols that inhabit Ohtori.. But for all that, it definitely holds the current #2 place as poster-child Yurii.

The movie is a whole ‘nother thing altogether. Hyper-real, with both art and story completely out of proportion to any other genre or style, it reads as, either a bizarre acid trip, or to us literature majors, a simple allegory. (Here’s the literal sentence people seem to completely fail to understand: “Utena is the vehicle by which Anthy escapes Ohtori.” Got it *now*?)

Amazingly, there are people who have seen the movie and *still* don’t think that Anthy and Utena are a couple! LOL Don’t you wonder what they saw?

Ratings:

Yuri – 9
Art – 8
Story – 8
Music – 9
Characters – 10
Overall – 9