Thinking about all the “tweaked” remakes and reboots - the gender-swaps, the live-action Disney - and I’m realizing how well Adolescence of Utena hit that “completely different, but totally the same” sweet spot they seem to be going for.

Like, there’s crazy-ass castle-in-the-sky architecture still, only it’s constructivist not baroque. The art style and character design is slightly different, but the same. There’s all the same characters, except they’re different. There’s still weird imagery, but it’s totally new weird imagery even when it’s still weird car imagery, and it sums up to the same vector, only of a different direction and magnitude.

Turning the architecture from baroque to constructivist in the movie seems like it should have been meaningful but fuck if I know what

I suppose that’s Utena in a nutshell