tbh I don’t really remember those guys and my attempt to yielded a weird mashup of the Mikage Seminar with the Trio from later-season Buffy

Like Chu-Chu, musta been one of those things that didn’t really stick with me

Looked at from another angle, Utena is a testament to how far you can get by on aesthetics alone, that J.A. Seazer score and Ohotori Academy backgrounds and thematic resonance and formalist shadow puppet aliens servicing a plot that at no point actually made sense

When I was first watching Utena in early 2000s showings by the Cornell Japanese Animation Society, who had been the ones to first fansub it years earlier, when that required a genlock, I would not have imagined it would be even subculturally relevant or so much as remembered by now, that’s kind of a nice surprise. If the two ‘90s anime series we decided to canonize are Eva and Utena, well, sorry Cowboy Bebop, but fair.

Trying to recall how we were differently receiving it then, but that’s tough to pin down in retrospect. I know we did keep a running count of the times Anthy got slapped and treated it as a laugh cue, but appreciating the formalistic recurring elements is sort of a big part of Utena

gaynintendhoe:

“There’s only one bed” scenes but it’s the fucked up repressed gay bed from Revolutionary Girl Utena

haha God, I forgot how much incest there was in Utena’s decadence

glumshoe:

[hand hovers over crystal ball] when you were a tween you got really into Arthuriana and you thought the aesthetic idea of questing knights was really cool but the religious and patriarchal aspects of medieval chivalry bothered you so you coped through swords and sorcery fantasy fiction and went through an obligatory phase where you looked into Wicca but discovered that it had no appeal to you and for a while you wanted to change your name to Rowan because it was earthy and gender-neutral but when you got older you decided against it and either kept your original name or switched to something ambiguous or masculine of center and maybe you described yourself as butch or non-binary or trans but you privately see your idealized gender goals as “has a sword and a sense of dignity and a Quest” which doesn’t make any sense really but as an adult you channeled your misplaced knight errant fantasies into a passion for environmental justice or ecology or wildlife conservation and picked up a diagnosis or two that explains why you are weird at parties

But was that really such a good idea?

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.

it’s gonna be okay

Revolutionary Girl Utena

1997

textsfromutena:

Text: 

(702): I passed out drunk in her bed. Her boyfriend showed up and told me to go to the other room or we were gonna have a threesome. I threw up off the side of her bed and left. I feel like that was an adequate response.

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

empty-movement:

So we all know the SKU blu-ray release is happening soon, right? Well, Gio and I were contacted by Nozomi, and we’ve been asked if we (collectively, you and me and all of us) can think of any translation errors, inconsistencies, or fan preferences that we’d like to see changed in the new subtitles they’re setting up. Of course, we want to help out as much as we can!

The focus right now is on the Student Council Saga, Episodes 1-12, and I don’t have a firm timeline aside from ASAP. If you can think of anything that needs changing, anything that’s wrongly translated or inconsistent, please let us know and we will pass the information along to Nozomi. Not every suggestion will be followed, and it’s at Nozomi’s discretion, not ours, but we are super grateful for the chance to once again be a part of the release of the series we all love so much and we want to do the best we can to make it awesome.

Again, the focus right now is on the Student Council Saga, Episodes 1-12, and the timeline is ASAP. Gio and I will be doing a rewatch to see if there’s anything that pops out at us… and Gio is going to livetweet it, so if you want to follow along, or if you just want to see what we have to say while watching, we’ve created a brand-spanking-new Twitter for the site. Check it out right here. Otherwise, if you have feedback or questions to send us, you can contact us at giovanna@ohtori.nu or yasha@ohtori.nu as always, and I will be keeping a closer eye on the tumblr than I usually do just in case.

Thanks so much for your help, everyone, even if you just reblog to get the news out there! This is gonna be great!

@ayu-ohseki @kita-ysabell @jeneelestrange @halfbakedyams @rosepetalrevolution @louchan @fireyfobbitmedicine @filantestar @ostolero @selphish @littlehidingowl @magnetic-terp-input @hotmonkeelove @postslikewarships @bustermachineseven @mistspinner @queen-of-hearts92 @revolutionarygirlanthy @revolutionizetheworld @smashtheshell @kamikazefinn @spoookiepie @supitscarrie omg too many more to tag ;_;

me: hey so remember how you spent the last few years, and kinda your life, thinking about what if things really didn't stay the same
also me: in case
me: yeah in case you ever *really* had to think about it
also me: yeah
me: when's the last time you thought about the egg speech from utena?
also me: oh fuck.
me: …
also me: …
me: …
also me: i mean it was weird enough people were still watching utena
me: yeah, but gender roles, when it was still "roles"
also me: I *know*!
me: but we forgot about the black rose arc, the mikage seminar, didn't we?
also me: we did!
me: because it's not like decadently aestheticized academic dueling means anything in Japanese history
also me: because Germany-sempai, I get it
me: you remember the speech?
me: Herman Hesse!
me: you remember the speech?
also me: if... if it cannot
me: you remember it
also me: if it cannot break the egg's shell, the chick will die without being born
me: we are the chick, the world is our egg
also me: unless we crack the world's shell, we will die without being born
me: smash the world's shell
us: sekai wo kakumei suru tame ni!
: ::elevator stops::

utenascreenshots:

thanks for 1k followers,heres something from yours truly 

Revolutionary Girl Utena - Ending [HD Remastered]

Yeah, the aesthetics, or rather #the aesthetic - kinda German expressionism crossed with French rococo. If you haven’t seen the movie, the architecture’s even more ridiculous in that. JA Seazer’s music of course was a huge thing, I think it helped create the sunny feel where everything’s absurd and weighty but not ominous.

Also just all the ritualized, formalist, symbolist stuff - the “ascending to the duelling grounds” and sword-drawing bits which were literally the same in each episode, and came in at roughly the same point, but also the stuff that would happen each time but in a different way as a sort of commentary on the story - the shadow girls’ play, the preliminary conversations in the student council room/Akio’s car/the seminar’s elevator-confessional, the moment when the duellists’ flower is cut, the absurd lyrics in the duel songs, the accessories on the desks and the way they all slam together at the end in the Black Rose Arc, stuff like that.

The Anthy bits were nice and well-used to modulate the pacing, of course when I’m talking about “sunny feel” the bits in the sunlit garden while The Sunlit Garden plays help. Coulda done without Chu-Chu, I don’t know who decided that every ‘90s anime has to have a weird, humanized animal mascot.

vraik:

killerteacell:

I’m just going to leave this very important link to legal youtube viewing of Utena here. For reasons.

HEY READERS. If you’ve been procrastinating because you didn’t want to watch the shaky 90s dub, YOUR SALVATION IS AT HAND.

youzicha:

Thinking about the word “coelacanth” (which is hard to spell and/or pronounce because of the gratuitously Greek roots) reminded me of a creative strategy for translating the J.A. Seazer songs in Utena.

The lyrics are typically mostly lists of nouns/verbs, with very little sentence structure. For example, the song for the duel in episode 23 begins

暗黒灼熱
誕生人形
名付けられて人動説

which the official subtitles render as

Darkness, burning
Puppets given life…
The name given is Human Movement Theory

While workable, that translation erases various features of the source text—in particular, the fact that is is written using Sino-Japanese vocabulary, which contributes to its arcane, mysterious atmosphere.

At this point, Yasuyuki Sato of the Utena Translation Project had an idea: if you think about it, English also has a form of diglossia, in that scientific vocabulary can be formed from Greek morphemes. His translation renders the same lines as

Incandescent darkness and birthed puppets
Are named, anthropoperipherism

This is is much more accurate! The only critism I could raise would be that, in 2015, English speakers don’t actually understand Greek any more.

Later in the translation of the same song, Sato uses “speleomorph” for 空洞形態 ‘hollow shape’.

(Anyway, translation is really difficult. What effect was J.A. Seazer aiming for by using Sino-Japanese? Some of his other songs use classical particles like 也, so maybe rather than “scientific” we should think “medieval poem”, and try to make the translation into a Chaucer pastiche. Or perhaps he is just interested in the phonetic quality of short bisyllabic words; in that case, translating into Greek roots goes in the wrong direction, because in English it’s the low dialect that uses monosyllabic morphemes…)