Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Revolutionary Girl Utena
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Grungehamster
Posts: 41 |
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I will note that Jacob wrote virtually the entire script of the Brows Held High episode on the film ages ago, and I think it gives a very good overview of how that movie is essentially concentrated Ikuhara id (with all the benefits and drawbacks that entails). Still, I would love to see him revisit it and really dig in deep. |
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animalia555
Posts: 467 |
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If I remember correctly some characters are portrayed differently in the Manga and the anime
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Grungehamster
Posts: 41 |
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Portrayed differently? You could say that. Chiho Saito wrote a much more traditional shojo series similar to what Ikuhara said he wanted to parody.
While I think there is a good bit of stuff that is worthwhile the manga adds to the series (like giving Utena a motivating force to be at Ohtori in the form of anonymous post cards and the bit about the school rules allowing you to wear something by a certain designer makes a lot more sense than claiming she is wearing "a boy's uniform" when it looks nothing like her male classmates or the student council) but you lose some of the more significant characters like Nanami and spoiler[Shiori] while the characters that remain are given much less complex motivations like spoiler[Juri has a crush on Touga and Touga has a crush on Utena and that love triangle motivates a lot of their actions]. Really the worst parts of the manga are (these are major spoilers) spoiler[instead of Dios becoming Akio and the implications of this idealized good losing his powers and in the aftermath showing his inner toxicity in the manga Akio and Dios are essentially Piccolo Daimao and Kami] and spoiler[manga Anthy is without any really toxic qualities and is instead the innocent damsel that she appeared to be all along instead of a victim of abuse who torments others as a defense mechanism/outlet]. |
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gabuhaha
 Posts: 136 |
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When I watched this for the first time as a teenager, that particular scene infuriated me. They spent two episodes building Utena up as someone who made up her own gender norms and went her own instincts. Then as soon as they introduce someone who Utena thinks could possibly be her prince, she reverts to the submissive female. It's not just a shojo trope. You see it in a lot of series oriented at males as well. So that this is expected behavior gets doubly reinforced. |
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Cryssoberyl
 Posts: 240 |
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And that is why, in my opinion, the Utena manga is rote, uninteresting by-the-book shoujo, as it plays completely seriously the tropes that Ikuhara was attempting to lampshade and subvert in the series.
(Obviously that would be enough of a deal-breaker without making everyone straight as well.  )
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Alexis.Anagram
 Posts: 278 Location: Mishopshno |
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Oh, Utena. As someone who could be described as firmly aligned with this show's "intended audience", I certainly have some thoughts about it, starting with the fact that, as others here have said, despite my best effort I never actually got through the dang thing. The barrier of entry for me had nothing much to do with its avant-garde technical proclivities or stylized narrative; best criticism I can offer of what I saw (and currently remember) from that vantage point is this feeling that it's not so much pretentious as it is redundant, kind of hypocritically casting its arguments in symbolism it doesn't seem to trust the audience to grasp or maybe more appropriately, interpret. Jacob refers to this repetition as "helpful," I think it's a little tiring and borders on being reductive. But I actually liked most of what I saw in spite of that and wouldn't hold the choice of format against the show given how well most of the characters seem to live inside of it, navigating its looping mechanisms without feeling too strained or coercive: I think the writing managed to strike a nice balance there, whereas Yuri Kuma Arashi was definitely biased towards mechanical trappings, which I suppose made that show interesting in its own right.
To be blunt, though, I found Utena to be so wildly problematic in its treatment of Anthy that it was really hard to reconcile my intrigue surrounding the central questions it poses with that gnawing feeling each episode brought that I was watching just another version of that endemic queer dialogue play out in which gender and sexuality are brought into focus and confronted in a meaningful fashion even while race and culture blur in the background, relegated to uninvestigated afterthought or worse, symbolic elements to which "enlightened" queers may lay uninhibited claim without scrutiny. I was immediately put on edge when I was treated to the presentation of a young brown woman capitulating the every demand of a cast composed of essentially one ethnic majority and (trigger warning) spoiler[literally being beaten on screen in her early appearances], and while I'm at least savvy enough to anticipate the inevitable reversal of roles implied at the outset it did little to comfort me that Anthy's personal development might be rooted in some effort to empower her on a less abstract, symbolic scale. That is to say, I don't know that Ikuhara et al. had the ultimate intention or necessary understanding to portray Anthy as a person with a cultural history trapped in a toxic setting where that aspect of her identity has been appropriated and neutralized: that might worry me a bit less if the production didn't go out of its way to accentuate and emphasize Anthy's racial "otherness" - the urge to use the term "exoticize" is tempting - such that the viewer is clearly meant to interpret Anthy as racially estranged from the majority of the cast. On the whole, I worry that the show generalizes Anthy's racial othering as supplementary or indistinguishable from those qualifiers of sex and gender identity that push people to the margins of society without giving thought or voice to how it's really, really not the same thing: and yes, I'll just preemptively concede that I realize this is a show made in Japan by a Japanese team where race and gender politics are socially specific but the idea that the show might be less accountable and open to criticism in this regard than the issues of sex and gender it actively engages is, well, really indicative of the whole problem as I see it. That said, given that the show is practically required viewing at this point, I guess I oughta jump on the bandwagon and use this set of reviews as a helpful excuse to have another go at it. I've been meaning to, I just wish I could find a nice list like I did with The X-Files where someone breaks down every episode that might make me give it up, 'cause I just really don't need to see casual abuse of brown bodies in my anime. I also really liked the reviews of these 3 episodes, Jacob's analyses seem to only increase in epic-ness over time. I'm going to have to start breaking out my Encyclopedia of Everything Art or I dunno I guess actually get an education. |
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Cryssoberyl
Posts: 240 |
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There is no treatment of race in Utena. The brownness of Anthy and her brother Akio are never commented on, directly or indirectly, and in fact the only meaning behind it is that Ikuhara saw some brown characters in a manga and liked it as a character design element.
Nor is there any of the cultural background that you are supposing must exist. Whatever Anthy and Akio are, it can safely be said that they are not Indian. Indeed, they may not even be human in origin, and certainly their mindsets go beyond what could be accrued by ordinary human experience. You may consider this "problematic" - for me, there is worth to the fact that these characters are accepted as such and never treated any differently because of it; I find no "othering" as you term it. The reasons for Anthy's abuse lie firmly elsewhere, and as you note, there is much more to it than there at first appears. Both her and her brother are powerful in extremely non-abstract, non-symbolic ways you don't yet perceive. (In Anthy's case, this is particularly, and actually quite forcefully, true in the movie.) There is also the very material fact that they are both portrayed and accepted as both physically gorgeous and highly intelligent. One of the strongest senses I had on this matter, when watching the show in my youth, is that the show was at pains to express that brown people can be smart and beautiful too - and that, believe me, is not a sentiment expressed often enough, especially in anime. But in any case, you need to watch the show before commenting on it in this fashion. You are making a great deal of baseless suppositions and attempting to analyze something without even giving yourself the concrete tools to do so. If you watch the show and then want to come back and say it's horribly neglectful in its treatment (or nontreatment) of race, so be it, but I doubt you will think so, if you are being fair to what was presented. |
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Shay Guy
 Posts: 2123 |
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"Shut up and stop being wrong."
The fact that nobody mentions Anthy's skin color doesn't make it meaningless, or mean there aren't any implications to the decision to give that color to Anthy of all characters, or that there's no case for it being tone-deaf. And as for "not Indian", maybe technically not, but that bindi has cultural associations. |
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Grungehamster
Posts: 41 |
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That element always has me so torn because while there is nothing explicit in the text identifying Anthy's skin tone as being a significant story element it is difficult as a Westerner to not feel there is a degree of commentary in having the one woman of color in the series being treated as an object to own. The women as a commodity message is already clear in how Touga acts, but nothing says that Anthy being the most explicit example of that isn't coincidental. At the very least that the Rose Bride and this Dios character who seems to descend from the castle during Utena's fight are the only characters who do not fall into the mokokuseki rubric at the very least casts them as exotic and separate from the cast at large, though the value of this othering is hard to qualify (especially this early in the series.) |
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Cryssoberyl
Posts: 240 |
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If that's all you took from what I said, clearly you are the one that has issues with differing opinions. Alexis gave theirs, which wasn't formed by watching the show, I gave mine, which was. Both opinions are individual and subjective, but at present, one is certainly more informed by the content in question than the other. As said, watch the show and then you can think whatever you want about it. Just don't cast someone else's dissenting opinion as an attack, like you did just now. |
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Alexis.Anagram
Posts: 278 Location: Mishopshno |
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Oh dear, this right here only adds to my concern. The idea of using black and brown folks as an ornamental quality designed to advertise a desired aesthetic is the definition of exoticism. If an artist has no intention of developing a relevant racial idea of a character in terms of their experiences and personal history then they certainly have no business invoking racial and cultural features as superficial markers, and this goes right back what I posited about queer communities and stories historically addressing race with entitled negligence.
Ohhhhkay. I don't know if I have the patience to unpack this really, really loaded commentary but suffice to say I am not comforted by the notion that this show presents its racially coded characters as potentially not even human. At this point it's worth directing some attention to what Shay Guy mentioned: the bindi is a culturally and religiously specific artifact, which means that it is representative of a people and their belief systems. So again, it sounds like the show is just adopting racial imagery carelessly, without putting thought into how this actually speaks to and impacts people: but from what I've been led to believe, this show is not just another thoughtless cartoon, as it consciously leads with its visual symbolism.
Well, does Anthy not look different from the rest of the cast? The show visually others her and it's obviously deliberate. It's problematic, especially when taken in context with her role and dynamic with other characters in the early episodes, because from the sounds of it there's no justification for it in terms of her character or her personal story: the creatives just wanted something "different." That's pretty racist.
This was something I noticed during my first viewing and while I can totally agree that it was initially refreshing to see Anthy's beauty and intelligence referenced, it really only adds to my consternation because ultimately her beauty seems to only contribute to this idea that she is to be coveted and treated as property, and without recognizing the manner in which the intersection of race and gender informs that dynamic (particularly the historical colonization of black and brown women as property) the show ends up practicing a really exploitative model of romanticizing race and culture.
As I said, I intend to watch it, but as far as giving it the benefit of the doubt? I watched a decent amount of it before reaching these conclusions and I've rooted all of them in the material as it was presented, so yeah I do think I'm entitled to offer my critique and concerns about how these issues are handled in light of that. My present feeling is that you didn't offer a defense of the material so much as a dismissal of this conversation altogether: I'm not satisfied with that, as I think this discussion is not just important in its own right but immediately relevant to any conscious reading of this show in 2017. |
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Cryssoberyl
Posts: 240 |
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Because it is not defensible as a knowledgeable and sensitive treatment of racial intersectionality. In fact, I made that clear at the very beginning. The impetus for having two of the characters be brown was nothing more than as a design element, a whim of the project leader. If you want to pass judgement on that basis, there is, in fact, no conversation to be had. You're right, it is not what you are suggesting it is not. The only question is whether there is still worth to the show and its messages despite that. Obviously many people strongly believe so, myself among them, and I addressed some of the factors I see as mitigating the situation. If those don't speak to you, then here again, I'm afraid nothing further can be offered. |
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Aylinn
 Posts: 1684 |
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Cryssoberyl is right that Anthy’s skin is just part of a design element. You should either accept it and judge the story for what it is trying to do instead of judging it based on what you would like it to be about. It is not a story about racial issues and it never tries to be. If it triad and failed, it would be a weakness, but it is clearly not the case here.
Not in every country colonization of black and brown women is such a big and widely discussed problem. Choosing Anthy’s skin color may appear careless and insensitive to someone from US, but different countries have their own set of problems and sensitivities and Japanese, I am rather sure, are more interested in their own problems than the problems of people in US. Or should the whole world feel guilty and remorseful for whatever colonizers from other countries did in other countries? |
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Alexis.Anagram
Posts: 278 Location: Mishopshno |
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I appreciate your forthrightness here: supposing this is the case, though, it calls into question why the show is held in such regard? If the "appropriate" method by which to view and experience the show is to lower one's standards for effective character writing, how can it be considered a masterpiece? If these questions sound rhetorical, that's only about half-true: I'm genuinely surprised, given the level of scrutiny and depth of analysis attributed to this show (not all of which I can claim to be party to), that it seems like it hasn't been consistently challenged on account of this issue. It feels like a huge elephant to have in the room.
Again, I think it's fundamentally problematic to advocate a reading of a show which incorporates racialized power dynamics (however naively or innocently) in spite of their presence. Because, again, it is problematic to apply race and culture as aesthetic conjecture without any substantive meaning: what that says to me as a person of color is that my experience of race and the living significance of my cultural symbols as they appear to me and my community are subject at any time to whimsical erasure on behalf of uninterested parties who feel entitled to abuse those symbols without giving any thought to how that impacts me, the person who then has to live with the social consequences. So let me ask you this, for an audience who sees in this show that sort of devaluing reflection of their heritage, how does the community accommodate their needs and perspectives? If what you're saying is you just don't really care about this conversation surrounding accessibility, then why should anyone care about any of the various messages (some of which I happen to believe are important and worthwhile) which the show makes a point to convey? In making a determination that the show should be evaluated on certain merits to the exclusion of considering its racial romanticism, what I hear is: 1) Discussions about gender and sex and shojo manga outweigh discussions surrounding race and culture and can therefore be considered valuable even when they are practiced in a racist fashion (which was what I was originally objecting to, after all); 2) Therefore, with regards to this show specifically, people of color who are made uncomfortable by the uninvestigated use of race as decoration do not and should not have access to expressing their concerns materially, because Utena fans do not and should not care about this perspective and will provide cover enabling the material's fetishization of women of color regardless. Basically, either buck up and enjoy what the show has to offer or satisfy yourself occupying the margins of social commentary surrounding one of the most prominent examples of subversive queer storytelling in the animated medium.
I could follow this logic if I were criticizing the material purely on its artistic merits, but I'm obviously expanding the conversation to address its unintended social impact, which is an especially relevant approach given the show's themes. Jacob talks about this in his reviews as well: effective critique recognizes that art is not insular and it's how people in the world respond to the material that determines its lasting value. As such, this isn't a question of what I "would like" so much as it is how this show speaks to me and what I find objectionable about it in the sense of its broader implication, which almost always goes way beyond authorial intent.
Well, first of all, Japan has its own history of colonization and historical relations of conquest and dominance with both neighboring nations and the Indigenous populations of the islands. But I agree that as a Japanese man living in Japan, Ikuhara may not (although he very well may!) have access to the kind of perspective I'm offering here, but then, that's exactly the value of offering it: to argue for increased awareness rather than shrugging complacency. I don't expect to retroactively rewrite the show or Japan's social attitude towards race-- although the idea that Japanese people are isolated from these questions and conflicts is misguided, I think. What I'm hearing from you is, "This show was made by Japanese people for Japanese people, so when discussed the Japanese perspective ought to be prioritized and kept intact." I actually agree with this to some extent, but where I differ is in considering that, again, this is a Japanese show made for a predominantly Japanese audience which nevertheless draws on non-Japanese cultural markers (in this case, Hindu and South Asian). In essence, it opens itself to this line of conversation specifically because the affected communities are not Japanese. It goes without saying I wouldn't have much of a case if Anthy's character was associated with cultural imagery surrounding miko practices. |
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DanQ
 Posts: 114 |
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From Ikuni's commentary for 3rd episode:
(How much is this truth, judge yourself. It's Ikuni's words  )
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