This Week in Anime

The Adolescence of Revue Starlight

Chris
I think anyone who went through Revue Starlight and didn't come away with multiple questions wasn't paying enough attention. For instance, why all the insistence on tomatoes here when we know the superior fruit is the banana?

We all deal with leaving high school in our own ways, and sometimes the sober grad party just isn't cutting it.

I had to immediately give this movie big ups for choosing to make the giraffe even weirder than it was in the series. Revue Starlight as an anime has always proudly gotten by on artistic esotericism, so skewing one of its most WTF focal points even further is a great statement of that intent.

That overall intent being providing even less narrative mechanical justification for all the wild staged shit it's throwing at the wall and getting by on the most outlandish outsized vibes possible.

Indeed, one major thing that sticks out to me about this movie is that, though it's nominally a sequel to the TV series, it has so many earmarks of working as a compilation or retelling as well. Once the opening act setting things up is taken care of, the main attraction, the dueling duets between our various star-crossed thespian lovers, do a lot to reiterate and review (or 'revue') the issues they worked through in the show.

The setup has a lot of elements that tie into the overall themes of the movie which we can get into later, but just on the surface it does work as a great refresher if it's been a while since you last saw the series.

Even compared to the necessary theatricality of the TV series, it cannot be overstated what a Capital-M Movie this movie is.

Let me state for the record that I am mad jealous you got that theatrical experience I missed out on. Even the first time I watched through this I couldn't stop myself from compulsively screen capping what felt like every other frame. So I was happy to let myself give it another watch less than twenty-four hours later to simply soak the whole thing in.

I'm extremely glad I gave it that second watch. The aforementioned vibes carry the clashing conflicts on-screen perfectly well, but there are details that crystalize better once you know where they're going. Like the early scenes with the girls declaring their post-grad plans, keeping track of where each one of them is going (pointedly, none of the partnered-up pairs have the same goal between them) informs their specific flavors of angst each couple is fighting through.

It also gives you more opportunity to catch all the delightful little background details, like Maya mirroring an ad's pose or being warned about the dangers of driving under the influence (of Richard Wagner).

These two would cross an ocean to see each other again, even if that's made a little easier by taking a train escorted by an existentialist talking giraffe.

Such travels might also be made easier by the metaphysical question of how much all this is actually even happening. Compared to the somewhat more explicated audition duels from the TV series, what the girls get up to here is very specifically not an audition, and the way it comes off might simply be the most lavish symbolic representation of all of them psychologically working through that particular flavor of graduation uncertainty.

I like the way that allows their hang-ups to be expressed nearly-entirely in these high-concept musical duels, compared to needing to be directly detailed and plotted out across full episodic time-slots.

The movie is extremely committed to that point. Not only is the overshadowing presence of Tokyo Tower cut down by the film's end, they even burn up the giraffe partway through, almost immediately after he puts forth the idea that Revue Starlight The Movie only exists because the audience (both he and us) enjoyed Review Starlight so much we demanded the girls fight each other again.


What remains in that destruction is that core principle: The stage girls aren't fighting for the sake of satisfying any sort of system, heck, they aren't even really fighting each other. They're fighting against their idea of themselves at the end of this stage they're on before they take the next one.

The movie rides that incredible line of drenching its proceedings in layers of symbolism and motifs while simultaneously having the characters scream exactly what they textually mean directly at each other and the audience. In other applications this might seem like overkill, but it absolutely fits the sensory overload this movie is shooting for in all its clearly-labeled baroque-ness.

I adore the way it teases us with the timing on this music, not starting with a song, but instead waiting until nearly a quarter of the way into the film before our favorite bad banana transforms the train the crew is riding into a rolling combat stage and busts into that opening to let us know It Is On.

I legitimately pumped my fists and cheered.

The fights in Revue Starlight were always great, but the absurd escalation afforded by the movie lets them get even more grandiose in their choreography and emotional intensity. Each successive one somehow manages to top the last, and they all effectively feel like equal parts collaborative stage shows and earnest fights to the death. Which makes them not unlike the spectacle of pro wrestling, I suppose.


They are also, and I'm not sure how this is actually possible, somehow even more homoerotic than the TV anime.

The colors shown off in those screencaps would do it it enough for me, but I also came off impressed by Mahiru's showing versus Hikari. It's probably the one that delivers the most on being a sequel to a story from the original series, demonstrating Mahiru's growth past her place in a love triangle she had no chance in, as well as how far she's come as a performer.
If we're talking our favorite number from the movie though, well, there was really no contest as to which one would end up being mine.

You joke, but the turnaround climax of the whole exercise really is Junna realizing how hollow her regurgitated philosophical quotes were, picking up the shattered piece of her previous weapon of choice which symbolized that, jamming it together with the tool her best frenemy told her to kill herself with, and then just screaming "Kill me yourself, coward!"

Like obviously I like this fight a lot because I love Banana and the battle animation in this part goes up to eleven. But also, that thematic execution which ends on some of the rawest cathartic growth for one of this series' coolest couples, well, it's just one more part of this movie where the extant emotion affected me in exactly the way they planned for it to.

This movie digs in deeper in detailing those pasts of Karen and Hikari to flesh out their relationship, something I think was a bit of a weakness in the original series, especially given the pair's supposed Top Star billing. I still don't know that it gets that over as far as it wants, but those specific weaknesses definitely make them and their connection feel more human. I appreciate touches like lil' Hikari's concern that Karen might stop being her friend after she helped her come out of her shell.

Or Karen's fixation on Hikari as more of a motivating goal than a person during their pre-high-school separation period.

Of course the theaterest kids here would get basically their own whole separate movie within the movie.

This shot is brilliant and should be shown in any film study class

Okay I'm making a joke there but of all the duels in this movie, this is the one where the symbolism gets cranked up so far to the outlandishly overt side of things that it loops around to being genuinely amazing in how brazen it is.


So much of this movie is like if The End of Evangelion and The Adolescence of Utena had a baby which they somehow conceived by swordfighting.

Truly, Claudine is The Joker of the stage.

Oh boy, if you want to talk about bold abstraction, this final Fury Road invocation here was where I had to congratulate Revue Starlight The Movie for the fact that there was nothing it wouldn't just go for.

Karen reforged, like the weapons in the original series, into a personified representation of the Position Zero goal itself, roaring back into a rematch invoking the cinematic indulgences of George Miller.

It doesn't even need to culminate with another complexly-choreographed fight, because the pageantry of the stage Karen arrives to confront Hikari on is the kind of theatrical reward it would be on its own in a real-life production. The act of getting to stand for that performance, in a way they now see themselves as worthy of, is the victory, regardless of who wins the 'duel'. Just the swelling of the music and the simulated ridiculous stage lighting effects sell that effort.

For real, after a couple previous near-misses, it was this part of this movie, this glorious, celebratory graduation for all of them accompanied by that incredible score, that properly loosed some waterworks from me at last.

I know there was some consternation back when the Revue Starlight TV series was airing about comparing its style to Ikuhara. But I think The Movie here definitely proves that Furukawa not only deserves to be measured against his legendary mentor, he has absolutely made his own, defining style out of everything he's learned and honed.

Out with the giraffes, in with the snakes, it would seem. Count me in for it too!

Maybe if we somehow convince Furukawa to direct the second season of How Heavy Are The Dumbbells That You Lift? I know that Revue Starlight is still a whole-ass franchise with a mobile game to dabble in and stage-show performances and the like. But for the specific action of Furukawa's unmatched anime treatment of the material, this was about as perfect a finishing follow-up as I could ask for, and one I can confirm I'll also be watching plenty more times. And no matter what that now-extra-crispy giraffe would accuse me of, I don't know that I could demand any more from these girls.