__Quick disclaimer: This review contains spoilers
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My first thought while going into Revue was, “Hmm… an idol SoL show, perhaps with a hint of drama. I think this’ll be a nice comfort watch.” Twenty minutes into the first episode, I realised that I was completely wrong. I saw two girls from the cast fighting it out in a “revue”, complete with a song dance, vying for the position of Top Star. Given how I had just started watching the show, the weirdness of of the entire situation (case in point, the giraffe who watching the girls) gave my inert brain an overwhelming amount of information that it needed to process in an instance. Despite perhaps not understanding everything that is going on, the show’s unorthodox execution grew on me quite quickly.

Starting off with the technical components, I must compliment the show’s visuals. It looks absolutely gorgeous at times, and the introduction sequences never fail to hype me up. Moreover, the entire part where Karen’s uniform gets made and she gets changed (I think it’s a henshin sequence?) is probably one of my favourite pieces of reused animation in anime. Huge props to the visual storytelling of Revue, which was absolutely ripe with visual metaphors, parallels and other artistic devices that would even impress someone like Ikuhara. The music too was fantastic overall, it set the tone for every particular revue very well, which themselves were very aptly to reflect their participants and their circumstances. Moreover, the OP song was a jam as well, and I absolutely loved how they changed the ED visuals almost every episode to reflect the “protagonist” of that episode.

After the first episode, even though revues became commonplace, the show always gave priority to its characters, which was a huge relief to me. Revue has a pretty decent sized cast for a single cour show, but all of them felt almost equally important, not only to the plot, but also to each other. The characters were all presented in pairs, and each pair felt more like a couple to be honest. Basically, what I’m trying to say is the romantic chemistry between the characters was quite strong for a show that wasn’t explicitly yuri (even though your definition may vary). To the show’s credit, it played in very well with the actual plot of Starlight (the play), which is a story of love, separation and tragedy. My favourite character was probably Banana-San, she was pretty bananice. Futaba was a close second. I liked her because first, I like tomboys and second, I was a fan of her character arc where she learned to shrug off her master (who I hate), who she felt indebted to, and finally reached for her true ambition.

The show had a very unique episode structure, where the episodes felt kinda disjointed but somehow it all seemed to flow. I think this is a good representation of how exceedingly nuanced Revue’s writing is; in fact, the structure is very reminiscent of another one of my favourite shows, Sonny Boy. It makes great use of the “show, don’t tell” technique because the anime never really ever hands anything to the audience on a silver platter, which is what makes the show’s analysis interesting.

Now the real elephant in the room- or should I say the giraffe in the room- has to be the themes. Revue tries to do a lot of things, and I can say with complete confidence that I am probably either misinterpreting it or missing some vital information. However, in my opinion, Revue is about passion and how crucial it is to aim for an ambition without losing what makes it part of your identity. Aside from that, there is an obvious focus on relationships and how one can bend the rules to prioritize connections over “following the script”. I was initially thinking that Revue is just a massive metaphor for the journey of life, but that doesn’t make much sense now that I think about it.

In conclusion, Revue is an exhilarating mess of emotions and genres: it manages to be profound and fun; thrilling and relaxing; action packed and CGDCT-esque at the same time. I can’t think of many criticisms for it, aside from the fact that it sometimes lacked clarity in conveying its themes because of the aforementioned ‘doing too many things at once’, which was a problem that was especially prevalent in the strangely abstract finale.

TLDR: Amazing show, go watch it