First of all, I must warn you about my bad English. I also don't actually know what to say here so this review is a complete mess. Secondly, if you are planning to see Utena there's a severe TW of rape, including incest rape.
This review hasn't got any spoilers, but anyway you won't get virgin to the series if you read this.
Revolutionary Girl Utena is divided in three arcs. The first one is the presentation. As it is the softest and the most "naive" of the three, each chapter is great as itself and as a part of the series and pretty much all of them have something to say. Since almost the first moment we know the -largue- cast of characters that will appear along Utena are morally gray -Anthy, the student council-, or at least, like Utena herself, plenty of faults. After all, the first arc is great as a presentation of everybody, the series but as a an arc itself, too, because it goes beyond being a presentation -which at the same time could be understood as a presentation of the rest of Utena-. Anyway, this first episodes maintain a cheerful tone that slowly goes disappearing throughout the time, being at the beginning an episode where an important issue is study for a Maths second exam and later having another episode which is in its entirely an on-screen rape of a 14 years old girl by an adult man, metamorphosing into a horror anime.
The second arc is a profundization on everyone -literally said like this in the series-, adding also new characters who help in this task of deeping in everyone and everything. The third arc is actually probably the scariest thing I have seen -this is not a pretentious statement, I really couldn't sleep at night because Utena-; the horror in the series anyway, has a delayed effect; sometimes at the moment you won't notice it, but after a few seconds or minutes you won't stop thinking about it, and it's pretty well accomplished.
With all of this I just wanted to tell that Utena has a great rhythm and Utena knows it. Actually, Utena knows a lot about itself; since the first moment, Utena knows it is really good, and I must thank the series for don't constantly remind me it. Haha, imagine this anime reminding you how good it is like how I reminded you the name of it in this paragraph, it would be tiring and boring at some point, because remind it has almost 40 episodes. Ah yep, another great point in Utena: it's easy to watch and understand. It never gets boring.
About Utena being easy to understand is something I really appreciate. Also the symbols are not any hard to understand. With this added to how easy and enjoyable it is to watch there are no excuses >:)
Also I think is funny the godly ways Utena treats themes like sexuality, loss of the innocence, rape, masculinity/femininity or the fucking thing around the promises of eternal love and that kind of shit little girls were meant to believe in 1997. And now.
I only want to say, as a bi girl who was a tomboy in high school, Revolutionary Girl Utena is the most special thing to me right now and I love Utena with all my heart. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I didn't talk about any technical matter, but it's all perfectly done so... Watch Utena.
I could write a lot more but I don't really know how to write and less in English, so it would get actually boring.
TW. ABOUT THE RAPE IN UTENA ( spoilers)? )
Here I'm only talking about the rape of Utena.
The representation of rape here is the best I've seen anywhere. Only this two facts makes it so well done is fucking scary:
Also, our protagonist has sequels and tries various coping mechanisms to distract herself of the matter. Anyway it is impossible for her. It happened, she knows it and she can't forget or merely think about any other thing.
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