Shoujo Kakumei Utena: Adolescence Mokushiroku (1999) ★

Info

• Title:: Shoujo Kakumei Utena: Adolescence Mokushiroku
• Title_EN:: Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Adolescence of Utena
• Studio:: J.C.Staff
• Year:: 1999
• Format:: Movie
• Runtime:: 1 hr 25 min

Log

2018-12-14

i watched this with faith because i heard that she turns into a car, and then we watched the car scene, and it was so incredible that we had to watch the whole thing.

it did not disappoint.

even though this and the tv series are separate, sorta, i feel like i have to rely on the show to make sense of this film, or at least use my knowledge of its language as a base platform.

the rose bride is the perfect love object. she’s the beautiful corpse, as her brother points out. in this role, her will is perfectly subservient to that of her prince, to whom she’ll accept anything. she’s a sex robot, basically. but she’s also hot.

the fact that she represents the object is why everybody wants her. she is the girl who will obey your every desire, and so many men are willing to cut each other down for the chance to possess her.

but the fact that she’s the object also means that she’s also the concept of the object too. which i think is why juri wants her? she’s bought into the rose bride mythology and wants to use that abstract power more than she wants to use the form it’s in. i think.

utena, however, remains the only person who doesn’t know any of this and is interested in anthy as a person. in the anime it feels like she fights to keep anthy out of the hands of people who would defile her, but with anthy being the rose bride, it’s hard to say that utena’s intentions are truly stoic. sure you’re trying to free her, but given that she’s the desirable object, perhaps you’ve become seduced too?

in the film, i think utena takes one step toward this same plot point (toward deciding to free her) and then she gets sucked into a car wash.

• the car metaphor: in the anime, the car is totally libido, i believe, and akio holds the key. here, the car appears to represent status, freedom, independence, and akio merely owns the form. it’s an interesting symbol, since he laughs about having a cool car yet being unable to drive it, forcing him to take a taxi instead. he has the look of a hero, but he’s unable to liberate himself from this whole mess either.

or, alternate interpretation: anthy’s body/status is the car, but the key is anthy. he has the rose bride, but he doesn’t have anthy, and so he dies unable to reconcile what it’s like to be so distant from something you’re so intimate with. the fact that anthy later has utena’s key means that utena genuinely has given herself to her.

it could also be important that anthy actually goes forward with utena’s key, seeing as she had been reduced to an object too for her. this disavowal of agency is telling, because it’s the exact thing that’s anathema to the pursuit of the rose bride. to become an object is to lack the ability to desire. for the pursuer, this is great, because it means that your object can never desire somebody else, or anything other than what you want for them. however it also means that they can never genuinely desire you, and intersubjective desire is what we really want from romance, right? so, for utena to become a car means that anthy now has all the agency in the relationship; she cannot count on the rose bride executing utena’s will. anthy has to make that free choice. and when they emerge, naked and driving through ruins, they’ve come to accept each other as they are.

also in the film the swords are boners. anthy gives her a boner. the goal of the duel is deflowering.

i have no idea how the phone call section makes sense though, or the stuff about revolution and the end of the world.

2023-06-11 chloe

• i like explosion.gif that goes on in the opening
• this soundtrack is so obscenely nineties.
• the scene when anthy shows utena the stars is genuinely moving. she sacrificed her roses for the sake of her betrothed! which, even if that’s something the rose bride would feel compelled to do, is striking in that she wasn’t told to do it either…
  • oh, speaking of, the visual design in this show is especially gorgeous. it’s like they took everything they were building up to in the original series and amped it all up with confidence
• cow nanami is a bit much, but also i don’t know where else they could’ve stuffed nanami into the story they were trying to tell – especially with touga MIA.
  • chloe didn’t like how i brought up nanami’s plump, bulging udder after the fact
• the fact that utena’s solution to the duels is to go “to the outside world” ties into how i felt after the end of my rewatch of the show itself itself.
• the numerous black cars - is this representative of akio as the lord of the flies?
• the rewriting of touga as a former love who is revealed to have sacrificed himself for the sake of another is… i think it makes sense for establishing a more direct reason for why utena wants to be a prince. the tv’s mystery prince and utena’s later relationship with akio burns just a little too slowly to compress into 90 minutes – especially with akio MIA too.
  • really, a lot of utena’s character motivations have to be simplified to work in a film here. like, in the anime, utena’s desire to liberate anthy was at least partially a selfish one: she wanted to be her prince and save her, which required the rose bride’s coerced cooperation… and that selfishness led her to lose anthy that first time. and likewise here, it’s still easy to see utena’s motives as similarly selfish too, yet for the sake of time they resolve this problem by having utena relinquish control of anthy if she truly wants her to be saved, and letting anthy make the free decision whether to escape with utena or not.
• the way that the symbolism of the end of the world and the castle is used here is perhaps more cogent than how it was used in the anime, but it’s also not nearly as fully explained. it gives me this feeling where it’s like a stripped-down dialect of its use in the anime: if you sorta understand it in the anime then you can more readily understand it in the film, but if you never watched the anime then you’re bound to have a hard time understanding it in the film.