Revolutionary Girl Utena (少女革命ウテナ) is a Japanese anime television series created by Be-Papas, a production group formed by director Kunihiko Ikuhara and composed of himself, Chiho Saito, Shinya Hasegawa, Yōji Enokido and Yūichirō Oguro. The series was produced by J.C.Staff and originally aired on TV Tokyo from April to December 1997. Revolutionary Girl Utena follows Utena Tenjou, a teenaged girl who is drawn into a sword dueling tournament to win the hand of Anthy Himemiya, a mysterious girl known as the "Rose Bride" who possesses the "power to revolutionize the world".
Ikuhara was a director on the anime adaptation of Sailor Moon at Toei Animation in the 1990s; after growing frustrated by the lack of creative control in directing an adapted work, he departed the company in 1996 to create an original series. While he initially conceived of Utena as a mainstream Shōjo manga (girls' anime and manga) series aimed at capitalizing on the commercial success of Sailor Moon, the direction of the series shifted dramatically during production towards an avant-garde and surrealist tone. The series has been described as a deconstruction and subversion of fairy tales and the magical girl genre of manga, making heavy use of allegory and symbolism to comment on themes of gender, sexuality, and coming-of-age. Its visual and narrative style is characterized by a sense of theatrical presentation and staging, drawing inspiration from the all-female Japanese theater troupe the Takarazuka Revue, as well as the experimental theater of Shūji Terayama, whose frequent collaborator J. A. Seazer created the songs featured in the series.
Revolutionary Girl Utena has been the subject of worldwide critical acclaim, and has received many accolades. It has been praised for its treatment of LGBT themes and subject material, and has influenced subsequent animated works. A manga adaptation of Utena written and illustrated by Saito was developed contemporaneously with the anime series, and was serialized in the manga magazine Ciao beginning in 1996. In 1999, Be-Papas produced the film Adolescence of Utena as a follow-up to the television anime series. The series has had several iterations of physical release, including a remaster overseen by Ikuhara in 2008. In North America, Utena was initially distributed by Central Park Media starting in 1998; the license for the series has been held by Crunchyroll since its 2023 acquisition of Right Stuf and its subsidiary Nozomi Entertainment, which acquired the license for Utena in 2010.
Plot
Revolutionary Girl Utena is divided into three story arcs: the "Student Council Saga" (episodes 1–12), the "Black Rose Saga" (episodes 13–24), and the "Apocalypse Saga" (episodes 25–39).
As a child, Utena Tenjou was given a rose-engraved signet ring by a traveling prince, who promised her that they would one day meet again. Inspired by the encounter, Utena vowed to one day "become a prince" herself. Years later, a teenaged Utena is a student at Ohtori Academy, an exclusive boarding school. She finds herself drawn into a sword dueling tournament with the school's Student Council, whose members wear signet rings identical to her own. The duelists compete to win the hand of Anthy Himemiya, a mysterious student known as the "Rose Bride" who is said to possess the "power to revolutionize the world". Utena emerges victorious in her first duel; obliged to defend her position as the Rose Bride's fiancée, she remains in the tournament to protect Anthy from those who seek the power of the Rose Bride for themselves.
After dueling and achieving victory over the council, Utena is confronted by Souji Mikage, a student prodigy who uses his powers of persuasion and knowledge of psychology to manipulate others into becoming duelists. Mikage aims to kill Anthy to install Mamiya Chida, a terminally ill boy, as the Rose Bride. Utena defeats each of Mikage's duelists, and ultimately Mikage himself. Following his defeat, Mikage vanishes from Ohtori Academy, and the denizens of the school seemingly forget that he ever existed. It transpires that Akio Ohtori, the school's chairman and Anthy's brother, was using Mikage as part of a plot to obtain the "power of eternity". Mamiya was in truth a disguised Anthy, who assisted Akio in his manipulation of Mikage.
Akio appears before each of the Student Council members, and takes them to a place he refers to as "the end of the world". Following their encounters with Akio, each of the Council members face Utena in rematches. Utena defeats the Council members once more, and is called to the dueling arena to meet the prince from her past.
Characters
Most of the characters in Utena are school-aged adolescents whose character arcs focus on their psychological and moral growth into adulthood, in the tradition of a bildungsroman or coming-of-age story. Series writer Yōji Enokido identified characters who reckon with the transition from youth to maturity by attempting to regress and "take back what they can't ever return" as a major theme for the series, and director Kunihiko Ikuhara stated that he developed the cast of Utena using the self-described rule to "never give a character only one personality".
The character designs for the series were created by Chiho Saito based on direction from Ikuhara, which were then adapted for use in the television anime series by Shinya Hasegawa. Hasegawa stated that he was attracted to Utena as a project because of Saito's art style, distinguished by characters with slender bodies, long limbs, pointed chins, and large eyes, as well as by a stylized focus on the dramatized body movement of characters. He commented that Saito's style deviated from the "anime-like" art that was popular in manga of the era, and thus presented a compelling challenge to adapt into anime.
The title character of the series is Utena Tenjou, a middle school-aged girl who seeks to emulate the noble disposition of the prince she encountered in her youth. She is courageous, forthright, and kind, if somewhat naïve and impulsive. Utena is distinguished by her tomboyish demeanor and manner of dress, particularly her insistence on wearing a boys' school uniform. Ikuhara has characterized Utena as embodying the traits of both a romance heroine and a romanticist hero, describing her in this regard as someone "who has at the same time both the romance of a girl and the romance of a boy." The magazine Animage noted
Development
Context
While working as an animator at Toei Animation, series co-creator Kunihiko Ikuhara joined the anime television adaptation of Naoko Takeuchi's 1991 manga series Sailor Moon as an episode director and later, beginning with the second season, Sailor Moon R, he assumed the role of series director. Frustrated by the lack of creative control in adapting an existing work, Ikuhara departed from Toei in 1996 after the production of Sailor Moon SuperS to create an original series. To this end, Ikuhara assembled Be-Papas, a five-member team of creative professionals from the anime and manga industry which also included manga artist Chiho Saito, animator and character designer Shinya Hasegawa, writer Yōji Enokido, and planner Yūichirō Oguro.
Several team members had previously worked together on other projects: Hasegawa and Enokido had previously worked with Ikuhara on Sailor Moon, where Enokido wrote many of the episodes featuring Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune in addition to serving as head writer for SuperS; Hasegawa and Enokido also contributed to the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion
Releases
Revolutionary Girl Utena was originally broadcast weekly on TV Tokyo from April 2 to December 24, 1997. The series consists of two seasons, respectively composed of episodes 1 to 24 and episodes 25 to 39, and was originally produced on 16 mm film. The series has had several iterations of physical releases in Japan, including a VHS and LaserDisc release beginning in 1997, and a DVD release beginning in 1999. A remastering of the series overseen by Ikuhara was published as two boxed DVD sets released in 2008 and 2009, and as two boxed Blu-Ray sets released in 2013. A limited edition boxed set collecting the entire series on Blu-Ray was released in 2017 in commemoration of the series' 20th anniversary.
In North America, licensing for Utena was overseen by Enoki Films USA; the company produced a proof of concept for potential distributors that localized Utena for Western audiences, giving the characters English names and re-titling the series Ursula's Kiss. North American distribution rights were first acquired by Central Park Media, which released both English dubbed and subtitled editions of the series that preserved the original series title and character names. Central Park released the first thirteen episodes of the series on VHS beginning in 1998; due to licensing issues, the company did not release the series in full until its DVD release beginning in 2002. Central Park's licenses were liquidated after the company declared bankruptcy in 2009, and the North American license to Utena was acquired by Right Stuf under its Nozomi Entertainment label in 2010. The company released the series on DVD in 2011, the remastered edition of the series on Blu-Ray in 2017, and its own 20th anniversary series boxed set in 2018.
Related media
Manga
Contemporaneous with the development of the anime series, Chiho Saito wrote and illustrated a manga adaptation of Revolutionary Girl Utena, which was serialized by Shogakukan in the shōjo manga anthology Ciao beginning in 1996. Saito also published a one-shot in Ciao titled The Rose Seal which depicts Utena before to her transfer to Ohtori Academy, as well as a manga adaptation of the film Adolescence of Utena in Bessatsu Shōjo Comic Special. An English-language translation of the manga has been published by Viz Media, which also serialized the Utena manga in its manga anthology Animerica Extra.
Unlike most of the manga series that are adapted either into or from an anime, the plots of the Utena manga and anime deviate significantly from each other. These differences in plot, such as the manga's increased focus on the relationship between Utena and Touga, were in part a function of the fact that Saito began to write and illustrate the manga before the anime series went into production. She attempted to incorporate as much material as possible from the scripts Enokido had completed, but was frequently required to use her own judgement in rendering aspects of the story that the anime would ultimately depict in an entirely different manner. Animerica described the production of the manga adaptation as "one that got its inspiration largely through [Saito's] own confusion about what exactly she was supposed to show, and Ikuhara's own vague answers to her questions." Saito changed editors five times during the manga's year-and-a-half long serialization as a result of the confusion around its production.
A sequel to the Utena manga series, Revolutionary Girl Utena: After the Revolution, was announced in 2017 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the series.
Themes and analysis
Gender
Utena's desire to "become a prince" does not refer to a literal desire to become royalty or change her gender, but rather to her desire to exhibit qualities of courage, compassion, and strength that represent an ideal of princeliness. "Being a prince" thus constitutes a body of ideas connoting a sense of heroic agency, rather than a reflection of Utena's gender identity or presentation. The series contrasts the notion of the "prince" to that of the "princess", represented by the passive, helpless, and objectified Anthy.
Although the simple juxtaposition of prince and princess archetypes could suggest that Utena is a straightforward "feminist fairy tale", Napier argues that the series "is not simply a work of female empowerment". Napier and other critics argue that Utena uses the prince/princess dichotomy to examine how gender roles restrict the development of both women and men, how the victims of this system come to enforce these restrictions on other victims, and ultimately suggests that being a "prince" is as limiting as being a "princess", as both originate from the same restrictive system.[6] This expression reaches its apex at the climax of the series, when Utena loses her final duel against Akio; though Utena ostensibly fails in her princely attempt to "save" Anthy, her actions cause Anthy to "question the rules governing her own performance as princess", and provokes her departure from Ohtori to a world where "the categories of prince and princess have been deconstructed and do not matter".
In considering depictions of gender in Utena, critic Mari Kotani cites the character of Utena as an example of a (lit. 'battling beauty'), a character archetype originated by psychologist and critic
Reception and influence
Revolutionary Girl Utena has been the subject of worldwide praise, and has received many accolades. In 1997, the series won the Animation Kobe award in the "Best Television" category. In 2017, Japanese broadcaster NHK conducted a national poll to determine the one hundred greatest anime in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the medium, in which Utena placed 30th. Utena was listed as one of the ten "best anime ever" by Anime Insider and ranked fourth on Paste's list of the best anime of all time. Anime News Network's ranking of the 100 greatest anime films of all time placed Adolescence of Utena in eighth; in his review, writer Mike Toole called the television series "the most important anime of the 1990s".
The series has received particular praise for its treatment of LGBT themes and subject material; reflecting on the series in this regard in 2020, Ikuhara stated that there "are a lot of anime that deal superficially with female-female or male-male relationships, but I think the sense of freedom and of diversity that Utena had is one of the reasons that it has such a big fan base even now." Critics and creators have cited Utena's influence on subsequent animated works, including Revue Starlight, Princess Tutu, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, Steven Universe,
Further reading
External links
Official websites
- Revolutionary Girl Utena — J.C.Staff official Utena page
- Revolutionary Girl Utena — King Records official Utena page
- Revolutionary Girl Utena — 2018 stage musical official website
Articles and information
- Empty Movement – a comprehensive fan website
References
- Described as such by: ; ; ; and. Thew. 2018 Camp. Davis Napier. 2005 Kotani. 2006^
- Egan Loo. Utena Voice Actress Tomoko Kawakami Passes Away Anime News Network, June 10, 2011, retrieved April 27, 2025^
- Alex Mateo. Right Stuf Phases Out, Migrates All Products to Crunchyroll Store on October 10 (Updated)