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 teenage 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 of 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 Utena as a mainstream (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 simultaneously 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 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. She discovers that the prince was Akio, and that he intends to use her and Anthy to gain the power of eternity for himself. Utena duels Akio to free Anthy from his influence; Anthy, complicit in her brother's scheme, intervenes and stabs Utena through the back. Akio attempts and fails to open the sealed gate that holds the power; a gravely injured Utena pries the gate open, where she discovers Anthy inside. Utena reaches out to her, and they briefly join hands as the dueling arena crumbles around them.
Utena vanishes from Ohtori Academy, and all save for Akio and Anthy begin to forget her existence. Akio comments that Utena failed to bring about a revolution, and that he intends to begin a new attempt to attain the power of eternity; Anthy responds that Utena has merely left Ohtori Academy, and that she intends to do the same. Anthy solemnly vows to find Utena, and departs from Akio and the school.
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 Tomoko Kawakami's role of Utena as playing against type for the actress, having previously voiced "boisterous -type characters". She was cast partially because she did not read the character description before auditioning and thus spoke naturally, contrasting other actresses who put on a masculine voice. According to Kawakami, she desired to communicate Utena's "friendly, good nature and how admirable she is to everyone, while not overdoing the boyishness" in her performance.
After Utena is drawn into the dueling tournament with the school's Student Council – president Touga Kiryuu, his sister Nanami Kiryuu, vice president Kyouichi Saionji, fencing team captain Juri Arisugawa, and boy genius Miki Kaoru – she is introduced to Anthy Himemiya, the mysterious "Rose Bride" at the center of the duels. As the Rose Bride, Anthy is submissive to the personality and disposition of whoever is the current champion of the tournament, and possesses seemingly no free will or independent identity of her own. Though at first glance Anthy resembles a stereotypical damsel in distress defined by her passivity and demureness, as the series progresses, she is revealed to occupy a central role in controlling the duels and the school itself with her brother Akio Ohtori. In early development, Ikuhara conceived of Utena and Anthy as a single character: a girl "who wants to be a prince, but at the same time also wanted to remain a princess". He ultimately split the character in two, Anthy becoming "another Utena" who by contrast wishes to "remain a princess". Ikuhara stated that he consciously crafted the plot and visuals of Utena to create a strong impression on the viewer that the series would climax with Utena saving Anthy, but the lingering question of "but what does she save Anthy from?" becomes, per Ikuhara, the "central issue" of the series.
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. Saito, an established manga artist, had never worked in anime before joining Be-Papas; Ikuhara decided to base the visuals of the series on her artwork and recruited her to the team after seeing an illustration from her manga series Magnolia Waltz on the cover of a magazine.
Planning
Ikuhara originally envisioned Utena as a mainstream series aimed at capitalizing on the commercial success of Sailor Moon. Saito characterized the earliest discussions on Utena as focused on creating a series "that people will like and [will] be profitable". The earliest concepts for Utena deviated significantly from what became the final series: an initial pitch to project financiers was titled Revolutionary Girl Utena Kiss, and focused on a group of female warriors called the "Neo Elegansar" who battled "the end of the world". Per Oguro, a basic series concept of "a romantic action show starring a pretty girl who wears boys' clothes" that had a "Takarazuka style" was eventually settled on. A school setting was also determined in this early concept phase, though other concepts such as the duels and the "Rose Bride" would not be formulated until later in development.
Although Ikuhara originated the concept for Utena, the series as a whole was developed collectively by Be-Papas. The group entered a six-month planning period after Saito joined Be-Papas, which focused on fleshing out the story and setting, as well as determining how Saito's visual style could best be imported into anime. Saito also began to contemporaneously write and illustrate a manga adaptation of Utena while contributing to the development of the anime series.