Art on no money

We’ve also been watching Revolutionary Girl Utena, the anime of my youth — it holds up, though to adults, the bad jokes are funnier, and the intense barrages of symbolism less exciting. The portrayal of adolescence is still the best I’ve ever seen, at least with regard to my adolescence, whose physical resemblance to The Rose of Versailles played out by the Takarazuka Revue was far slighter than Utena’s, but which was still the precise kind of desperation for a poetic adulthood played out in lurid practice by the gorgeous, naive, swordfighting denizens of Ohtori Academy.

Watching the series as an adult, I was also much more aware of its ingenious cheapness. Apparently at the height of Sailor Moon’s power, its primary director could get greenlit to make whatever he wanted — but he wouldn’t necessarily be meaningfully funded, and the result is a series full of stock footage, fight scenes told largely through stills, and epidemic back-of-the-head shots.

But Utena doesn’t look bad. I’m convinced that Ikuhara could pull off an exciting fight scene using only stills; half the work is already done by the elaborate heavy-metal choruses, with bizarre lyrics pulling from both mythological and more prosaic sources, which he commissioned from J.A. Seazer to accompany the duels. The Art Nouveau set designs also helped; the school looks so good that you want to see those backgrounds again. And  the story is repetitive by design — the cycling of the characters’ problems, their hopeless families, the strange ceremonies they enacted, the occasional abrupt breakage of the theme — so that watching the repeated scenes also became part of the ceremony. It only sounds unbearable.

Ikuhara’s animation staff picked their battles well, too. What time was spent actually animating new sequences was spent very carefully. Thus, there are very few moments in Utena when a character drawing looks hasty or off-model, and that helps to make all of these decisions look deliberate, uninfluenced by the prosaic concerns of money and daily life, and far from their origins in budgetary need.