Overview: At the age of six, Utena Tenjou's parents die. Depressed, and seeing no reason to live if all things die, Utena crawls into a coffin. She is saved by a beautiful prince, who challenges her to become a true prince herself. She grows up caught between the void of her want to be strong like a prince, and her desire to be loved like a princess.
"Portentous and pretentious in equal amounts, Utena quite literally invests teenage crushes and schoolgirl intrigues with world-shattering significance. Created by director Ikuhara, with several other staffers from his earlier Sailor Moon S, and Chiho Saito, who drew the Utena manga for Ciao magazine, it artfully perverts mundane school life into a quest of fantastic proportions. It also features swordplay and cross-dressing in the swashbuckling tradition of Princess Knight and Rose of Versailles, to which it owes a heavy aesthetic debt..." "Highly sensual though rarely explicit, its premise is ironically close to that of an Urotsukidoji that replaces sex and violence with pure, infinite yearning. On Japanese TV, Utena thrived in the vacuum left by the conclusion of Evangelion, though it was not without controversy-in a ludicrous outbreak of racism, the TV Tokyo switchboard received complaints that love interest Anthy was "black."
Sensual, though rarely explicit... a show packed with pure, infinite yearning. That pretty much perfectly states why years afterwards I find myself still so engrossed in the series.
Schedule of Content:
Saturday: Introduction
Sunday: The Music of Utena
Monday: Digging Deeper: Repetition in Utena
Tuesday: Hot, Steamy Pictures
Wednesday: Profile Through Pictures: Akio Ohtori
I love the fact that some people had a problem in Japan with the fact that they though that Utena was dateing someone who was black. First of all theirs nothing wrong with dateing someone who is black and second Anthy has dot are her forhead. Last time I check that something they do India. That were most likely make her either Dravidian or Indo-Aryan and not black.