"I understand. Your only choice is to revolutionize the world."

Now THIS is the Utena I remember.


Ikuhara is fully in his occult-opera groove, and mmmm, that is some glorious nonsense. It's
downright magical. My desire to blog wars with my desire to not ruin anything for anyone lucky enough to not have seen this yet, so I'll just stick to the big picture.

So, after the student council spent all of last arc trying to break Utena's will with their own, we switch tactics from the overt to the repressed... and make a clean break from their themes with a remix of "The Revelation of Absolute Destiny", themed dueling arenas, and the infamous Elevator of Emotional Torment.


The Black Roses' schtick is creating duelists from that old Jungian anime favorite, the shadow. In response, Utena starts relying more on her own "higher self", Dios, to win battles, rather than her own skill, or even luck.

Not that she seems aware of this. The Black Rose antics provide the first overt "magic" we've seen that isn't dismissed as a trick of some kind, and while Utena doesn't seem too shaken up, she does turn to another character to stay centered. We'll see how this works out.

Amazingly, the dub is actually sort of good here! The always magnificently-hammy Dan Green and Liam O'Brien foreshadow their yaoistic pairing in Descendants of Darkness with Mikage and Mamiya, and Akio's fiancee totally sells her trip through the Elevator. Shame the rest of the cast is as awkward as always.

So yeah, the Black Rose arc is full steam ahead for loopy greatness. Utena's particular charm is the way it totally wears its heart on its sleeve, but isn't above blowing off some steam by going even further over the top to poke fun at itself (which is to say yes, there's another Nanami comedy episode on this disc, and it's actually one that gets directly referenced in the movie). I genuinely have no idea how much of my love for this show is totally legitimate and how much is camp value, but the series definitely swings both ways.

When? Where? Who? Which?

So, thirteen episodes into the Utena rewatch, and I find myself curiously dissatisfied. It's not like this stretch of episodes is bad or anything-- sure, two of the six episodes are taken up with a Nanami comedy episode and a recap, but we do get four episodes of Touga in full manipulative bastard mode, along with an expanded version of Utena's rescue by the prince that toys with dramatic irony and unreliable narrators.


It's good stuff, and finishes establishing the characters and obsessions the rest of the series will be riffing on, but somehow it's just not hitting me like it should. The only part that seemed especially Ikuhara was the the hilarious bit from Miki's two-parter where he remembers Touga's dialogue much more homoerotically than he actually said it.


(and speaking of that, the awfully-acted dub takes some... interesting liberties with the dialogue here and there. I can't imagine the rerelease will keep that. Almost a shame)

Are operatic swordfights just not enough to hold my attention any more? That seems doubtful. More likely, I've just watched and rewatched this opening stretch too damn much for it to have any impact any more, which would make sense considering the first thirteen eps were all CPM had for like four years thanks to some poorly worded contracts. I believe the movie actually came out here before the Black Rose arc, which is probably the worst possible way to see that film, but more on that much, much later.

Anyway, we're finally out of the setup phase and headed into the meat of the show, and hopefully towards the amazing, lush lunacy that made me remember it so fondly. I never did actually watch the Black Rose sequence in full, hopefully that'll shock me back to life.

THAT'S ME!/EVOLUTIONREVOLUTIONEVOLUTION!

Has it really been a decade since I last saw Revolutionary Girl Utena? Time to fix that.
Quick primer: Utena Tenjou is basically a good-natured shounen adventure protagonist hanging out in a boarding school melodrama. While going about her business of cutting through all the histrionic bullshit making everyone's life miserable, she falls into yet another genre, a fighting tournament to rescue a princess of sorts. Hmm... when I lay it out like that, I recall that Bryan Lee O'Malley has admitted to liking Nana, but I wonder if Scott Pilgrim isn't a little influenced by Utena too.


Either way, this is very much a sister show to Evangelion, exploring and exploding the tropes of its chosen genre (I'm particularly fond of the unusually literal version of the all-powerful student council). Utena usually wins her fights by refusing to play along with everyone else's drama and applying out-of-context solutions to the problems presented, and now that I think about it she only seems to fail when her enemies trick her into questioning her own judgement and thinking inside their boxes. Let's see if my memories are correct; so far I've only rewatched the first seven episodes, and Utena hasn't really started relying on her customary tactic of winning by exploiting the opponent's psychological flaws, or just cheating with the power of Dios. So far they're pretty much just establishing all the characters they will later tip over like dominoes. Well, episode 7 is one of my all-time favorites, but then I always was very fond of Juri.


I think I probably will rebuy the Right Stuf version, if only to be rid of CPM's horrible old policy of "we will give you one chapter stop every fifteen minutes and you will like it" (and the hardsubs on all the dueling songs). Of course, you shouldn't be skipping past anything anyway; the show has a lot of ritualistic elements (the shadow puppet Greek chorus, the fight songs and catharsis during battle, and and of course the ascent to the dueling arena and drawing of the Sword of Dios) and as far as I'm concerned sitting through the opening and ending is just another one. Besides, those songs are awesome.

If I end up rewatching the whole thing, maybe I'll finally write something about the alchemical symbology that seems to underpin the whole series (the Rose Bride being a dark girl dressed in red that everyone abhors but wants to possess is extremely suggestive). I wonder sometimes if Kunihiko Ikuhara did this deliberately or just backed into all this Jungian stuff by being his weird self (I never actually watched his Sailor Moon work so I can't say if it was any more blatant there), but he'd certainly never say even if you asked, saucy bitch that he is. It's a shame he never really did much else after the Utena movie.

I guess I have at least one CPM appreciation post in me

Part of the problem of basing your business around releasing short OVAs is that the format is basically dead, and the few that do squeak out nowadays usually aren't worth the time it takes to watch them. Case in point, Bee Train's Murder Princess, which was so lily-livered and indifferently animated that I had to rewatch Hades Project Zeorymer to wash away the taste of mediocrity.

Zeorymer revolves around the internal and external struggles of Tekkoryu, a.k.a. Hau Dragon, your standard elementally-themed giant mecha committee for world domination, opposed by two also seemingly standard-issue plucky teens in the titular stolen, never-to-be-duplicated unit. So far so generic, but two things make them stand out from the rest:

Firstly, these guys live the dream of every rap video and Bond villain, rocking a sumptuously decorated floating dragon-head fortress absolutely dripping with overdesigned clothes and equipment. These mad rococo stylings are the calling card of director Toshihiro Hirano (a name we'll revisit as soon as I finish watching Vampire Princess Miyu TV), but the important part is this: if Tekkoryu wants you dead, they will shoot you in the face with a gold-plated gun. That is just how Hau Dragon rolls.

Second, they are the world's single most dysfunctional and gossipy crime syndicate, largely due to being founded by one of the most sadistically pragmatic mad scientists I've seen in anime. His master plan is surprisingly clever, so much so that I'm not going to go into the plot in any real detail-- it's only four episodes, just watch it-- so let's chat about the animation for a bit.

The animation quality is consistently very good, but in some ways curiously wasted. The main problem is that the Zeorymer outclasses its enemies so badly that it barely expends any effort taking them out-- it just shrugs off their attacks for a bit then shoots a single beam, or worse, just crosses its arms, and then boom, on to the next challenger.

Still, all the energy blasts, exhaust trails, and incidental mecha greebles are lovingly detailed (you can even make out the labels on the various control panels) and the set designs are lush. It's only now that animation standards have dropped so low across the board, that I appreciate little details like the Hakkeshu Empress' elaborate bangles and hair decorations swaying with every step she takes.

It's all very '80s, but in a good way-- sometimes all you want is a nice-looking, coherent robot fight show that gets in, struts its stuff, and gets out. If you're watching, say, the new Mazinger, this might make a nice snack between screenings. It's mecha comfort food, but made from very rich ingredients. It's a shame CPM couldn't be bothered to put all four episodes on one disc, but at this point I'd say they've paid for that sin.

ADV picks up a mixed bag from CPM's corpse

So CPM's official dead now (as opposed to just in a coma, like they've been for the past few years) and the looting as begun. Apparently ADV has announced that they're picking up four of CPM's classic titles:

• Grave of the Fireflies
• Now and Then, Here and There
• World of Narue
• MD Geist

It's great to see Grave of the Fireflies and Now and Then, Here and There (the latter being an oft-overlooked gem of the unrelentingly depressing take on the typical alternate world story - a Disney or Miyazaki movie gone bad, in a sense) but the other choices are a little more confusing.

World of Narue looked nice for its time, but ultimately never amounted to anything. And MD Geist published by anyone other than CPM will be not only surreal but inexplicable. That's something CPM could have just taken with it to the afterlife.

So long and thanks for all the OVAs

So another one bites the dust. I actually happened to watch Negadon the night before the news broke, and, well, it wasn't really that surprising considering that Negadon is pretty much the last thing CPM released in the last three years.

With CPM finally down, I think Media Blasters is the last of what I always considered the second-tier anime distributors, who tended to subsist on OVAs, and usually not being too picky about quality or coherence. That meant some pretty spotty catalogues, but every now and then you'd find some weird diamond among the dross.

Maybe I should post a bit on the host of oddities Central Park Media and its army of sublabels brought to the world, as one last hat-tip to that crappy CGI MD Geist. Eh, probably not. If nothing else I'll always remember them fondly for bringing out Patlabor, which changed me from some guy who remembered Robotech into the broken man I am today. Cheers.