Revolutionary Girl Utena - Podcast (+ addendum about Penguindrum)

Here I did a podcast on the anime Shoujo Kakumei Utena (Revolutionary Girl Utena, Kunihiko Ikuhara, 1997) alongside the American critic and writer Tevis Thompson, in commemoration of the show's 25th anniversary.

There was another question asked after the podcast was made, this time by @BeetBeatBit from Twitter, which I felt worth responding as an addendum, since it also includes further thoughts on the director. Spoiler alert on the endings of Penguindrum, Yurikuma and Utena:

Q: "What do you think of Mawaru Penguindrum (Kunihiko Ikuhara, 2011)?"

I like Penguindrum, but I feel that I felt it backwards as you did because so many episodes dedicated to the stalker girl in the first half are in fact my least favorite aspect of the show, or at least made me wonder why we spend so much time with this activity that I don't feel adds that much - even when it is revealed why she behaves the way she does, I remain unconvinced. We already understood that she is a messed up, broken person. I feel that the movie adaptation that is being released this year is probably thought to balance the narration better, although I have yet to watch it.

Of all of Ikuhara's stories, Penguindrum seems to me as the most complicated one to internalize or to understand, since even though all of his stories are about traumatic experiences, Penguindrum is about a very specific one: The generation that was born during Japan's Lost Decade, which I talk about during the podcast, in a certain way a sequel to his discourse with Utena. One can canalize its feelings by perceiving the story as a group of people whose families are broken by extremist ideologies or abusive parents by citing the very specific example of the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack as a catalyst that the children in the show have to live in the margins of society. The whole platitude about fate plays an important role in the show because of this, since the characters are convinced by their social circumstances or their families that they deserve to carry the weight of their predecessors.

Similarly to Utena, the resolution after so much suffering is that the characters are able to escape from that cycle of abuse, they can be their own person instead of the established role for them. "That it is possible for a person to be free" like the director says, but it is a tough path (like Utena), and that the option that you have to liberate yourself from abuse instead of perpetuating it is to try to make the life of another person that suffers the same as you do a better one (like Utena), even if that means to metaphorically burst into flames.

It is also the most dense among the director's catalogue, much more loaded than Utena. In fact the explanation I just gave feels short but it has been quite a few years since I revised the show.

I think that a huge issue that people have with Ikuhara (and with Anno as well, since he's also part of the conversation) stems from the fact that fully connecting with the stories of both directors is much more difficult than what it seems like because they take experiences that are not of any person. Any person can see Evangelion or Utena and see a show directed at boys or girls with a flavor of resources that are of questionable quality (pseudo-existential reflections and Abrahamic symbology in Evangelion; surrealism and the sense of humor in Ikuhara's case), have a very poor precedent and don't really work all that well in those stories anyways (Utena is hilarious to me, but I don't connect with the sense of humor of the other ones). Besides, Ikuhara is very "gay culture", which is also why his audience is primarily LGBT.

However, if you know those stories (especially first hand), most probably you know that this has the specific source that they are portraying. It is a binary - either you relate to it or you don't. I am actually surprised that both stories are liked by so many people because I would expect the opposite. In my particular case, I have not been through these circumstances (I think) but I have the feeling, at the very least in Ikuhara's case, that the reason why I connect to his stories is:

1) Because my interest in cinema is primarily visual, and this also applies to Japanese animation. Disregarding exceptions like Miyazaki or Takahata, the truth is that a lot of anime creators are not very professional narrators, but what I'm interested at is the form that they have to convey ideas or concepts through animation, and Ikuhara does exactly this: To create imagery or visual references of sensations on a very instinctive, primal level, even when you don't really understand what it means, similarly to Lynch, of whom the director is also an admirer, and to construct his own visual language that interconnects with itself. Taking Penguindrum as an example, the scene of Yuri's background, where her father insists to her that she is an ugly person and nobody except for him will love her so she will make her beautiful, with the scenery surrounded by sculptures, broken pictures and chiseling sounds... Essentially sculpting a person through abuse and gaslighting.

2) Because the conclusion that he gives to his stories involves the sacrifice for other people. As I said, that the path to contribute to the world, even if it seems like little, is to make the life of others better, especially those that suffer what you do, and that means a lot to me. Obviously other directors outside of anime already dealt with this concept (Rossellini and Kiarostami are the first that come to mind), but I think that it is rare to have the fixation on so many types of marginalized people looking to make each other's lives better, and liberating each other, even though that means, figuratively, to be impaled by the swords of humanity's hatred (Utena), to combust in fire (Penguindrum), to take the bullets (Yurikuma), etc. and that is why I don't get these stories from other people than him.

Then there are other personal aspects, such as the apocalypse, trauma and families being my weakness, or that in Penguindrum's specific case that my family was made up of two brothers (I am the oldest one) and one little sister, but that does not have much bearing.