[Utena review: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4]

In this final part of my Utena review, let me show you a few little things that might not seem like a lot but make a world of difference.

Let’s begin with the titular phrase. Meaning roughly “Do you know, do you know? Do you really know?”, this phrase is uttered in every episode by the Kashira Shadow Players. “What’s that?”, you might be asking, or perhaps “Bwah?” if you aren’t so articulate, but either way allow me to enlighten you (man, are we feeling pompous tonight or what?). See… they’re a greek chorus!

*crickets*

I’d forgotten about this as well. It’s not something you see often nowadays. Which is just as well, since we’ve had two and a half millenia to come up with new means of fulfilling the job of a greek choir. Let’s try this:

That’s Austin Powers’ Basil Exposition, a character that appears on the films to deliver, well, exposition needed to understand what’s going on. A one-man greek chorus. In truth a greek chorus was more complex, but this site ain’t Wikipedia. So let’s return to the Kashira Shadow Players:

The Kashira Shadow Players appear in every episode to deliver exposition. You should be ever thankful to them for shedding some light over what’s sometimes a deeply impenetrable plot. They are bizarre, both in their behaviour and as a storytelling resource. Dumping exposition in the audience is usually frowned upon, and with reason. Here’s handled beautifully. I know I wanted to give a little cheer every time they came up on the screen.

As the story moves forwards, the Kashira Shadow Players become, if possible, weirder, but also funnier. They’re gold. And then, it turns out that they know… well, wouldn’t want to spoil that for you

Here’s something else that made me live this series even more. There’s a Student Council in the Ohtori Academy (of course!). And they hold meetings in an impossibly high place (of course!), a sort of observation platform overlooking the academy grounds that nobody but them can access (of course!). And though the meetings are somewhat normal at the beginning (except for Miki and his inane cronometrization habit, if that’s even a word), things turn… interesting later on.

All of this serves no purpose whatsoever… except for entertaining us. I appreciate it very much.

Speaking of efforts made just to entertain us… I didn’t notice this one until the final bit, as it kept cutting back and forth between the images you’re about to see and other stuff. When I noticed, I had to go back and watch the scene all over again just to be sure:

To put this in context, anime series tend to be done in tight budgets, and, I guess, even more so back in the 90’s. That means that you draw as few frames of animation as possible and reuse backgrounds, pieces of movements and even entire animated sequences as often as possible (that’s the real reason you saw all those “transformation scenes” in Sailor Moon and “Goku standing still and looking constipated as the wind blows his hair a bit” in DragonBall Z). And here we have another budget series, which reutilizes entire animated sequences frequently (“Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku”; the tale of the prince and the princess; Utena and Anthy going to bed; and so on), where the animators just drew four times as many pieces of this background as they needed to, only because they wanted to give us a little gag that probably went unnoticed by the people who saw it in TV back then without the benefit of a VCR.

These are the little things that make you realize that this was made by people who loved their job.

Because I’ve ranted on a on long enough about this series, I’ll end this review here with just two more points. The first is: you might have noticed that I have so far avoided discussing the plot in much detail. That is because it’s a really great story that deserves to be experienced firsthand rather than being told about it. You will enjoy the little twists, and the big ones as well.

The second is: if you are reading this, chances are it is because you came to this site to read Imaginary Daughter, enjoyed it, and decided to stick around. If so, you should know that the brand of weirdness shown in Utena is right up the alley of Imaginary Daughter, and I think you will enjoy this series as well.

And hey, if that’s not enough for you, there’s always the LESBIAN SEX to keep you hooked through to the end!

[Utena review: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4]