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

I’m not sure if the uppercase is mandatory there, but it certainly feels like it should be. Anyways, the title refers to the signature theme of Revolutionary Girl Utena, a TV series I’ve been rewieving this week. Without further ado I give you Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku, courtesy of YouTube; hit the jump for a bit of rambling analysis on the music of Utena and, more importantly, even more and even cooler videos from this series.

(As a side note, notice the appearance of roses, staircases and gates, as discussed previously).

The music in Utena is (almost) all like this, relying as it does on heavy guitars and bass, but also, more uniquely, featuring polyphonic choral arrangements. It’s very distinctive – like everything else in this series – and it sets the mood nicely for the scenes where it’s used. Particularly, each duel scene is set to a different song in this spirit, making for a pretty nifty experience when you’re listening to the full soundtrack.

Not all the background music conforms to this style, but only two of the main songs (as fas as I can remember) don’t; the opening and the original ending. This ending is fine but nothing special. The opening, Rinbu Revolution, is well worth one minute and twenty nine seconds of your time, I say.

The last song I want to call your attention to is the best one the show has to offer in my opinion. It’s used in one of the later duels, and then from that episode onwards it’s used as the ending song. It’s pretty spectacular, queer and beautiful, which is the very definition of the show. It also helps that the second ending utilices some wondrous abstract imagery as well, with black silhouettes, elevators and floating inverted castles (!). Anyways, if you’re going to watch just one video from this entry, let it be the one for Virtual Star Embriology:

Below you’ll find a series of links to places where you can buy some of the soundtracks. Utena offers something like seven different OST albums. Personally I recommend the first and second one, which cover all the songs I mentioned as well as most (if not all) the spectacular duel songs, and also the fifth one, which is very different but has a number of really great tracks.

• OST 2 – Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Eve of Absolute Evolution Revolution
• OST 2 – La Fillette Révolutionnaire Utena: Virtual Star Embryology
• OST 5 – OST 5 – Saa, Watashi to Engage Shite (sorry, can’t find a place where this is sold!)

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