Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie

I recently re-watched this movie, having first watched the entire series + the movie 10 years ago. Revolutionary Girl Utena is truly one of a kind. The series is sweet, funny, fierce and surprisingly deep. Every character is conflicted and flawed and struggling to overcome their "demons," the things that scare each character and hold them back from becoming confident, fully-fledged adults. In the series, every character gets their turn to "shine" and then, in turn, to confront their "darkness." Revolutionary Girl Utena will probably go down in history as one of the queerest --if not *the queerest*-- anime out there... with just about every main character having some underlying relationship that's gay, just plain complicated ... or involves a problem/hang-up over the love of a sibling. Pretty daring for early 1990s. Everyone has a dark, not-so-veiled secret... and you love them all both in spite of -- and because of it -- anyway! The movie compresses what was 39 episodes in TV into 90-odd minutes... and so it necessarily takes shortcuts. Think of the movie as the more overt companion piece to the TV show. Dynamics that were more subtext in the TV show become main-text here. And at the same time, the movie revels in abstraction... with stories that were more drawn out and linear in the TV show being reduced to something more symbolic here. The show's rose-heavy Louis XIV France design, insistent, Gothic music and the shadow-puppet Greek Chorus are perhaps never so lovely (and cohesively) powerful as they are here in the movie. The Utena movie is a love letter to those who fan-girl/boy the original series, for sure. And there's plenty for someone new to the Utena world who's willing to hold its wounded and aching heart till it finds its noble reason for being.... and just go with it.