Review of Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie (1999) by Chatvarin L — 11 Oct 2007

I decided to like this in the end, even though it lacks the emotional engagement of the TV series. After all, the animation is stunning, with some of the most beautiful pictures, animated or not, I've seen on film.

The metaphors are now less subtle and more extreme, which oddly enough make you understand them more (not least because you have to - in the series they were fairly easy to ignore while you follow the story).

Having just read Blake, I now see the French Revolution inspiration much more clearly than when I watched the TV series all those years ago. A drawback of all these though is that, as said already, the characters aren't painted vividly enough for you to feel them and feel for them; they are fairly easy to ignore here while you just get on with what you could make of the plot from the movie's hugely abstract symbolism.