Ikuhara Episode Commentary

DIRECTOR KUNIHIKO IKUHARA’S
EPISODE COMMENTARY: PART 1

Rondo Revolution: Kunihiko Ikuhara’s Thoughts

There were several forks in the road to the theme song “Rondo - revolution”.

First I had X, the producer at the time, play me several demo melodies. One of them really felt like “the one”, so I decided on that one with X (naturally, the chosen one was the melody that would become “Rondo - revolution”, but we also released it separately later in a form close to that original one, under the title “Rose&release”).

Next, X set up a meeting for us with a certain lyricist at a restaurant in Shibuya. We explained the project, presenting Ms. Saito’s drawings, and the lyricist seemed really raring to go.

But.

The lyrics that came back to us some days later didn’t sit well with me.

“They’re just not quite right…” X agreed, and fell silent.

Several days later, I got a phone call from X saying, “She says she wants to do it. I’ll have her call you, so stay put.” This phone call was how I found out that Ms. Okui would be singing the theme song. And that she would be singing the theme song. And that she would take charge of the lyrics herself, too. Right after X hung up, I got a phone call from Ms. Okui, and we ended up having a meeting.

I’ll dredge up my memories of that time period to write the rest of this story. This all happened a long time ago, though, so there will be some details I can’t remember.

I got a phone call from Ms. Okui.

We started our planning meeting on the spot, but production was still ongoing, for one thing, so in terms of the show’s content… I couldn’t tell her a lot of crucial things. Nevertheless, she’d thankfully read several of Ms. Saito’s works, so she already understood the “spirit of the work” very well.

That meant that in our meeting, we were able to focus on “what we’re trying to express” instead of on the story. By their very natures, there’s no way to perfectly reconcile “the world of song” and “the world of anime stories.” But I felt there ought to be a way to bring together the spirits of “song” and “anime.”

“I want you to think of this as a song that will play during the story’s last scene.”

That’s what I told her. Like I said, we hadn’t decided what the last scene would be yet. Still, I had a vague suspicion that it would depict a “parting.” At the time I didn’t have a concrete image of what kind it might be; there’s-

parting with a lover,
parting with a dear friend,
parting with a beloved sibling or
family member,
parting with the entire milieu in which
you live…

Those were my nebulous thoughts.

What could a person who’d lost all those things gain in the final scene…? It would be magnificent if that could be captured to a song… Surely the viewers who watched the series through the end would think, “I see, so the theme song was about this final scene” …

Some days later, I faxed her a note.

Even if the two of us are torn apart,
the time that we spent together
wasn’t wasted
So I can change the world

I asked her if she could express something along those lines. And I also had the temerity to ask her to include a few keywords in the lyrics that expressed the world of the show:

“sunlit garden”
“revolutionize”
“lose everything”
“strip down to nothing at all”
“change the world”

Several days after that, the finished lyrics were faxed back to me. My “garden” and “revolution” suggestions in Japanese were there in English. I thought the show’s spirit was expressed brilliantly.

Above the lyrics was a note saying, “What should the title be?” (I think). I also think that “Take my revolution” was there as a provisional title. And in another display of temerity, I asked if she’d be willing to write the kanji for rinbu (“round dance”) but gloss it as “rondo” to arrive at a title of “rondorevolution.” She agreed, on the condition that we inset a hyphen and make it “Rondo - revolution.” (Or maybe the changes went like this: “Rondo - Take my revolution” → “Rondorevolu - tion” → “Rondo - revolution”.) I took my inspiration from Ms. Saito’s manga for the word “rondo.”

Later, even when production circumstances were harsh, this song really bolstered my spirits. This is only occurring to me in hindsight, but maybe it was able to express the “Utena” spirit so well because Ms. Okui and I were in very similar frames of mind at the time

…Nah. It was probably just the fruit of Ms. Okui’s talents.

Or on second thought, maybe it was X’s skill as a producer after all.

[Now for the first closing. The book I have actually has pictures of what Ikuhara’s about to talk about in the last paragraph, so there’s another reason to get those DVDs while you can… –C.A.P.]

Ending Animation: The Making Of

The Revolutionary Girl Utena endings were divided into Season 1 (episodes 1–24) and Season 2 (episodes 25–38), with a final episode getting a scat version of the theme song “Rondo - revolution.”

The first season’s sequence had romantic visuals, with Utena in a dress dancing with Dios. Utena and Anthy give us glimpses of serious looks in their eyes, and in the latter half Anthy appears with Dios as well, in the exact same pose as Utena. The whole mood of it is mysterious; it makes you think, “This is no simple prince-and-princess romance.”

The ending theme song is “truth”. It’s performed by Ruka Yumi. You can see key art for this sequence on the next page. Shinya Hasegawa said that he put Hiroshi Nagahama in charge of it because his sharp style, with its striking silhouettes, would be a good fit for something with so little motion. Within beautiful animation that projects a noble impression; the main characters dance all dressed up. He’s directed them brilliantly.

And starting in episode 25, the staff made the ending theme song J. A. Caesar’s “Virtual Star Embryology”, and changed the visuals as well. Maki Uetani did the vocals. It was different from the choral pieces in the duel scenes, and the more piercing ring of the solo vocals was pleasing. Shinya Hasegawa, Yoko Kadokami, and Hiroshi Nagahama were in charge of the key animation for this sequence. Tall, thin visuals of Utena and the ornamentation behind her, drawn in black silhouette, climb up into the blue sky as if on an elevator. Partway through, cuts of Utena and Anthy holding roses come in, timed to the music, and then it’s silhouettes of the two standing facing each other, with Anthy in her bridal gear. At the end, birds soar up to the castle in the sky, scattering feathers, and rays of light break through the clouds. There’s also an “Akio Car version” of this second ending as well, which was on episode 33 of the TV broadcast. On the LD and VHS releases, episode 25 also had the Akio Car version, but on DVD it was only in episode 33. The theme song is the same, but the Akio Car shows up in the video, and no characters appear. It shows a scene of the Akio Car zooming along, switching from cut to cut in time with the song’s chorus, until it finally arrives at the dueling arena. It’s a playful arrangement that got people talking even at the time.

Also, apparently a humorous, cute ending featuring Chu-Chu was conceived during Season 2 production as well. The idea was to have close-up of Chu-Chu’s face that took up the whole screen, with Utena, Anthy, and the other main characters appearing inside his eyes. To the right are some rough storyboards drawn for that sequence by Shinya Hasegawa. Chu-Chu’s facial expression would change depending on which characters were in his eyes, so the visuals were very humorous, with anger and tears and everything else. If that ending sequence had been used, it probably would have been given a cute song, but if “Virtual Star Embryology” had been paired with that close-up of Chu-Chu, the peculiar mismatched feel of it would have surely surprised viewers.

[And that’s pretty much it for Ikuhara in the book, other than a passage from the LD notes. Now it’s time for a doozy: an interview with the people who were involved with the HD process. Lots of great Ikuhara stories in this, so we here go! –C.A.P.]

HD Video Remastering: Interview With The Staff

Hiroshi Kaneda
Film Transferring/Colorist

Haruyasu Yamazaki
Technical Coordinator

Tomomi Takemura
Master Editing/Online Editor

Hideki Ito
Line Coordinator

Let’s start off by talking about the production process for HD remastering. Revolutionary Girl Utena (hereafter referred to as “Utena”) was originally done on 16mm film, wasn’t it?

Ito: We convert that to the high-definition “HD” format, create new materials, and then process them to produce a new master. “HD remastering” means trying to raise the quality of the master by updating it to a new generation of media.

Please tell us what your impressions of Utena were when you converted the first materials.

Kaneda: The theatrical version of Utena was 35mm, and the TV version was 16mm. Given that this is an HD remaster, I think first off you can sense the difference in quality that comes from the difference in film type. Also, the old TV vision was created for broadcast, so only about 90% of the cel art is visible after fitting it to the TV frame. So if the rest of the cell had stuff in it that shouldn’t be there, it didn’t matter because nobody would see it anyway. But now we have full-display TVs, like LCD TVs for example, and everything is 100% visible. That meant that when we were first recording the HD type, how much of the frame to use became an issue. Ultimately, we ended up showing everything, since that was the director’s preference. And so the 10% that was never visible before got cleaned up and generally corrected, and now you can see the whole frame as it was originally drawn.

That’s something to be happy about. What about adjustments to the whole screen?

Knd: There were aspects of the look of that outer-space background in Utena and Anthy’s dance scene in the movie that didn’t fit the director’s image. He said it needed more depth, more profundity, so we altered the way we transferred the film. We tested three different categories of original film elements—positive film, negative film, and interpositive—and used the one that yielded the best image.

So he wanted to express more translucence and depth, then?

Kn: That was the one scene where we adjusted the parameters most minutely, to bring out the sense of translucence and depth. The director and I went through each individual cut together, with endless trial and error.

Did he have requests about the coloring of the characters, too?

K: As an example, Utena’s hair is pink, but there’s pink and then there’s pink. You have your reddish pinks, your yellowish pinks, and all that. For this project there was no order chart or other basis for color matching in the film, so we started by getting permission to examine actual cels of the main characters, and we decided to match those. The character that I especially felt had the most variation in her coloring was Anthy. Her skin was difficult. I think there were probably several different versions from the beginning. You see, it was a slightly different color each time. As we worked, we consciously worked to avoid letting those color variations make anything seem off within a given scene. For example, one part of a sequence of evening scenes abruptly had a more daylight sort of coloring, so we consulted the director: “Should we match this bit to the evening hues for continuity?” And then we adjusted the skin tones to fit the overall tonality.

Are the colors any more vivid than when we watched the show on TV?

K: None of the colors got drastically more vivid. After all, it’s not good to make them too far removed from the video you’ve seen up until now. They are sharper now, though. We’ve revised them to be clearer, so I think they’re easier on the eyes.

I see. And after that, you need to clean up any defects in the frame, right?

Takemura: In terms of order, first you have digital remastering, and then you set up filter parameters to do the denoising. You remove all of the noise and distortions in the frame. Then you bring this processed footage to the editing room and check it with the director.

But when we watch anime on TV, we don’t really think “Look at all that noise!”, do we?

It: Most of the anime shows made in recent times were produced digitally, so there isn’t any noise, but even though this Utena is a “digital remaster”, I think there’s bound to be a certain amount of noise in it, because the original materials were film. Still, I think this is far and away cleaner than the previous DVD release. It’s not even comparable. You see, that was a seriously mad dash to the finish.

Tkmr: To start with, I did about 100 corrections per episode.

Yamazaki: That was after my team cleaned up each cut, though. We’d remove the noise, cue and paste things from other places, and generally make it look clean. Ultimately, it’s almost like compositing work. Then we’d lay that back to tape again and check it with the director, at which point we’d receive additional corrections… (laughs)

I: Yamazaki would input the tape media to a nonlinear machine and work on it, and then Takemura would edit it on tape media, and that would become the final master.

Ymzk: You were saying that to start with the director check would yield about 100 corrections, but how many did he give you on the second half of the work?

Tk: About 300. Because after we’d done one full pass on the show, more corrections would come up during rechecking.

That sounds like a lot of revisions. Is that more than average?

All: Oh, yes… (laughter)

T: Basically you’re doing frame-by-frame recording of the cels, right? And when there’s lip flaps with layered cels, the noise you end up with ultimately stands out. That stays in the picture throughout.

I see. And I understand that when it came to pieces like the onscreen text put in during original video recording, you changed them to digital elements. Could you tell us what that means?

Ym: Things like the final “to be continued” and the eyecatchers weren’t on the film itself, so we recreated them. Then there were things like the rotating roses in the four corners of the screen.

In the TV broadcast the movement of the roses was jerky. Has that changed now that they’re been redone?

Y: We tried not to break the atmosphere the show’s had up until now. Out motto on this project has been, “Try to keep the image of the show as intact as possible.” Still, we did want the audience to feel like we’d done something, so we tried to get that to show through, but then it was like, “Mmm, no, that’s going too far.” The director and us tossed back and forth various opinions and ideas as we pinned down the right feel.

There are also some places where the key art is new, am I right? I’m told Mr. Shinya Hasegawa drew it.

T: That’s right. The new materials are static image data (the digital version of cel drawings), so they’re sparkling clean. We take them and blend them in with the texture of the old film. We input the new materials we receive to an editing system called “DS”, and then composite them while adding motion. In the final stage we add grain to make it fit in with the grittiness of the film.

Are there any other scenes that changed?

T: The eyecatch that says the show title is completely new in the HD version.

Y: The director was very respectful of the image of the original, so we did out best to work according to the goal of using original materials as much as possible, but this part apparently just didn’t fit the image… There were those silver plates in the four corners of the eyecatch, and the idea was broached that “Maybe these are just in the way”, so we took them out, and it really did look better. When you look closely, the red backgrounds that’s unfolded beneath the lettering is different in the pre- and post-commercial bumpers, too. The eyecatches took a ton of time, because in the beginning we had no idea what direction to go in. We couldn’t even begin to figure out how they’d given the letters those rolling motions back then. There’s a certain analog-style awkwardness there, as if it got done by coincidence. The idea was to trace that, but it was no easy thing to get that bit done digitally. Once we had the motion, our next problem was the texture. The original opening bumper had a yellow logo with a bit of gradation, and there was this sort of green bud thing rotating above it. It was quite a vivid eyecatch. But we were asked to make it all gray this time, and to give the texture a crystal-clear feel when the letters were finished unfurling. So we thought maybe we should make it metallic, and we experimented a lot with different textures, until finally we found that that just wasn’t the right direction to go in… But you know, the logo in the show’s opening sequence was a silvery, chic monotone. So we figured we might as well try spinning it that way, and then it was like, “This is it!” We could finally see the finish line ahead of us. Ultimately, we got eyecatches where silver is born from a slightly darkened screen, and then when the spotlight hits it, the red of the background rises up and the bud at the top gives off a pink shine. In the end, when the director finally told us “OK!”, there was applause. (laughs)

I: I can understand the director’s pickiness, since eyecatches are things that appear every episode. With proposed revisions like this, we had Takemura find the middle ground in terms of how we’d make this all hang together as a final work. He’s the one who had the most communication with the director.

What types of things would the director say to you, Mr. Takemura?

T: He’d say, “Do something about this part.” But Director Ikuhara isn’t someone who just says “Do something about this” and leaves it at that. He’s good enough to ask, “What options do we have for fixing this?” When I grope for a few answers and propose them, he’ll make a decision: “Okay, let’s use this method here.” He really listens to our suggestions and makes his decisions after taking them into account. It was the same way with the denoising. There were some cuts where we were like, “This is a tough one; it might not get clean”, but the director said, “That’s OK.” Well, when someone tells you that, you think, “I have to do something about this!”

And you had to synch up the timing, too, didn’t you?

T: You see, the film in use at the time was already gone. That meant the video and audio didn’t synch up, so we had to balance the accounts at both ends, so to speak. And the scenes in the duels when the prince descends—some episodes didn’t have anything that really fit, and we had to adjust them in editing.

I see. So all of you listened to the director’s various wishes and put them into practice.

Y: In the beginning I wasn’t directly discussing things with the director. But when things came to crisis point, he said “Let’s walk this path together”, or something along those lines. At first, I thought he meant we’d have a talk every week or something, but we started emailing back and forth on the principle that “That’s nowhere near enough!” And I’ll tell you something… he replies really quickly. During the eyecatch thing, I’d message him with “How about footage like this”, and immediately I’d get back something like “I want to see an example of this pattern, too.”

Could you all sense the director’s enthusiasm?

Y: Absolutely! If he’s like this with a remaster, I wonder what he’d be like if he decided to do something new.

I: His enthusiasm is amazing.

T: He’s a passionate person, isn’t he? We talked about various things in our spare moments on the job, and I can tell you one thing: he watches all kinds of stuff. I mean, if it’d been a week since you’d last gotten together, he’d tell you about this movie or that DVD that he’d seen in the meantime. I thought he must be trying to absorb into himself anything and everything good that might be out there.

I: Yes, he was always watching things with curiosity: “How did that scene in that show come out?”

T: Like, “That was beautiful, huh? How do you they did it? Can we do that too?”

He’d talk about those things even in the studio with you, then.

T: When he does checks, he has his eyes glued to the screen the whole time, and I think he concentrates pretty intensely, so he probably gets worn out. He’d spend over three hours on one episode of Utena, so we’d usually take a break after each one.

Mr. Kaneda, can you share any impressions of the director or happenings during production?

K: He’s picky down to the last detail. I only noticed this as I was working, but—you know how there were all those scenes of the Akio Car speeding away? There was a point when there were three people in the car, but in the speeding-away shot, only two people were there. We fixed things like that at his request. But fundamentally, even when we were redoing things, he would always say he wanted to faithfully convey the image of the original, from back when it was first made.

I: It seemed like he wanted to do the things he couldn’t do back in the day, the things he wished he’d done, the things he had a chance to do over now.

K: Yes. Basically he wanted to get it that much closer to perfection.

What about you, Mr. Yamazaki?

Y: I think I’ll just be repeating the other two, but in the studio with us he had a “Let’s do this as a team!” mentality, and that in turn made us think “I want to do something to make this good!” He keeps getting more and more of the people around him on his side. He has that kind of charm, I think. “Look how much love he gives to his works!”—that much was plain as day. And that’s exactly what makes us start thinking, “We’ve gotta do this thing!” This isn’t the nicest way of putting it, but there are sort of “hired director” types in this world, you know? He’s not like that at all. He’s the polar opposite. His type of director is rare these days.

I: He’s a man among men. Because he hates dishonesty and unreason. Can it be done or not? If not, he won’t do it. But if there’s a chance it can be done, he goes all the way with it.

Y: Before he decides whether something is possible or not, though, he’ll try various things. Right now we’re done with the show itself and we’re working on the DVD menus—and he refuses to compromise about them, too. For him this isn’t just about the work called “Utena”; right now he’s trying to create the work called “The Utena DVD Box Set.” That’s the sense I got.

That’s so true; I can see you’re all striving together as one to make “The Utena DVD Box Set” happen. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.

5.1 Audio Remastering: Interview With The Staff

Yo Yamada
Sound Engineering/Direction

Tomokazu Mii
Sound Effects

For this DVD box set, the sound has been redone in 5.1, the format where you get sound out of six different speakers. Could I ask you to tell us about that process?

Yamada: In general, we didn’t re-record lines. Among other things, the actors’ voices will have changed after eleven years. The thing you’ll notice the most when you listen to the new audio mix is the sound quality. For example, in the sound sources of those days you got a lot of lip smacking and other mouth noises, so the first thing we did was a sort of cleanup to clear that stuff away phrase by phrase. And then we re-recorded just those lines where the nuance was off in the original.⁷ Places where the schedule constraints of the day meant that the actors had to record before the art was ready; things like that. I think the director felt frustration at the time, too. Other than that, since this is a 5.1 track, we needed sounds that could be heard out of the back speakers, not just the front. In terms of how we gave the mix a three-dimensional feel using this system, we added things like walla (crowd noises) to get sound with breadth. We did re-record those things. In 5.1, you can hear particularly clearly the sounds that give a sense of motion or positioning.

What are these six speakers that are used in 5.1?

Ymd: In front you have L,C, R (the left-front speaker, the center, and the right), and then there’s Ls and Rs (the left and right-rear speakers), and finally there’s the subwoofer, which does the low frequency sounds.

So, is the goal of switching to that format producing a “you’re right there with them” feeling? I know the sound in the duel scenes in more three-dimensional.

Mii: To begin with we had instructions from the director to make all the whining sounds, like the swooshing of the swords, surround. The original audio was always there comes from the front speakers, but new sounds we added in are coming from the rear as well. People with 5.1 setups at home with hear those new sounds coming from behind them. Those are newly recorded effects, but they appear in almost every episode.

Then you made new recordings of the sound effect-type things for this release. Do you get a different sense of presence when the “swooshes” are layered like that?

Yd: Yes. It packs more punch, and since you get the vwoosh coming in from behind when the swords are drawn, you feel like you’re in the middle of the action. The director was very particular about the action scenes. Also, there were some things that we altered drastically: the sound of the bells that ring before each duel, and the sound of the Akio Car. We were acting on the director’s instructions for those changes, and they’re quite different now.

What was the director’s image of the bells’ ringing like?

Mi: He basically wanted to broaden it. He wanted the audience to hear weighty sounds coming from the front and back. To tell you the truth, the new sound doesn’t match the visuals at all. You only really see four or five bells, but we put a huge number of them in the soundscape… The low booming sort of ring doesn’t catch your ear right by itself, so we put in higher sounds as well. There’s all kind of bells ringing that aren’t at all like the ones on the screen.

The choral songs start up in the duel scenes that follow, too, so that seems complex.

M: When you have music and SFX (sound effects) together, the SFX can easily be overwhelmed so that you can’t hear them. When the director listened to the SFX by themselves he said they sounded great, but when we combined them with the music they weren’t audible, so that was a difficult issue. What’s more, there would even be dialogue on top of that sometimes.

Y: What do you pull back? What do you bring out? And where? One constraint is that you really have to be able to hear the dialogue. In a situation where you want to bring out the dialogue and you also want people to hear the music, it becomes a matter of frequency. In terms of the duel scenes, the director was also particular about the part when the sword comes out of Anthy’s chest.

M: He had the image of the movie’s sword-drawing in his mind, and the movie was 5.1 in theaters, so the sound came in from back to front. But the TV series wasn’t made that way. It has SFX, but they’re almost entirely covered by the music and you can’t hear them. So, in the moment that the sword comes out of her chest, we’ve added a booming sound. There’s also light pouring forth in the video during that sequence, so we put in some “whoosh.”

I see you were very perfectionistic about the duel scenes.

M: This time around, the SFX can carry the scene by themselves, even without the music. That wasn’t possible during the TV series. And it’s one of the distinguishing features of 5.1, really.

The choral pieces continue all throughout the duel scenes, don’t they? And the lyrics are very significant, so I image it was difficult to blend them with the dialogue and the SFX for the swords.

Y: Director Ikuhara really wants the vocals to come through, you know? He wants the viewer to be able to hear all the lyrics. We changed the edit points of the songs a little, too. Things that weren’t tied together smoothly at the time can be edited smoothly now. In cases where the duels were shorter than the songs we cut up the songs to tie everything together, but where the editing was choppy before, we’ve now smoothed everything out. We’ve tried not to change the image of the original, but I think people who notice that kind of thing will know what I mean.

Do you bring down the song vocals a bit during the dialogue and bring them back up again when the characters are finished?

Y: That’s the way it was balanced during broadcast, actually. But with 5.1 you have a lot of speakers, so you distribute the sound in such a way as to making everything audible. For example, if the dialogue is hard to hear with just the center speaker, you put it in more speakers.

That makes sense. Moving on to the next thing, you mentioned that new audio was created for the Akio Car as well. How did you make that?

M: The original engine sounds were high-pitched. That’s not such a bad thing for a sports car, but the director said a lower sound would fit his vision better. He said that he’s also like to convey a real sense of riding in the car through a low roar while it was in motion. So first of all we made the engine noise itself lower, and then while people were riding in the car we had a continuous super-low drone in the subwoofer. That gives you an oomph, so you really feel the car.

Y: We were trying to reproduce the conditions of when you’re actually in a car. Like you’re feeling the vehicle’s vibrations.

Before the Akio Car comes into view, there’s a scene where he revs the engine, isn’t there?

M: He puts the key in, revs the engine once. The engine goes vroom, and then he revs it one more time. This whole engine sequence has been re-recorded from scratch. You see, the original sounds were never what the director had envisioned. Since we were redoing the show’s audio anyway, it was only right that we take advantage of the opportunity to re-record this part.

You’re giving it sounds that fit a specific mental image, rather than sounds that fit the type of car that appears in the show, right?

M: That’s right. It’s not realism. It’s a question of whether the sounds have the right image and feel good.

Y: We had comparatively more time on this release, so we would first put in sounds according to our own mental images, then get detailed instructions from Mr. Ikuhara, and then submit the fixed audio the following week. I’m told that for the TV series they had no time, so they always had to record the audio before the art was done. That meant there were parts where the timing didn’t fit, and we made it all fit this time.

M: Apparently there were times where the viewer would expect a sound and there wouldn’t be one, or where the engineers thought there’d be certain video going on and so they’d put their all into adding sound there, only to discover later that the video they expected wasn’t actually there. We’ve removed the effects from those places.

I hear the library scene in episode 4 really sounds like a library now.

M: The director wanted to have the sounds of chairs and footsteps and such—in other words, to have sounds that conveyed human movements without anyone speaking. At first, we designed the sound with a certain amount of soft but present crowd noise, like people mumbling to each other. But the director said, “That’s not right.” He wanted to have the audience feel the human presence not through people’s voices, but through the sounds of people moving.

Y: After all, you generally don’t talk in libraries, right? So we express people through coughs and things. The TV broadcast ended up having walla (crowd noise) in it.

There are also scenes with elephants and such; do those spots have more of a sense of presence now, too?

M: Yes. When physically large things appeared, we got the woofer going so that you’d have low sounds at floor level.

Oh, I see. I’ve heard that the director was also particular about the part in episode 6 when Nanami gets hit in the face with the ball.

M: Originally that had a manga-like sound, like a boing or a thwack. The director said “Maybe a realer noise would be more comedic to people now.” So we made it a much more painful sound.

Y: It took us a long time to get there, didn’t it?

M: There was the sound of the ball hitting, and that came from the rear speakers. Then we put it in the front ones as well, and then we added a bone-jarring noise.

Interesting. Speaking of sound, in the beginning of episode 9 when Saionji and Touga have a kendo match, there’s a strange, playful trick where the voices of female students seem to be coming out of the bamboo swords. How is that now?

M: We couldn’t really grok that at first. “Walla that makes it look like the swords are talking? What’s the deal with that?” But when we listened carefully, the swords really move in time with the girls saying hooray. Then we got it: “Oh! That actually is the swords talking!” So we adjusted the positioning of the sound. In the end, that’s the game he was playing, using the sound. The scene was originally created with that nuance, but the director wanted to pursue that even further in 5.1. He must have wanted to clearly express that nuance through the sound this time, since it might not have gotten across to the audience before.

Ah, I see. And in the Mikage episodes, the sounds in the confessional leave an impression.

Y: You could say that was when the sound effects really needed to step up to the plate. Low sounds… We were very particular about the sounds of the elevator, too.

M: When it starts or stops, it makes a jerky thump. And when it’s moving there’s the whine of a motor, but in 5.1 if we made the sound come in from the rear and spread, it was overwhelmed by the music. The director told us, “I can’t hear it from the front.” The tradeoff for spreading it was that it lost its core. So we cranked up that noise in the front speakers and spread it to the rear, giving it the same balance as the original broadcast. Also, we re-recorded the walla in those scenes. Because there was a drumming sound like someone kicking a tree there in the SFX, but the director said, “I want dialogue.”

Y: We rounded up dozens of men to retake those male moans.

M: Where they get out of the elevator and come into that room with the coffins, right?

Y: That was brutal work.

Listening to you talk about it, it sounds like a newly reborn, definitive version of the show. Well, to wrap up the interview, could you tell us your impressions of Director Ikuhara?

M: The director was more knowledgeable about audio than I expected. He has a 5.1 setup in his own home, and of course he watches all kinds of movies, so a lot of his instructions were very clear, which made things easy for us. He would tell us his vision: “I’d like to hear this sound from this direction in this way”; things like that. When we were doing the duel scenes we learned the director’s way of thinking, so after that we made everything accordingly.

Y: I’ve been privileged to work on three King Records shows: Neon Genesis Evangelion, Martian Successor Nadesico, and Revolutionary Girl Utena. Out of the three directors of those shows, Mr. Ikuhara is the closest to me in age, so he was easy for me to understand. In my mind, it’s easy to work with someone who grew up in the same age I did, and it’s more exciting. Because the anime and dramas that we watched as kids are the same, and I can see those elements popping up. So I ask him about it, and we both get pumped up talking about it: “I used to watch that one! Yeah, and this one!”

Ah, you understand the image he has of things.

Y: Right. If I say that to our young assistant, he doesn’t get it. There’s a deeper meaning there, though. (laughs) Also, you could say the director’s final word was a bit scary: he’d say “Well, I think this is my fault, but…”—and the re-recording would begin all over again. (laughs) But you know, it wasn’t okay to just give up. I could see his point, and think “Yeah, he’s right.”

M: Yes, hearing his opinions I could see how maybe we should try it again. On this project, I was fired up enough to want to give 100%, even 120%.

I’m very much looking forward to hearing the final audio.

Y: Even on normal TV speakers, there will be more sound than before, the dialogue will sound cleaner than before, and the music will have a different sense of presence, so I think you’ll be able to enjoy it in stereo as well.

M: But it’s even more awesome with a 5.1 setup, so I hope you’ll listen to it in 5.1 if possible.

This conversation has certainly made me want listen to it in 5.1. Thank you for speaking with me today.

Revolutionary Girls: Girls’ Manga

There’s a type of anime which targets a “girl” audience, maybe through being based on shoujo manga, or maybe through having an outlook on the world that’s informed by a girl’s perspective. Originally, the main trends were titles based on popular shoujo manga, like Candy Candy and The Rose of Versailles, and magical girl titles, like Magical Princess Minky Momo and Magical Angel Creamy Mami. As a group, they were gentle works in which the subtleties of human emotion were depicted in details or dangers were escaped via the fantastical actions we call “magic.” And then, in 1992_32ya, Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon began, and the tides changed. Girls actively used their physical skills to defeat evil. Kunihiko Ikuhara, a Sailor Moon director, once commented that “Seeing girls be violent is pleasurable to viewers now.” Violence: what everyone had thought girls wanted to avoid at all costs up until then. It’s a world with very negative associations, but it’s true—in the show, Sailor Moon and the others punched and kicked their enemies. What’s most important, however, was not that our popular image of girls had fallen so low that we could see them as violent; it’s that even when they had action scenes like that, the heroines were still beautiful. That’s what inspired the girls’ longing;—even action scenes that only come across as violent with male heroes turn cute and cool when girls do them. Maybe that was what people intrinsically desired even more than fighting boys. And so there was no longer any need for a setup in which the girl is protected by the boy. In that situation, what Kunihiko Ikuhara created next was Revolutionary Girl Utena. It was a show that flew right in the face of the “prince fantasy” setup: the prince who saves the princess is a girl. The world of Utena was a logical extension of the fighting girls you saw in Sailor Moon: what you could call the consummated form of that world. And there was this theme that you fought the male prince as an outdated ideal.

Given these elements, some thought that Utena called into question the whole concept of a “women position in society = gender.” Something that shook up and overthrew the relationship between men and women. It’s true that underworld human relationship taboos are buried within Utena as something like a foundation for that reform—anomalous breeds of relationships like homosexuality and incest. It’s not difficult to interpret these things as reflecting psychologically uncertain times, when the types of relationships that follow preexisting rules are approaching their limits. Director Ikuhara’s work is often described as having similarities to the shoujo manga of the 1970s, and there was a similar shakeup in relationships then, too. There was Riyoko Ikeda, who drew females who dressed as males in Rose of Versailles and The Window of Orpheus, as well as manga artists like Keiko Takemiya and Moto Hagio, who drew boys in love with other boys. Keiko Takemiya has said that she drew same-sex love out of a desire to depict a pure form of love; those who harbor feelings strong enough even to overcome a lack of acknowledgment from anyone else need to invent their relationship. A relationship just for the two of them, a world with only the two of them. The invention of a new relationship is dramatic, and whether it comes to fruition or ruin, it’s backed by a mad romanticism. The readers are moved by the main characters’ attempts to break free of the strong, walled-in feeling that smothers them.

However, in truth the image of girls that Utena held wasn’t probed to the extreme in just a single direction like this. Anthy carried a heavy burden, but she frequently gave us glimpses of a temperament that was hard to pin down as either eccentric or venomous, and Utena was a lively girl who did what her feelings dictated. When faced with a prince her heart raced like a girl’s, and she enjoyed herself; she was very human. In that sense, she wasn’t “the anti-man”, and though she loved Anthy, she wasn’t a lesbian. She wasn’t a symbol formed from gender ideology: she was freer. Humans are multifaceted beings. And Utena and Anthy were filled with complex human nature like that. Their characterization had breadth. Viewers were heartened and alarmed in turn by the various facets of Utena and her friends, and that was what made them so entertaining and so rich in nuance.

What is the fun of shoujo manga, really? “It’s adorned with beautiful things”, “It depicts expressions of emotion in detail”, “It pursues human relationships.” Women look at people with sharp eyes. The masterpieces of shoujo manga are those works that have a narratively which can withstand their power to stare right through people. Utena had such elements. For instance, take Miki and Kozue’s sibling relationship: the longing for lost memories, and the strong desire for the one you love to care for you even when sullied. And then you have the sad relationship between Jury, who seals away her impossible love and therefore becomes unable to escape, and Ruka, who merely wishes to free his beloved’s heart without seeking anything in return. Utena brilliantly portrayed the type of story shoujo manga has pursued, the type that depicts delicate emotions. And on top of that, Kunihiko Ikuhara added a new pleasure sought after by girls. No matter how deeply you’re troubled, no matter how much your heart is stirred, the climax of those feelings is decided with a duel. As he’d once said about Sailor Moon, “It wasn’t the romance that was such a hit with girls; it was the part where the main characters used their sure-fire techniques to defeat their enemies.” This time he made the final catharsis for all the sublimated emotional turmoil the brandishing of swords in a duel. He took the highlight scene that up until now shoujo manga had enlivened with dramatic staging and beautiful dialogue, and he changed it to the beautiful yet cool action called the “duel”. There viewers had the fun of engrossing themselves in the profound psychological portrayals girls have been reading for many years now, combined with the newly discovered pleasure of battle. This was quite the dramatic invention in its own right. Surely this acrobatic turnabout is the true thrill of Utena, and a crowning achievement of conclusively portraying a revolutionary image of girls while plumbing the depths of shoujo manga in an orthodox way.

Laserdisc Liner Notes: From The Japanese Archives

When the packaged release of Revolutionary Girl Utena first began, DVDs didn’t yet exist. VHS and LaserDiscs (LD) were put out. LDs in particular were large and packed real visual impact, and the booklets enclosed were well worth seeing as well. Those printed extras were composed of written contributions from the staff, interviews, reprints of original materials from Animage (Tokuma Shoten Ltd.), etc. And just like the worldview of the show itself, the staff’s ways of viewing Utena were brimming with surprise and mystery. It was high-voltage content. Yuichirou Oguro, a member of the original creators, BE-PAPAS, served as editor himself. One of the prime sources of this richness of content was the fact that he personally saw to the magazine material and the structure of the linear notes. Here, we’ll convey the essence of those LD liner notes to you through select excerpts.

NOZOMI ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCTION STAFF

Executive Producer: Shawne Kleckner
Producer: Kris Kleckner
Assistant Producer: David Olsen
Translator: Sarah Alys Lindholm
Editors: David Olsen and Lisa Cooper
Design: Greg Hillsman

External Links

• Booklet discussion (EGF)

• Empty Movement materials:

  • Voice actors & American interviews

  • Ikuhara interviews & audio episode commentaries

  • “Ikuhara Audio Commentary: Adolescence of Utena”