Kunihiko Ikuharas Twin Peaks?
I just wanted to say I love Utena. I’m an anime fan and have been one for awhile (since I was a kid) and I run an anime club. It’s my second favorite anime after Evangelion and would be my pick as the most underrated anime I have ever seen. Sure it has a dedicated fan base and is well known among the anime community, but it really seems to lack the presence of other cult titles like Evangelion and Lain. At least in my opinion.
To me Utena is an endlessly fascinating peace of creation. A combination of coming of age story and post modern Freudian fairy tail that’s filled with endless delights. It’s hyper real and filled with obserdisom and melodrama, but beneath all the excess it is strikingly emotional honesty and filled dark psychosis. It’s about people who are trapped in there pasts and cut of from the adult world do to there own issues.
Even the shows budget limitations are handled in a visually poetic way. It’s one of the few shows were I don’t reach for the fast forward button during stock footage. It looks like some kind of bizarre children’s book come to life. It’s not for every one, but I find it strangely fascinating.
Kunihiko Ikuhara has said that he’s an admiring of one of my favorite directors David Lynch. I can defiantly see that. In a strange way I see Utena as his Twin Peaks do to its unique mixture of cliques, originality and soap opera story telling raised to a very high level of quality and intensity.
Just some of my thoughts on Utena. It’s a shame these boards are so dead because it’s something very special if not for everybody.
"In the shadows of future passed the magician longs to see, one chants out between two worlds: fire walk with me"