The bird is fighting its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wishes to be born must destroy a world. The bird is flying to God. The god is named Abraxas.
—Herman Hesse, Demian
Revolutionary Girl Utena, episode 13: “Tracing a Path.” Directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara. Character designs by Chiho Saito. Be-Papas, 1997 (Nozomi Entertainment, 2011). Approx. 24 minutes. Rated “16+.”
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This technically begins the second story arc, the “Black Rose Saga,” though that story won’t really get started until episode 14. This arc is perhaps the most intriguing in the show, as it has a clever mind-screw plot, and it’s the one that most impressed me when I first watched the series in spite of some clumsy editing and a lot of recycled animation. But it’s also the most frustrating arc, since the elaborate storyline it develops never gets mentioned again afterwards and the apparent revelations it delivers turn out to be mostly misdirection. It’s like twelve episodes of tease.
Every once in a while, Utena does a recap episode. This is common in anime, but Utena is screwy with recaps just as it is with everything else: it embeds important plot developments in the recap episodes to prevent you from skipping over them. Continue reading “The Recap Episode of Doom: The ‘Revolutionary Girl Utena’ Rewatch, Part 13”