It’s the longest day of the year, here.

Anyway, I went to the mov~ies~

Given the number of times I watched the Utena movie in middle school I have the entire movie down frame-for-frame, beat-for-beat. And I never thought I would get to see it in theaters, let alone twenty-five-some-odd years later. I first saw it at A-Kon, an anime con that is last I checked still running in Dallas, on a bootleg VHS in a crowded hotel conference room. Standing room only. I was hiding in the back hoping nobody would notice how young I was and kick me out. Then it was finally released on DVD in the US and I spent most of seventh grade white-knuckling it through Certain Scenes while watching it on the small TV in my bedroom. I embodied the reason that you shouldn’t allow your kids to have a TV in their own room, but damned if I didn’t get to create my own soul that way, watching things that I never would have been allowed to watch.

Damn near ground my teeth to powder every time I watched it. Head on a swivel. Finger on the ‘off’ button.

Anyway. I am so grateful to GKids for doing this theatrical run. This is just a visually magnificent film and it deserves to be seen on a big screen. Fun to see how much of a non-presence movie-Akio is even on the big screen. Almost teared up when Rondo-Revolution started playing toward the last scene.

I was pretty accurate in clocking who was at the theater for this movie. I say this with only the fondest affection; I am immediately clockable as That Type.

I am thinking of the nobility Juri, Miki, Wakaba, and (God help me I still do not like him any more than I did at twelve) Saionji showed in the escape from the locust cars scene. Maybe they were not ready to go to the outside world yet, maybe they were not strong enough, but instead of trying to drag Anthy back down with them they gave her a hand up out of the bucket. I know they will make it out someday. As an adolescent you think you will be for sure the iconoclast, the one breaking out, but as an adult I have more sympathy for the ones who get left behind, who maybe do not have that much fire in the belly, or who need more time to work up the courage. I see in portrayals like this the adult-looking-back writing the script, or an adult-like willingness to cede center stage. I never understood why they did not just follow Anthy out, back then.

私は世界を変える。
(I swear to you I will change the world)

I have talked before about re-experiencing in adulthood something that was an awakening in adolescence, something that wove itself into the superstructure of the psyche. I miss the moral clarity of my youth, the confidence and certainty that what I was doing was right. Could an adult have broken out of Ohtori to the Outside World? Adolescents tend not to believe things are impossible and the adults who are left in Ohtori are not exactly aspirational figures.