Forum - View topic

This Week in Anime - Utena's Revolution

For the record, most people would not recommend watching the movie before the series. Adolescence is a retelling/pseudo-sequel that's borderline unintelligible without context from the show.

The movie is not a sequel, it is a fully alternate continuity of the type that was popular in multimedia franchises of the period, which would have multiple alternate versions of a story in different formats, with manga, TV Series, OVA, and Movie versions all separate continuities. (See Tenchi Muyo and Escaflowne for some other high-profile cases, among many other examples.)

I also disagree that the movie wants or needs details from the series plugged into it. In fact, I argue the opposite: that leaning on the series as a crutch leads you to misunderstand the key differences in setup the movie is presenting. I assure you that, dense and multilayered as it is, the movie is fully comprehensible as a coherent interlocking web of character motivation and interaction all on its own without "help" from running back to the series to fill what you perceive as gaps.

For this reason, I actually encourage people who've never consumed the franchise before to watch the movie first, while they can still enjoy and appreciate it independent of the dogma of the series with which people so zealously want to overlay the movie.

(Also no mention of the importance of Utena to the formation of modern yuri as a cohesive commercial enterprise, but that's as usual.)

It's Utena and Sailor Moon that contributed for Yuri's commercial solidification, despite Sailor Moon not being a centrally yuri affair (having, like, one couple).