I always wondered why that scene was included in the movie too. It doesn't advance the plot in any way. The only possible reason I can think of is that the director wanted to show us Shiori was just a warm body to Touga and he didn't really enjoy it anyway, hence the Shiori butterflies.

I do think Movie!Touga and TV!Touga's background are connected. Touga is the only duellist from which we get to know nothing at the end, not even during the Black Rose Saga. During the entire episode in the BRS, we can not even see his eyes or hear his voice, ever, and this saga is meant to explore the "deeper" side of each one of them by somebody else's point of view. For Touga we get a completely stranger's POV, someone who Utena doesn't even know the name of.

If the background is the same, it adds so much more missing information to Touga and all his relationships. The memory of Nanami and the cat? There was some sort of rivalry between Touga and his adoptive father going on (a public place where Touga could challenge and win some power back from the man who was abusing him). It could also give Nanami's exaggerated feeling of debt to his brother some reason behind it, even if unconscious. Saionji's relationship would also mean something different, since he left his hair long to mimic Touga's, unaware of what it meant to him. Saionji's jealousy over his friend, feeling of inferiority because of his beauty and maturity, would be simply explained by Saionji still being innocent while Touga had lost his innocence long ago, and sharing that reality with his friend would forever change him.

Making it the same background adds a lot of silence to Touga's relationships that really explain the actual missing plot for him on the show.

In my opinion, they just added this scene in the movie because they decided to leave it out of the show for some reason. I remember it was confirmed by the word of god but if someone could confirm it?

Last edited by pesimistamente (07-09-2016 05:40:46 PM)

Ugh, I just wrote up my thoughts and they got deleted. I'll have to do this again.

I really am enjoying everyone's analyses on here. Especially OnlyInThisLight's thoughts on the topic. The butterflies are very important because they are parasitic cabbage eating butterflies.

This is what the butterfly looks like:

And this is what happens to the cabbage:


Shiori is making her metamorphic transformation into an adult, but not the good kind. Perhaps the parasitic kind? I'm certain it is an allusion to the Black Rose Saga where Mikage was preventing all the side characters from self-actualizing into fully developed adults. You could deduce what the character's psychological mindset was by the shadowbox on the elevator wall, and it's various stages of metamorphosis. If an unresolved issue was exposed to Mikage, he made them relieve their painful memories until they had a psychological regression.

I think the metamorphosis into adulthood (albeit, the misguided adult) is backed up by her transformation into a car later in the film. However, when she transformed, she dived off into the deep end and crashed her car. Although she had made a physiological transformation into an adult through puberty, she didn't have the tools to understand that she was harming others by her selfish and childish desires.

At least, that is my take on it.

@Nocturnalux
I am also a bit disturbed with the portrayal of movie Nanami, if only because she has been reduced to being a cow for the entirety of the movie. The fact that Suzuki, Yamada, and Tanaka were all elephants like in the curry episode makes me think it was a joke. I don't know what to make of Chu-Chu's little friend...

@pesimistamente
Yes, you are right in your hunch. Word of God has said that TV and movie Touga share the same backstory. I just pulled this up the other day and posted it on another thread.

This is an interview with Enokido in the “Revolutionary Girl Utena Privacy Files” that were published in a magazine called “Shousetsu June” in 1999:

Although the TV series touched upon Touga’s younger days, the film goes into more details – the wound of Touga that was never directly depicted. In his younger days, Touga was a normal kid who enjoyed happy times with his friend Saionji Kyouichi and his younger sister Nanami. However, he came to know his unfortunate fate from the time he was ordered by his parents to wear his hair long. His parents sold him to the Kiryuu family. Although he was an adopted son on the surface, the instinctive Touga knew what that meant. And in order to protect his younger sister, he accepted his lot. Being sold. We did not go into depicting what Touga’s parents obtained by going as far as selling their son. We would like you to think of it as a kind of metaphor.

And Touga accepted in silence the sexual abuse from his new parents. His personality changed while he made a magnanimous show of enjoying the abuses in order to prevent his personality from splitting. The change took place in a spot so deep in his mind, that even those closest to him did not notice. Saionji and Nanami never noticed out of their innocence. And Touga never told his secret to anyone. It is said that a human being gains whatever he lost in exchange. So what did Touga gain in exchange at that point in time? It was the sense of alienation from being abused every night and seeing his innocent friend and sister during the day. The alienated self.

And it is out of this awareness of alienation that you come to obtain a higher human and sexual self-awareness. In the TV series, Saionji always felt that he was one step behind Touga. Although the two are more or less equal in terms of ability, what Saionji lacked was that sense of alienation.

Last edited by barafubuki (07-10-2016 01:48:08 AM)

Nocturnalux wrote:

It is not so much that scene that I quest the validity of as much as Nanami's cow apperance. The franchise is not averse to comedy so in itself I can accept Nanami's cow form making a cameo (even if I think the movie would lose little if it left it out) but in combination with Touga's sexual abuse it suddenly becomes a bit questionable.
Even if Nanami was not a victim of abuse herself, the fact that she still grew up in a house where her brother was routinely abused, makes it difficult to see the comedy in her being turned into a cow and urinated upon by Chu-Chu. Of course, even in SKU she goes through quite a lot and is mocked through most of the series but the format allows for pacing the Nanami humor to meld into the more dramatic moments.
But the movie, by its very nature, is much more saturated so that the viewer has to deal with Touga being a victim of child abuse almost alongside Nanami-as-a-cow.

I wrote about a sequence between Nanami, Touga and her father in the TV Show, and how Touga's backstory dramatically changes TV!Nanami backstory too, if only hinted. You can read it here .

Since Touga defines Nanami's and Saionji's characters, all changes from TV/Movie!Touga also affects TV/Movie!Nanami. In a world where Akio has (so much) power, so does Touga, and when Touga's presence is almost hegemonic, Nanami is relevant and has some agency herself. In a world where Akio has (almost no) power, so does Touga and where Touga's presence is almost invisible and has been dead all along, Nanami is completely irrelevant and loses all her agency in the story.

They decided to portrait movie!Nanami in the way where TV!Nanami was defeated and powerless. Let's remember, regardless of how comedic Nanami's episodes are, they show us the contrast between Utena's agency to define herself vs Nanami's lack of actual power in Ohtori. It's tragic. Has anyone analyzed why they use an holocaust song for that specific episode?