Noice.  At least this will bring new fans to the series (hopefully).

I really want some 20th anniversary stuff happening.  There's very little out there (that I have seen at leas)

Shay Guy wrote:

As I recall, someone here called that notion bizarre when I said it, but I stand by it. Utena has things to say, but it's perfectly comfortable looking silly. Much like how BoJack Horseman has all that character drama bundled under a thick layer of animal puns and Todd shenanigans.

I'm not sure it did/has appealed to all that broad of an audience, but there is a lot that, if you're unfamiliar with the traditions, just looks purposelessly silly enough to be justified as just to be silly. That works in its favor.

I think, a lot of things that seem outre to a non-Japanese audience do feel a bit more familiar in its home country, though. The anglophone audience, at least, was in ways, ill-served by having Utena first and its progenitors and the slipstreams of tradition largely second. It's harder for an English-language audience (not presuming for other cultures/nationalities, just to be safe) to distinguish, always, between obscure-to-use and obscure-to-a-general-anime-audience-in-late-90s-Japan, especially amidst that late-70s/early-80s revival that was going on just then.

Unfortunately, the movie is a particular target. As you can also see in that discussion, even people who are prepared to admit some worth and meaning to the series are quick to cast the movie as some kind of dumbed down pandering crowd-pleaser, without even trying to understand it as a very different but equally complex and interesting take on the formula.

Aelanie wrote:

Unfortunately, the movie is a particular target. As you can also see in that discussion, even people who are prepared to admit some worth and meaning to the series are quick to cast the movie as some kind of dumbed down pandering crowd-pleaser, without even trying to understand it as a very different but equally complex and interesting take on the formula.

I can understand not liking the movie, or anything else. But, something doesn't have to be "less real" or fraudulent because it's not to your taste, and that's what I think too many people forget. The other end, just as common if not more common, being when someone can't accept flaws or criticism of something they like because they've invested too heavily in it's being perfect or brilliant.

Utena is a dangerous franchise for both ends. You get both it's-a-fraud folks, the it's-perfect, but also people who are outright antagonistic to, say, the comic one-offs or Nanami episodes, because they don't seem to perfectly fit at first. There's weird friction between Utena and Eva fans, as if they weren't made by people who all know each other, at roughly the same time, as pretty much part of the same slipstream of neoclassical anime. Their horse has to be the bestest and the fastest and the other horse has to be lame and fraudulent.

It's something I appreciate here; we all shoot our mouths off once in awhile, but most of the posters are willing to pull back, too, to apologize and revise their thoughts, or to reconsider and stick to their guns because their reconsideration proved to them that they were right.