At first glance, Shoujo Kakumei Utena (Revolutionary Girl Utena) doesn't seem to fit in with my list of favorite anime. Many of my most treasured series are ones far more stereotypical of a 21-year-old male otaku-- Dragonball, Evangelion, Berserk, Trigun, and so on.

So how did Utena become my favorite anime series ever? A combination of things, really. First of all, it's the most artistically ambitious anime series I've ever seen in terms of style and symbolism. Its direction is masterful. The music is unlike anything I've ever heard. But among these reasons is the simple fact that I love Utena's female characters, and particularly Utena herself.

I've always been a fan of powerful female characters, but too many in anime and live action are just men disguised in a woman's body, written for a male audience by a male writer without attention to the differences that separate men from women in behavior and thought. Utena is one of the rare exceptions to this rule. It presents a variety of believable female characters coming from different viewpoints. And its overall message is one of empowerment and equality for women, which brings me to the subject of this analysis.

This single line, more than any other, helped me to conclude that Utena is all about women, their roles in society, what they are thought to be capable of and what they really are. Kunihiko Ikuhara, director of Shoujo Kakumei Utena, stated in his audio commentary for the Utena movie DVD that he has been asked many times by people about what all the symbolism in Utena means. His answer is that it means something different for each person, and that he would prefer not to give a definite answer, to leave the series open to interpretation.

To Ikuhara himself, the series, and particularly the movie, Adolescence of Utena, is about the move from childhood to the adult world. There is much in the series that can be used to support this idea, but I'd like to talk for a while about my own impressions of the series. Not long after I had finished watching Utena and Adolescence of Utena, I formed the distinct impression in my head that this series was making a very strong and positive statement about women.

Manga creator Chiho Saitoh has commented on the differences between her original ideas for the Utena manga, and the story that the television series evolved into. In an interview, she said that the concept of the manga (and for that matter, most other shoujo manga series as well), was that there was a dashing, charming prince waiting for the heroine at the end of her adventure. It's a shoujo manga tradition to have this sort of plot, and it's quite comfortably in sync with Japanese traditional gender roles.

However, in the anime series, according to Saitoh, the message projected is that girls don't need a prince waiting at the end of the road. With that fundamental difference, it's easy to see why Utena is a powerful feminist story. Most shoujo manga, while featuring brave heroines with special powers, still reinforce traditional male and female roles. The heroine may do many brave deeds and become a strong character, but in the end, she still must end up with a prince, without whom she may not be able to save the day.

Sailor Moon is a prime example of this. Although it features many powerful female characters, mostly in the supporting cast (Sailors Pluto, Uranus, Neptune, and Jupiter spring to mind), the show usually falls back on a premise of the prince rushing in to save the day. Sailor Moon finds herself again and again being rescued by Tuxedo Mask, and seems utterly incapable of accomplishing anything by herself for the majority of the series.

Don't misinterpret that I am bashing Sailor Moon, or any other shoujo anime in particular. Sailor Moon is another one of my favorite anime, more so for the stunning manga artwork of Naoko Takeuchi than anything else. But the fact remains that no series shows women so independent, so strong, and yet still so feminine as Shoujo Kakumei Utena.

The feminism of Utena is not only present in the characterizations of the women of the series, but also in the basic underpinnings of the plot. To understand this, we must take a look back at the world of Utena in order to understand how its nature reflects our own past. We must also understand the "roles" characters play in the series, and what they mean.

Though not concretely explained in the series, the nature of the world in which Utena lives is partially perceptible to us through clues given in tiny doses throughout the series, particularly in episode 34. In the time before the beginning of the series, as explained in that episode, all the girls of the world were still princesses. However, the one girl who couldn't be a prince, Himemiya Anthy, was a witch. These were the two categories into which girls were separated, and there was no in-between.

From the flashbacks and shadow plays in the series, it appears that being a princess meant playing a passive, helpless role, waiting for the Rose Prince to come to the rescue. Anthy was the only girl from that time who broke that mold. Presumably, she did not need help from the Prince, since she herself had magical powers. In addition, it is stated in the film (which should, of course, be noted as a separate continuity) that Anthy herself made the King of Flies (Akio) into the Prince (Dios) with her own powers.

Those details are debatable, but it is clear that in the old world of the Utena universe, girls were expected to be weak, passive, and obedient-- the very model of a "princess." The only girl who ever defied this, who ever made an assertive action on her own, was Anthy. She sealed away the prince in order to save his life from the greedy people who the world who would have worked Dios to death. For this action, Anthy was branded a witch, and her punishment from the society of that time was to suffer the million swords of humanity's hatred forever.

Thus, the old world offered two choices to girls-- take your place as an inferior member of society, or suffer the consequences. Be a princess or be a witch. It's much the same in our universe. When women stand up and assert themselves from a woman's perspective, they are seen as troublemakers who should be silenced quickly. Women who take on the traditional roles handed down to them by centuries of male-dominated society-- as homemakers, mothers, sex objects-- are the ones who are glorified and made into "princesses."

Enter Tenjou Utena, and with her, the third choice for a woman-- to become a prince.

Utena is often perceived as a "gender-bender" anime from the get-go, because of Tenjou Utena's desire to become a prince. This concept is treated whimsically at times, but underlying the seemingly ludicrous notion is another meaning which I believe directly ties into Utena's feminist elements.

In Utena, the "prince" is a concept that is not connected to gender. From the beginning of the series, Dios is a vision of sorts, a lofty ideal rather than an actual person. This throws us off guard and shatters the expectations of anyone who began watching Utena with the conception that it was a typical shoujo story, in which the girl happily marries her prince in the end. I fell for this trick as I believe nearly every viewer of Utena must have. From a storytelling standpoint, this gives Utena one of the most unpredictable endings ever. From a feminist view, it gives us a shoujo heroine who is finally freed from her attachment to a male counterpart.

Utena wants to meet her prince, but in the end, she instead becomes her OWN prince. She takes a journey from being a typical shoujo character to one entirely unique for a shoujo series. It's probably a similar story that many women share, as our society presses toward equality and they learn that what they once thought could only be provided by a man, they were more than capable of achieving for themselves.

The "prince" is anyone who is noble, selfless, truthful... all of the things Dios embodied. Thus in the world of Utena, it is possible for a man or a woman to become a prince, and in so doing, our heroine breaks through the mold of the two limited roles to which women had been assigned up until the Revolution. Not a princess, or a witch, but a true prince.

Only three people in the world ever knew about the Revolution, but from that day on, one girl proved that it was possible for women to be on an equal level with men. She became a prince and rescued her princess, defeating the powers that tried to seduce her into settling into a traditional role.

I will probably always consider Utena to be my favorite series, and Tenjou Utena herself my favorite female character in anime. The feminism of Utena is only one of the many reasons why I like it so much, but it's certainly the biggest reason I like the protagonist herself. Breaking all the molds, Utena has given me renewed interest in female anime characters, and hope for the potential of positive, empowering messages that anime can send to female viewers. For that I'll always be grateful.

--With thanks to Lauren, my own "prince" and the strongest woman I have ever known.