___________
View/Sign
my
Guestbook
___________
E-Mail Me
AIM: Dogasu
As many of you may know, I love anime. And Pokemon isn't the only anime I like by any stretch of the imagination.
A lot of people use Pokemon as the stepping stone to other anime. Hopefully this page will help. Each month, I'll showcase a different anime. Perhaps what you read here will interest you enough in a series to go out and experience it for yourself.
To see how Pokemon is like other anime, go here.
To find fan pages for this series, check Anipike for the largest list of anime sites on the web!
This month:
"If it cannot break its egg's shell, a chick will die without being born. We are the chick. The world is our egg. If we don't crack the world's shell, we will die without being born. Smash the world's shell! For the revolution of the world!"
Saito Chiho has been publishing manga in Japan
for over eighteen years, yet she is virtually unknown in the United States.
However, her 1997 work Shoujo Kakumei Utena (released in the US
as "Revolutionary Girl Utena") changed all that.
Tenjou Utena was a little girl grieving her parents' deaths. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, a prince on a white horse appeared. He hugged her with a rose-scented embrace and gave her a ring engraved with a rose, saying that the ring will bring her to him someday.
Years
later, the tomboyish Utena attends the elite Ohtori Academy.
There, she witnesses a young girl, Himemiya Anthy, being slapped
around by her "boyfriend," Saionji Kyoichi. So she challenges
him to a duel (to teach him a lesson), but when she does she finds herself
in the middle of a student council dueling to bring revolution to the world!
The dueling arena is a special area with a giant crystal castle floating
over the arena, and it is there that Utena wins her first match.
As her reward, Utena is given Anthy as "the Rose Bride" and
has officially become a "Duelist."
Utena
doesn't want to continue dueling, but she discovers that she must if she
is to protect the fragile and passive
Anthy. So her battles
continue with the other "Duelists"--the suave and debonair playboy Kiryuu
Touga, the gentle pianist Kaoru Miki, and the cool and confident
Arisugawa
Jury. The duels continue as Utena tries to discover who
her prince is, what this whole "revolutionize the world" business is about,
and how to turn Anthy into a regular girl.
The
series really pours the shoujo elements on full-blast. If you're
offended by roses in just about every shot, effeminite men, lesbian overtones,
animation sequences recycled in every episode, or a little monkey who's
only purpose is for comic relief, you may not like the series. However,
the series is a lot deeper and has a lot more substance than your average
shoujo title. For one thing, each and every character has his or
her own inner conflicts and motivations for obtaining the Rose Bride.
No shallow one-dimensional characters here! In addition, the show
has a unique style that makes it stand out among the other shoujo titles
out there. There really is a solid plot behind each episode, and
though the show may have a few throw-away episodes out there *coughEpisode13cough*,
the show moves at a pretty steady pace.
The
first 13 of the 39 anime episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena have
been released on VHS and DVD by Central Park Media, as has the movie.
It was recently announced that Central Park Media would release the next
season (the Black Rose arc) in the near future, so fans who were left hanging
will be able to pick up where they left off. In addition, the manga
is currently running in Animerica Extra, released by Viz Comics.
Previous Featured Anime/Manga
- __________________________________________________________________
Pocket Monsters was not created by me. It was created by Satoshi Tajiri and the crew at TV-Tokyo. Pokemon is (c) Game Freak, Nintendo, 4Kids Productions, Hasbro, Bandai, and a ton of other companies. When you have a popular anime like Pokemon, lots of people own it so it's impossible to list every company who owns a piece of Pokemon. No infringement of copyrights is meant by the creation of the web site. All images were gotten from official websites (Nintendo, TV-Tokyo, etc.) unless otherwise noted (I don't steal images from other sites!).