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liri
I finally caught up with Mawaru Penguindrum and watched the ending last night.
I've seen some excellent analyses of the ending, although I'm not entirely sure I'm in agreement with the ones that hold that the Shouma and Kanba seen at the end are dead/written out of the world. This is the one I used to make sense of the ending, though I have to disagree (tentatively) with the anons who felt that the weird/surrealist elements were less prominent in Utena than in Penguindrum. I think I mentioned it an earlier post, but I always felt like Mawaru Penguindrum was far more tied to reality than Utena ever was.
I honestly cannot make sense of Utena on a realist level at all. Maybe it's just an artifact of the way I watched the show - one arc at a time, with years between them, and I haven't yet rewatched - and the haziness of my memories. But I honestly felt like Utena had no literal level to its narrative at all by the end. Where do these kids come from? Who are their parents? Where are their parents - I mean, in the sense of "what is the physical location of their parents?" not "where is the parental supervision?" How far are they from home, and where is the school even located? Do they ever leave campus, except I think that time Akio and Utena have sex? Utena's parents die, of course, Kozue and Miki's parents are briefly mentioned, so are Touga and Nanami's, but the whole thing just felt like the school and all the people in it were floating out of space and time, disconnected from everything. I know that was part of the point, but... money doesn't exist for them, distance really doesn't exist, food barely exists, lessons and teachers and weather barely exist.
No matter what I'm watching, even if it's an Ikuhara series, I will always latch onto the mundane details. Few things endeared the characters in Penguindrum to me as much as the moment when Himari tells Ringo about the "Mika-chan" (apparently a Barbie-like, or more likely Licca-chan-like, doll) house that she always wanted but her parents would never buy, and then the two girls sing the Mika-chan jingle together and giggle.
The city they live in is shown; there are coffee shops (with a penguin instead of the Starbucks logo) and food and trash cans and the aquarium has a gift shop. They live in a real world; an insane world in which there is apparently a literally-existing Child Broiler that actually broils children (when I first saw the term I thought it was a fan nickname) but a real, if terribly broken, world. Their world was real enough that when the non-literal elements, like the boxes, started showing up at the end, it was hard to tell wtf they meant - when could this have literally happened? It didn't, because even if they have to sort the trash they're still in an Ikuhara series, but was a very different experience from watching Utena, in which I pretty much gave up on figuring out if any given thing had literally happened.
I'm not really talking about Utena itself here. I'm just comparing the experience of watching Mawaru Penguindrum against my memories of Utena. I got the new boxed sets for Xmas, and I'm sure I'll have more to say when I watch them. Maybe my impressions will completely change, because I watched the first arc back in the olden days of VHS and the last arc... maybe in 2004, 2005?
I've seen some excellent analyses of the ending, although I'm not entirely sure I'm in agreement with the ones that hold that the Shouma and Kanba seen at the end are dead/written out of the world. This is the one I used to make sense of the ending, though I have to disagree (tentatively) with the anons who felt that the weird/surrealist elements were less prominent in Utena than in Penguindrum. I think I mentioned it an earlier post, but I always felt like Mawaru Penguindrum was far more tied to reality than Utena ever was.
I honestly cannot make sense of Utena on a realist level at all. Maybe it's just an artifact of the way I watched the show - one arc at a time, with years between them, and I haven't yet rewatched - and the haziness of my memories. But I honestly felt like Utena had no literal level to its narrative at all by the end. Where do these kids come from? Who are their parents? Where are their parents - I mean, in the sense of "what is the physical location of their parents?" not "where is the parental supervision?" How far are they from home, and where is the school even located? Do they ever leave campus, except I think that time Akio and Utena have sex? Utena's parents die, of course, Kozue and Miki's parents are briefly mentioned, so are Touga and Nanami's, but the whole thing just felt like the school and all the people in it were floating out of space and time, disconnected from everything. I know that was part of the point, but... money doesn't exist for them, distance really doesn't exist, food barely exists, lessons and teachers and weather barely exist.
No matter what I'm watching, even if it's an Ikuhara series, I will always latch onto the mundane details. Few things endeared the characters in Penguindrum to me as much as the moment when Himari tells Ringo about the "Mika-chan" (apparently a Barbie-like, or more likely Licca-chan-like, doll) house that she always wanted but her parents would never buy, and then the two girls sing the Mika-chan jingle together and giggle.
The city they live in is shown; there are coffee shops (with a penguin instead of the Starbucks logo) and food and trash cans and the aquarium has a gift shop. They live in a real world; an insane world in which there is apparently a literally-existing Child Broiler that actually broils children (when I first saw the term I thought it was a fan nickname) but a real, if terribly broken, world. Their world was real enough that when the non-literal elements, like the boxes, started showing up at the end, it was hard to tell wtf they meant - when could this have literally happened? It didn't, because even if they have to sort the trash they're still in an Ikuhara series, but was a very different experience from watching Utena, in which I pretty much gave up on figuring out if any given thing had literally happened.
I'm not really talking about Utena itself here. I'm just comparing the experience of watching Mawaru Penguindrum against my memories of Utena. I got the new boxed sets for Xmas, and I'm sure I'll have more to say when I watch them. Maybe my impressions will completely change, because I watched the first arc back in the olden days of VHS and the last arc... maybe in 2004, 2005?