Thinking about all the “tweaked” remakes and reboots - the gender-swaps, the live-action Disney - and I’m realizing how well Adolescence of Utena hit that “completely different, but totally the same” sweet spot they seem to be going for.
Like, there’s crazy-ass castle-in-the-sky architecture still, only it’s constructivist not baroque. The art style and character design is slightly different, but the same. There’s all the same characters, except they’re different. There’s still weird imagery, but it’s totally new weird imagery even when it’s still weird car imagery, and it sums up to the same vector, only of a different direction and magnitude.
…I guess that depends what you think it is that they’re going for.
The Disney live-action remakes strike me as an attempt to recapture the numinous magic associated with the Disney Animated Classic canon, only in an idiom that’s more actually numinous, at least to contemporary tastes. We can take lush live-action visuals with some CGI much more seriously than we can take cutesy squash-and-stretch cel animation. We have the good old enchanted romances and adventures that we love, but without comic relief talking animals or immersion-breaking musical numbers. (And the culturally cringey stuff of yesteryear gets cleaned up while we’re at it.) It’s [an attempt at] the pure uncut Once Upon A Time magic that so many people of our generation remember Disney films as being, even though they never actually really were that thing.
You may or may not approve of that project, you may or may not think that Disney is doing a good job, but the mission statement is pretty coherent.
Meanwhile, Adolescence of Utena is just fucking bonkers. Like, it’s working with a bonkers source text to begin with, and it ups the madness considerably just in terms of imagery and structure etc., but it’s also metanarratively bonkers – I genuinely don’t understand what it thinks that it’s offering to fans of the series, apart from some shots and scenes that are stunningly gorgeous independent of any context.