flower of hope

Through this, you may be able to imagine a happy future, or through this, you might be able to go on living happily. Or… These are the sorts of things I wish to portray. To put it nicely, this is why Utena is naive and foolish. She speaks of her Prince and the like, at her age. To our sensibilities, we think of that as stupid. I want to show that this sensibility of ours, that leads us to think of that as stupid, is itself absurd. - Kunihiko Ikuhara (1997 Video Interview)

To step into the unknown is the soul of creativity. To rebel against the mood of the times. And by rebelling, bring forth and create a new zeitgeist. Yet the very act of rebelling means we are walking in accord with the era. So for this, we first created a young girl character named Tenjou Utena. We entrusted her with showing the nature of humans to defy their own instincts and norms, because that brilliance is what we wanted to depict. Whether or not we succeeded in this endeavour remains to be seen. (…… This doesn’t really “explain” anything at all, does it?) Yoji Enokido, Script Notes for Episode 1