Did you enjoy End of Evangelion, but find the symbolism to be too shallow and easy to understand? Do you like the Revolutionary Girl Utena TV series, but think that there's just too much plot? Do you love the stylish visuals of X, but get bogged down with the depth? If you answered yes to any of these questions, Revolutionary Girl Utena the Movie may be just the anime for you.

The Utena movie is intended to be a separate entity from the TV series, in the sense that it is nominally self-contained, rather than a straight extension of the TV series. The movie, though, is rather different from other attempts that I've seen to retell the story of a TV series. Escaflowne: A Girl on Gaea told a substantially different story from the TV series, which let it squeeze into just 2 hours. The Mobile Suit Gundam Box Set Special Edition took the liberty of spreding itself out over 3 movies and 7+ hours, which gave it plenty of time to include all of the major events from the TV series. The Utena movie takes a third tack by abandoning the idea of telling a coherent story at all. Instead it compresses the TV version into a series of short snippets that illustrate major themes or events from the show. Unfortunately, this means that while the plot, such as it is, is a parallel to the TV series, it's very difficult to follow anything unless you've seen the episode that the thematic material was taken from.

I can't imagine that anyone who hasn't seen the TV series would have a prayer of understanding what's going on. Sadly, this group is likely to include in one way or another just about every American viewer, since Software Sculptors saw fit to release the movie when they had released only the first 13 (of 39) episodes of the series. More episodes have been released since, but at the time of this review only about half of the complete series is available in the US in licensed commercial form. That's not a complete disaster- it's pretty easy to follow large chunks of the movie- but I'm pretty sure that there are also large sections where I'm missing the message. That's a very bad thing, because the basic structure of the movie emphasizes message over story. It's still enjoyable, but there's a palpable sense of missing out on something very important.

Fortunately, the emphasis on style over plot was not shirked when it came to production values. The video and audio quality are both excellent, although not quite up with the absolute best of modern anime. The animation is very good, obviously full 24 frame for anything involving action, and the designs are excellent. The design work is clearly based on the TV show and carrys most of its flavor, but the characters and settings have been reworked and improved. The audio is likewise good, with solid voice acting and good music. The music is not all original; many of the songs from the TV show are reused, though the performances are new.

The menus are nice, but they're nothing particularly special. The packaging, per se, is rather minimal: a clear box with a double sided label so that you can read the back side through the box. I much prefer a standard insert because the plastic isn't perfectly clear and the moldings make some parts hard to read through. There are a good number of extras on the disk, including an amusing trivia game.