Visual Motifs
The dominant motif of the entire series is the rose, which fills the decor and landscape of the Academy as well as the ritual accoutrements of the Duelists. Highly stylized, they are reminiscent of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's work.
Another motif is the use of elevators, which are used as places of transition or transformation. These include the Council's elevator, the one found in Nemuro Hall (scene of the confessions in the Black Rose arc), and the one found in the final version of the dueling arena.
Cars may be considered one of the most oblique motifs seen in the series. In the anime, they appear in the third version of the dueling arena. In the final act of the movie, Utena is transformed into a car.
Repeated use of animated sequences can be seen in almost every episode, most noticeably Utena's entrance to the dueling arena. While this is usually seen in anime as a practical consideration to reduce production costs, it may also be used to reinforce certain themes.
Utena also takes the typically shōjo manga poses and dramatic effects intended to heighten the mood or tension of important scenes and exaggerates them, often to the point of being deliberately comedic. Examples include characters framed with spinning roses, or a dramatic scene accentuated with a baseball match in the background.
The colour red is used liberally throughout the series to symbolise the ambition of the characters.
Read more about this topic: Revolutionary Girl Utena
Famous quotes containing the words visual and/or motifs:
“Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.”
—Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980)
“Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have “really happened,” or to have some exceptional significance in explaining certain features of life, such as ritual. Again, whereas folk tales simply interchange motifs and develop variants, myths show an odd tendency to stick together and build up bigger structures. We have creation myths, fall and flood myths, metamorphose and dying-god myths.”
—Northrop Frye (1912–1991)