#takushi koide | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

canmom · 3 years

Note

Extremely curious as to your thoughts about the revue starlight show and finale movie

Ah, now there, I am due for a rewatch of RevStar, and I haven't yet seen the finale movie! (I really should have by now it's been out more n half a year lol)

RevStar is interesting because it seems to be the most overt attempt to follow in the footsteps of Kunihiko Ikuhara I've seen. Like Utena, it's drawing on the imagery of the Takarazuka Revue - in fact, literally set in a performing school that's blatantly patterned on Takarazuka, and its thematic thrust is a criticism of its structure. But it's also got got all the highly symbolic compositions and characterisation expressed indirectly through imagery that makes Ikuhara's work such analysis fodder, especially in the big song-duel sequences that happen almost every episode at the turning point of each character arc. (Yeah, just like Utena.)

These character song-fights are definitely the part that grabs my attention most, although I take kVin's point in his writeups that the light-hearted slice-of-lifey school sections are also very well executed, full of charming rhythms and creative camerawork even in minor moments. Just... I'm not super attached to school stories. The quieter moments are obviously necessary to set up the character conflicts that underlie and give meaning to the duels... but I probably wouldn't have watched it if not for that.

Actually one thing I didn't realise is that in RevStar's case, the stage musical came first, performed in 2017, the anime releasing the year after - though this is a case of being one big multimedia project rather than adapting a stage musical to anime which really would be novel. After the success of the anime there were subsequent productions, and I believe this is one of those later ones, featuring the incredible voice of Tomita Maho as Tendou Maya:

youtube

In these posts I've spoken a lot as if studios, rather than people, are the main agents that make anime, but of course "a studio is just a building" - it just so happens that a lot of studios have become shorthands for certain creative teams (Shaft and Shinbo, Trigger and Imaishi). I don't know the same background for Kinema Citrus but I get the impression that they're a well run studio (their work just previously on Made in Abyss is also exceptional) - and I've heard they're good about paying their international freelancers decent rates and on time as well which really shouldn't be exceptional but, anime!

But anyway, the thing that immediately stands out to me on RevStar's animation is just how flowing and lively their action animation feels when it's basically all being done on 3s. Big camera moves, running, fast-paced swordfights, all on 3s kind of defies belief, and when I started rewatching RevStar a few months ago, I paused and framed through some of the fights like :O It's the ideal of Mitsuo Iso's 'full limited' deployed on an impressive scale, primarily by the unbelievably talented young Takushi Koide - and 'talented young' seems to be the description of just about the entire team from what I gather from kVin's writeups.

So, the Ikuhara influence is not just based on the obvious resemblance of the Takarazuka theme - director Tomohiko Fukuhara got his first episode director job working on Penguindrum and then became kind of his right-hand man on subsequent projects like Yurikuma Arashi. kVin relates here, in the first of a fantastic series of production notes:

Who is that Furukawa fellow who’d get viewers so excited? If you had asked a few years ago, the answer would have been a fairly impressive action animator. Ever since Penguindrum, though, his name has carried more weight. Before that show, he’d never even drawn a Storyboard, but Kunihiro Ikuhara sensed something in him. Furukawa ended up co-storyboarding the openings and up to 6 episodes in the second half, alongside some other rising stars like Shouko Nakamura, Mitsue Yamazaki, and Katsunori Shibata. (...)

─ Although Ikuhara’s style is of course not a miracle conjured from nothingness – it initially came down to his real-life theatrical inspirations plus endless Osamu Dezaki-isms filtered through Shigeyasu Yamauchi‘s lens and some Junichi Sato comedy – he’s always had this much of an inspiring effect on the youngsters who work under him. And, in modern times, no one has absorbed his precepts better than Furukawa, who’s actually become integral to Ikuhara’s working process. He assisted him on every one of his new projects, from minor stuff like his ending sequences on Kokoro Connect, BROTHERS CONFLICT, and NORN9, to acting as co-series director on Yurikuma Arashi.

So while it's tempting to see it as a cynical attempt to rip off the style of the great auteur Ikuhara, it's more than this - perhaps one day we might speak of an 'Ikuhara school', the way we speak of Yoshinori Kanada.

That said, since the comparison is inevitable, RevStar is definitely much more straightforward than Ikuhara tends to be. The storyline and in-fiction stakes are spelled out a lot more concretely: win the competition and you get a wish, and you can use it for such things as time travel. Because, yeah, there's a mid-season 'this is actually a time loop' reveal, just like Madoka! It's also much less reliant on the device of repeating 'bank' footage and general repetition-based jokes than Ikuhara - yes, there's the sequence where the uniforms are pressed at the beginning of each duel, echoing Utena's famous stair climbing, but that's about it.

Still, like an Ikuhara anime, it places a great deal of weight on shot composition (favouring very striking symmetric shots), symbolic elements, flower language, etc. - here's your inevitable Emily Rand citation. This is most overt in the stage shows, naturally, which take the theatrical setting to introduce all kinds of set elements that relate to the theme and design of each character. There are plenty of other strong visual elements that become recurring motifs of the series as a whole, such as - of course - the mysterious giraffe which oversees the fights and seems to represent the viewer... and to a slightly lesser extent, Tokyo Tower, the Position Zero mark, etc.

Another comparison: while Ikuhara tended to go on very stark, flat compositions that emphasise the unusual architectural setting, Fukuhara and Koide seem to prefer to push a sense of inhabiting a 3D space with their tilted cameras and unusual angles, which apparently was a pretty heavy workload for the layout artists. (Something they take to extremes with the dramatic CG camera moves in the fights themselves).

Speaking of character design, this is probably the show's biggest stumbling. It's very much the dominant moe standard, which is a shame, because as kVin says they could have done fantastic things by really pushing the shōjo manga inspirations visually as well. (To be fair, Ikuhara's post-Utena work has also not pushed the envelope nearly as much on drawing styles either.)

Unfortunately, kVin also reports that this production was in a pretty stressful state for most of the duration, and at one point it was in the air whether it would be finished. It was definitely on the wave of shows hiring international freelancers, something Kinema Citrus has made a habit of (who knows, I'd love to draw animation for them one day), and evidently it did in fact get finished, but it's another unfortunate case of an ambitious show being achieved mostly by straining the animators to their absolute limits. This is perhaps more a case of great ambition than poor showrunning, but I wish we could have an industry where ambitious projects like these could be given the proper time to be realised.

(^ i don't remember this scene, maybe it's from the movie? been a while though lol)

It's interesting, come to think of it, to compare the 'shine' of the girls in the Revue with the 'spiral power' of Gurren Lagann. Both represent ambition and drive, but while Gurren Lagann is a full-throated celebration, RevStar laments that these girls are thrown into a wasteful, destructive competition in which one will eventually overshadow the others, and even condemns the audience that enables it with a literal giraffe-turns-to-camera moment. (Such a 'you, the viewer, are complicit in enjoying the show we made!' is always a tricky line to walk, of course, and I'm not sure if it quite pulls that off, although it's definitely amusing in the moment.)

I find this theme interesting bc, although I could never be a stage performer, it's not like a similar dynamic doesn't exist in my chosen field of endeavour. Everyone wants to be the next Bahi JD or Weilin Zhang, and I no kidding, I definitely do too! My current overly elaborate animation project was started in large part in a sense of like, attempting to prove I have what it takes to compete in the sakuga arena - not really the best place to create from, although it's been interesting to learn the subtleties I hadn't grasped at the outset.

Anyway, that's the preamble out of the way. Am I putting too much effort into these? I'm supposed to be drawing up a commission sheet. ...eh, it's fun though!

don’t watch period | drop if not interested within 2-3 episodes | give it a go, could be your thing | 5 star recommendation

fav characters: Yeah I can't pretend otherwise, it's Tendou Maya. Something about a really arrogant ambitious girl, it's a hell of a vibe, and very appropriate for the show's themes as the perfect otokoyaku who's the obvious favourite to lead the revue - and thus the foil to Karen who hopes to reshape the hierarchical system. Her song is the one I still listen to occasionally.

There's something to be said for (Ba)Nana, who seems a comedy character at first, turning out to be the one who has won the competition every time and each time wished to relive the year - not because of a self-destructive devotion like Homura, but simply because she can't bear to let go of this group of school friends. That's a funny spin on the concept!

least fav characters: I can't really say I dislike any of these girls. There are sufficiently many that I have trouble remembering all of them lol. Not surprising that there was a gacha spinoff.

fav relationship: ooh, this one's tough - tbh I was not as good at keeping track of characters and relationships on my first watch so I have trouble remembering all the dynamics. Anyway, the love triangle between Karen, Hikari and Mahiru (primarily, the Karen/Hikari side) is the central driving dynamic, although 'childhood promise' is not a trope I find particularly engaging. More interesting is perhaps Maya and Claudine, the initial jealous clash slowly turned into like, supportive but hurting power couple ig. I gotta rewatch it though.

fav moment: ...would it be too obvious to name Pride and Arrogance? ok, how about every time the giraffe says 'I understand'. I've kind of picked that one up - thank you Unicode Consortium for adding a giraffe emoji.

headcanons/theories: ...ok, what exactly is the giraffe getting out of this? it's set up as kind of an Incubator-like figure, tempting the girls with glory and creating this punishing structure that forces them to turn on each other to realise their ambitions, culminating in the wish... but we don't have any daft story about entropy to 'explain' that. Maybe they actually spell that out at some point and I forgot?

unpopular opinion: Honestly what's even the popular opinion about this show? If you're the kind of person who likes this kind of thing, "it's good". if not, it's "revue what?"

how’d you find it: Overall, definitely one of the standout anime of the last few years - a very compelling series which realised grand ambitions with many really inspiring sequences. Not quite as semiotically overwhelming as your Ikuharas, it's a lot more upfront about what it's about, but it delivers that with aplomb.

The places where it's weak are mostly where it doesn't set itself apart from the limitations of late-2010s digital anime - the backgrounds in particular have that, I'm not sure what word, but like very even 'digital painting' feel without a lot of character, and the character designs as mentioned are too conventionally moe for my taste (although I think the outfits for the fight sequences are great) distinguished mostly by hairstyle. But that's a minor complaint.

I can't wait to get around to watching the movie, since I hear that's fantastic. Actually, come to think of it, why don't we do it for Animation Night this week?

random thoughts: RevStar is one of those 'multimedia projects', and I think it's really interesting how musical theatre in Japan seems to be hooked into the other creative industries in a much more significant way. I feel like it would be unthinkable for a TV show or game to be accompanied by a musical over here, but while it's not exactly common in Japan, the fact I can easily think of two examples (this and the YoRHa musical) kinda strikes me as noteworthy. I guess it's somehow connected to the whole idol subculture?

Hope that satisfies, I look forward to watching RevStar again though so I can give a more substantive engagement with its characters, themes etc.

#solicit bryn's anime opinions #anime #revue starlight

22 notes · View notes