UTENA EXPLAINED

Responding to the prompt

Someone tell me what it was about. In particular, what does all the various symbolism mean, what are we supposed to take away from Mikage's arc, what's the deal with Kozue, and why did Nanami turn into a cow that one time.
Impossible difficulty: explain Miki's stopwatch.

there's too much symbolism to get into all of it here, but i'll go over some of the big ones. most symbols have multiple meanings or interpretations, but i'll stick to the main ones.

flowers are a huge deal, specifically roses. in duels there's the obvious metaphor for penetrative sex, and all the baggage that carries. when they show up in the corner or as part of a frame they usually are associated color wise with one of the characters in that scene, often to indicate that they're being Main Character-y for lack of a better term. flirting, looking cool, making an entrance. obviously not universal, but that's a rule of thumb that i'm pretty sure is accurate most of the time. outside that, colors are generally meant to represent things associated with the character of that color. for example, if there's a lot of orange on screen there's probably some unrequited love going on even if juri isn't around.
cars, and other methods of tranportation. represent masculinity and adulthood, as well as sex and other things that are commonly linked similarly in modern culture and in fiction. you make out in your car before you have your first time which makes you a man, etc. i wrote something previously somewhere about the car symbolism but i can't find it. but basically what i had to say was the car represents the impossible standards of toxic masculinity as made obvious in the scenes with touga. he's inviting others to ride in the car, because he's the pinnacle of masculinity among the students, as is clear from him winning against utena in the first arc. he's what saionji and to a lesser extent all the other characters want to be, he's student council president and is the most powerful character. but he can't actually live up to all that, so when he has to make his own moves without akio's support he instead has a much lamer bike with a sidecar. theres a lot more you could read into that re: his relationship with saionji, but i'll cut this short here.
touga's carrot represents his penis (bet that one slipped by you. it's super subtle and you need a massive brain to understand what him posing like that means)
coffins represent being trapped within your fear of death, or just being trapped in ohtori where you'll never age. lots of things around ohtori are shaped like coffins, or in ways that the camera can frame them as coffin shaped. you can only break out of your coffin by accepting that going into the painful unknown is better than staying behind, which is what happens to anthy in the last episode. utena breaks through the coffin and anthy realizes that the real world is worth living in and is finally able to leave akio, and therefore ohtori academy
the animals represent the fact that it's funny when animals do things you wouldn't normally expect them to. i'll go into more detail on this when discussing nanami, where i'll break down the meanings of her comedy episodes.
other symbols i can't get into include gardens, the statues, chuchu, and the hair styling choices of the character designers

mikage's whole deal is (imo) pretty simple. he is what happens when you try to work within the system. whether that system is our real world patriarchy, capitalism, or akio's dueling games, there's no way to win by playing by the rules. even when he tries to cheat, the system can absorb that, as shown by utena defeating every duelist in that arc very easily (outside wakaba, which is a whole can of worms i do not have time to get into here, but might at a later date) and at the end he's erased completely. it also links back thematically to miki's plotline, where mikage is seeing a fake version of mamiya, the real one having been replaced (as so many characters are) by an idealized image, always represented by anthy but here actually her in disguise, making the comparison even more clear. (iirc if you look at miki's flashback's he's replaced kozue's hairstyle with anthy's)

it's also when the true nature of ohtori academy as an eternal hotel california style garden becomes clear. tokiko leaves and ages, mikage stays and as such is incapable of growing beyond the person he was back then. it's only by escaping the frameworks and expectations imposed on us by society that we can truly become free. at the end of the series anthy has managed this, and (we hope) so has utena.

considering i said he was simple, he did have 3 separate points of importance i felt it was important to dig into, and he obviously has more (and you can go more in depth on all the points i make here of course). says something about this show that that's simple

in utena there are 3 brother sister pairs in the main cast. but really, they're all the same. on some level they've all got some incest going on, and the level of said incest kind of maps onto their positions. miki and kozue only really have vibes going on, nothing explicit. there isn't any real abuse going on, though the relationship is clearly unhealthy and both parties would strongly benefit from having friends apart from each other (and miki clearly does as shown by the badminton scene, which is a scene i just really love so much). miki idealizes the past in ways similar to how both akio/anthy and nanami do repeatedly. kozue as well, but less so.

then we get to nanami and touga. touga is clearly abusive towards nanami, having been manipulating her in ways that are borderline incestuous since before the series started, and shifting into more a abusive (and more incestuous) mode of interaction as the series goes on. i'll have more to say on this when discussing nanami turning into a cow, but for now i'll just say that these 2 relationships are (thematically at least, if not literally) what the akio/anthy relationship looked like at various points in the past. kozue and miki are codependent, but miki both wants to shelter kozue from what he perceives as threats, but also blames her to an extent for being the whore to the madonna he remembers from childhood, and sees in anthy now. i've always been curious how he would have reacted to seeing anthy how nanami did. meanwhile touga is trying to ramp up the abuse to the levels of constant sexual assault found in his mentor's relationship, while trying to groom miki (as well as kind of saionji, but he's on much more equal footing with saionji) in ways similar to how he has been groomed by akio. given how awful the stuff he does is, it's easy to forget that touga is also a child even if he's older than those he abuses, and the movie makes this even more explicit. if nanami didn't have the example of anthy to show that this sort of relationship is actually awful to live in she might not have resisted touga in that car. or maybe she would have! hard to say. but that's a good segue into the next topic, so i'll cap things off there for this bit.

there are 5 nanami episodes. nanami episodes are not to be confused with her duels, which are also good, but not what we're talking about here. nanami episodes involve funny animals tormenting her, presumably as punishment for that one time she drowned a kitten (despite this nanami is still my favorite character). the first nanami episode is entirely mundane. anthy is just too weird for nanami to embarrass when she can't sexually humiliate her in front of a massive crowd (which is a huge trigger for anthy, but nanami couldn't have known that). this gives us a fair amount of insight into how nanami sees the world and her place in it, with humiliation being the only possible response to any deviation from the norm. this is all pretty much ignorable at this time though, because it's a very goofy comedy episode. the next one is weird, but also mostly not relevant to what i'm talking about here. obviously tsuwabuki's whole deal has a lot of thematic relevance to the aforementioned fucked up sibling dynamics and the broader statements on gender roles to be found within utena, but if i chased every available tangent i'd be here all night. the curry bodyswap is the first nanami episode to clearly have a message directed from anthy to someone else (anthy's witch magic being responsible) but it's aimed at saionji. the rose bride is a perfect woman who would never reject a man, so she needs to put utena in a position to break saionji's heart for her in the hilarious exchange diary scene.

anyways the last 2 nanami episodes (not counting the recap episode) are the thematically super important ones. though 4 out of 5 nanami episodes are for sure anthy fucking with nanami, these 2 come with additional messages. nanami turns into a cow because she is so enamored with her own status that she's blinded to the realities around her. the reality of the cowbell is ignored because of the associated prestige. similarly, the fact that her relationship with touga grants her immense privilege within the school blinds her to his predatory treatment of her. This is made literal with the cow thing, as the song playing makes clear. it's about selling a cow to be slaughtered, and it predates utena by a while as a yiddish folk song. nanami's dreams about being sold off and consumed by touga are closer to reality than she realizes at the time, though she won't realize that for many episodes to come.

and then the last one is the egg episode. the egg represents coming into womanhood, your period, elegance, learning things about yourself (it isn't a coincidence that this episode prompts the bit where touga thinks nanami is coming out as gay to him.) it's also where it becomes impossible to view nanami's fears and anxieties and the way she sees the world as just something for the comedy episodes, and you're forced to interact with her as a character on the same level as the rest of the cast. it's also the first time we see her consciously go against her brother in a way that's purely selfish and that she actually thinks of as going against him. at the end it seems to be the case that the egg was in fact chuchu's and therefore has an obvious connection to anthy in the same way that all the other nanami episodes (minus the tsuwabuki one) do. my reading of these episodes is that anthy recognizes herself within nanami and moves to warn her where her relationship with touga is headed. but her warning is, seemingly, completely ignored. in fact nanami did listen, if not fully consciously, and recognizes herself in anthy in her last (2 part) duel episode. she ultimately manages to find a healthy distance from touga

and finally, to end on a lighter note we'll look at the stopwatch. here's an interview with ikuhara where he answers the question. "It has a very deep significance. His stopwatch contains the key to open all the mysteries of the world. And Mickey is the only one who knows that. So I don't know what it is either." so he's not helpful. i don't have a grand theory here, sometimes weird things do happen in utena without too much significance, though i have some ideas. at 6:13 in episode 17, nanami picks up and uses the stopwatch. at this time it reads 7:73, which can be read as "nanami" in japanese with goroawase. i don't have the time or the knowledge of japanese to go through the whole thing, but my guess is there's a lot of number puns in there. (edit from later: found a google spreadsheet of someone who documented these, and it holds up at several points)