5: “THE SUNLIT GARDEN - FINALE” [EPISODE 5]

5: “THE SUNLIT GARDEN - FINALE” [EPISODE 5]

Around that time in production, I read an interview with a certain pair of pop idols in a magazine I was thumbing through at the store.

“Our motto is ‘get hold of eternity.’ It’s a brilliantly glittering thing.”

I was a little surprised.

“Get hold of eternity” was such an abstract phrase, and yet for some reason, I readily accepted it. It was as if from that single phrase I could indirectly sense the details that shaped their personalities; the look of the place where they grew up; what they saw of current affairs on the TV news; the manga, anime, and popular songs that affected them. Call it the empathy between contemporaries, I guess.

When I brought it up with Enokido, who was doing the screenplays, he was onboard. Up until that point, we’d spent a lot of time arguing in the abstract about the spirit of the show, but I felt like it was a few words from these pop idols that got us to the heart of the matter.

At the same time, the process of producing this two-parter set of episodes brought home to me again that Utena is a story about the relationship between characters. When you get right down to it, this series is a story about the relationship between Utena and Anthy. So I decided to apply that same style to the stories of the supporting characters, too.

From then on, I would be very conscious of “get hold of eternity” and “a story about relationships” as key motifs of the show.