Stefan Gagne and utena@duellists.tj's
If Other Directors Made Utena! List (version 1.0)
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Quentin Tarantino's Shoujo Kakumei Utena. Anshi and Utena discuss the
significant symbolism in a Scooby Doo episode, then shotgun Akio in the
face and go have sex.

Oliver Stone's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Even MORE surreal and
incomprehensible than the first! Now with more crossfades, insert shots of
symbolic objects and lots more BLOOD!"

Michael Bay's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Every shot last three seconds or less
and there's crazy colored lighting everywhere, and in the end, Utena and
Akio square off on an asteroid coming at earth while escaped convicts make
airplanes explode.

Clive Barker's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Everybody goes to hell and has a lot
of suggestive homosexual erotic poses while fighting bloodsoaked demons.

Wes Craven's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Like Clive's but with less
homosexuality and more bad jokes.

James Cameron's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Stunningly realistic, fifty nine
hours long and with a budget in the range of 450 million dollars... with
no conclusive ending. It just goes until the money runs out.

Kevin Smith's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Everybody sits around the school
talking about all sorts of bullshit and they throw in a lot of dick
jokes.

Mamoru Oshii's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Utena starts investigating what's
really going on in Akio's master plan, with Anshi as an uncaring
assistant. There are lots of still shots and a few sequences moving
through the school slowly while playing creepy music and eventually
there's a large scale fight followed by a quiet moment of reflection.

Hype Williams's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Everything is in really bright neon
colors and everybody wears shiny clothing. All camera angles are low and
people fight while sparklies float through the air.

Alan Smithee's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - The script is awkward and Anshi
swears like a sailor while Utena keeps saying the same things over and
over. Editing is choppy and the story doesn't make any sense when it
finishes. Everybody on set blames everybody else for what went wrong.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Lots of obscene jokes
involving Chuchu, and Anshi would die in every episode.  Utena learns
something vaguely resembling an important lesson each time after
slaughtering everybody in the school or destroying the place. Touga is
heard shouting 'YEAH I want Cheesy Poofs!!'.

Woody Allen's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Opens to black on white text and old
music for credits. Utena is very neurotic and makes lots of bad jokes
about being the victor. Anshi is even more messed up.  Everything goes
wrong then everything goes right then things just sort of get confusing
and folks remain neurotic by the time it's finished.

Disney's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Chuchu can talk and is voiced by Jim
Carrey. Utena tries to show the moral lesson of the day which is usually
'Stealing is bad!' or 'Violence is wrong!' or 'Don't do drugs!'. Akio is a
really bad guy but makes a lot of jokes. There is nothing even vaguely
resembling sex and Touga stays in the closet. In the end there's a big
swordfight and Utena saves the day and everybody is happy. Happy Meal toys
are made but recalled when a small child swallows one of the plastic
Million Swords. A pop soundtrack including a track from Mariah Carrey and
Michael Bolton is released. Disney reaps revenues and ties up Ikuhara and
puts him in a closet so nobody can hear his screams of protest.

Dreamwork's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - No change.

David Cronenberg's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - More dream sequences involving
distorted flesh and phallic imagery. Whenever Utena withdraws the Sword of
Dios, a vagina appears in Anshi's chest to pull it from. Everybody has
extremely disturbing homosexual sex involving bondage with medical
equipment. In the end, Akio's head explodes. Then everybody dies.

Ed Wood's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Akio is a vampire ghost and Anshi is a
reanimated corpse. Several actors are relatives of the producers. The
script was written in a day or two and has many scenes that were jumbled
out of order in editing. Every now and then he runs off into some editing
tagent involving stock footage of buffalo. Touga is replaced with Tor
Johnson, and Utena is actually Ed Wood in drag.

Roland Emmerich's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Whole setting is moved to New
York. We see many two dimensional personalities and crack a lot of bad
jokes, and eventually blow up every major city on the planet in the
process of revolution, but the ending is megahappy and everybody feels
good despite everybody dying.

George Lucas's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Details are scarce due to extreme
secrecy on the set, but when they release a trailer for it, people
stampede into theatres, injuring 178 and killing 4.

Gus Van Sant's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - No change, but for some reason, he
refilmed everything exactly the way it was in Ikuhara's save one scene
with masturbation and the addition of a few White Zombie songs.

John Carpenter's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Utena turns into a cigarette
smoking, sunglasses wearing antihero. Akio is a vampire. Lots of fairly
good jokes and plenty of bullets and a lot of misogeny.

Todd McFarlane's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Nobody's sure what went wrong in
the process of writing the script, but the end result is really watered
down, has many bad jokes and sucked up a budget of phenominal size for
very a unconvincing co mputer graphics monster version of Chuchu.

Joel Schumacher's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Crazy colored lighting
everywhere, and there are now nipples on Utena's armor. The sets are
amazing, but the camera swings around so wildly we never get a good look
at them. Akio is gayer than ever but not nearly as well developed a
villian, and wears costumes that would make a peacock dizzy.

Orson Welles' Shoujo Kakumei Utena - In black and white and featuring an
ending that comes before its beginning, a series of flashbacks look back
to try and figure out who Utena was. Eventually they fail to find out what
the word 'Chuchu' meant.

Alfred Hitchcock's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - The complacent Utena is bored
with school and hoping something interesting will happen. A wrong turn
takes her into a duel on a black and white checkered floor arena from a
high camera angle, and the pessimist character Akio sucks her into a
cinematic night journey she needs to grow to escape from.  Violence
typically happens offscreen or very quickly.

Brian de Palma's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Utena just got out of detention
for passing notes in class, but gets sucked into Akio's student underworld
of crime and corruption against her will. She struggles to save Anshi from
it but is killed by the end. Lots of circular rotating camera angles and
70's music.

Cecil B. DeMills's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - A huge musical with all these
wonderful STARS! Expensive, elaborately painted and colored (and fake
looking) sets, lots of musical numbers including 'I Am The Rose' and 'A
duel, A duel I must' and 'Let My Anshi Go'. Everybody ends up happy,
except Akio, who melts when they tossed a bucket of water on him.

Terry Gilliam's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Quirky and irreverent, and almost
incomprehensible with lots of wide angle lens shots and drug trip
sequences. Utena might possibly be insane or dreaming but it's impossible
to tell because reality refuses to clarify itself at any point in time
assuming she's actually in time or not. In the end we're not sure exactly
who won.

Monty Python's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Silly and absurd, with a funny
sequence involving cutting off all of Seiji's limbs. Plenty of little
animated cutout cartoons with Chuchu. After an hour and a half of
slapstick humor, sex jokes and head-scratching gags, the whole thing ends
when Akio has Utena arrested for sexual harassment.

Akira Kurosawa's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - A five hour samurai epic filmed in
black and white involving a lot of sitting around and talking. Actual
duels are finished in a single swordstroke. There is very little music.
The students act like one character and are always panicking. In the end,
they defeat Akio, but almost everybody dies in the process.

The Coen Brother's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Quirky humor which sometimes
feels like a long string of nonsequitors, Utena moves from duel to duel in
a bewildered state of jokes and confusion. Weird shotwork and the
occasional highly phallic dream of roses puncture through the film until
in the end we're left wondering exactly what happened. Also includes lots
of bowling, peeling wallpaper and diapers.

Joss Whedon's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Still set in high school, but Utena
struggles continually with her 'destiny as the Victor', fluctuating
between acceptance and denial. Akio as the principal is merely one person
in a town-wide conspiracy and Ootori Gakuen is actually sitting on top of
a Hellmouth, thus meaning duels happen every five minutes with
supernatural creatures. Utena's friends are much, much quirkier and she
has sex with Touga, ONCE, causing him to lose his soul and create a third
season FULL of angst.

David Lynch's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Many, many voiceovers to let us
'hear' the thoughts of the characters. Plenty of surreal dream imagery
involving roses, hands crashing drops of water and horrifying monkeymice.
Everything starts out nice in a happy garden in the suburbs outside school
but eventually gets dragged into a depraved world of hedonism. Akio snorts
back laughing gas whenever he can. Any abuse of Anshi is on screen and
highly graphic. Characters can sometimes appear in two places at once for
no explained reason whatsoever. Whole thing closes on a strange shot that
doesn't quite illustrate what happened in the revolution and the closing
song is by Marilyn Manson.

David Fincher's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Utena is played like a puppet from
word one, with many plot twists forcing us to wonder exactly who is in
control of who. Lots of dark. LOTS of dark, lots of shadows. Half the
movie is filmed at night . In director's commentary, the man is obsessed
with lighting. Eventually Akio turns out to be Utena's long lost brother
in a strange twist of fate and Utena destroys him then jumps off a
building, proving a highly depressing and ironic fate, except to be saved
when it turned out all to be a game hosted by Anshi.

Nick Park's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - It's the loveable adventures of Utena,
living a modern lifestyle on the outskirts of campus with her faithful
companion Chuchu. They have a lot of cool machines to serve breakfast and
the like. When they get involved in the duels, there's a hillarious bit
where Akio is dropped into a rose-cleaning machine and comes out as a
Terminator like android with mechanical trousers.  Eventually everything
ends up well and they return to their happy normal lives.

Peter Jackson's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - A strange tale involving ghosts
(Dios), lesbians (Anshi), zombies (Akio) and puppets from hell (Chuchu).
Lots of slapstick humor with computer graphics that puts the film way over
budget but it has a cool soundtrack by Danny Elfman.  Everything ends up
super happy but not after bending reality on its ear more than once in
quirky and amusing ways.

Peter Chung's Shoujo Kakumei Utena- Everyone is dressed in fetish
clothing, and have the body proportions of mutant spiders. Utena and Akio
are lovers, brother and sister, enemies, and possibly also father and
daughter as well; they have sex in the middle of duels and at any other
time possible. Long, surreal dialogue sequences expound at length on
individual will versus external will, and Utena randomly dies from stupid
clumsiness every so often. The symbolism makes no sense, except to
itself, and there's no coherent storyline at all.

The Farrelly Brother's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Lots and lots and lots and
lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of mastrubation jokes.
Lots of snot jokes. Lots of fart jokes. Utena gets her pubic hair caught
in her zipper in one scene, and Akio is played by Jim Carrey and gets to
pull his taffylike face all over the place. Makes a surprising amount of
money at the box office, encouraging more drivel of a similar nature.

Martin Scorcese's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - A gritty look at the criminal mob
(also known as the 'Student Council') at campus. Utena starts out as a
meager freshman but quickly works her way up in the ranks while providing
voiceover narration . Becomes involved with Anshi which gets her tangled
up with Akio in a number of unexpected backstabs and accidents and duels
and eventually everybody's lives are destroyed in a montage played back
with classic rock while Utena escapes and changes her name to live life in
peace.

Jon Kricfalusi's Shoujo Kakumei Utena- Utena and Anshi are reinvented as a
nervous, irritable chihuahua (Utena) and an extremely moronic fat cat
(Anshi). Although it starts out merely quirky and in sometimes
questionable bad taste, the show quickly falls prey to infighting and its
lowest point comes when Utena rips out her own female organ for a
'comedic' sequence- shortly after that the show is cancelled. Episodes
are ALWAYS late and unfinished, set to strange 50's commercial ditties,
and the relationships are all perverted and sadistic. It's also not very
funny. Duels aren't even present, and Akio only appears as a sadistic pet
trainer.

Rumiko Takahashi's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - A wacky romantic comedy! Utena
accidentally gets engaged to Anshi in a duel, and of course they're at
each other's throats and Anshi keeps calling Utena a tomboy.  Chuchu turns
out to be one of Utena's long lost rivals who fell in Spring of Drowned
Monkeymouse. Touga waves around a bokken and bad poetry in a surprisngly
cool and effective way, but after losing his duel is relegated to cheap
comic relief. Akio never gets defeated and nothing ever gets changed and
after 36 volumes of the same thing over and over it ends on a fakeout
ending that doesn't actually revolutionize anything.

Hal Warren's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Utena shows up at the mysterious
abandoned school where she meets Chuchu, a lanky guy with a funny hat who
talks with halting, stumbling pauses. Whenever he walks, a 6 second loop
of irritating music follows him. Eventually she's sucked into the dark
satanic cult of Akio, a guy who wears red and black robes with roses
imprinted on them and leads around a yapping terrier dog, and has a bunch
of wives in white gowns who catfight in the dust at the drop of a hat. Was
featured on Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

Masami Obari's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Tastes great, less filling. 90
frames per second animation for all ascensions and powerups, but the rest
of the show is only 10 fps- Utena and Anshi have HUGE...  tracts of land,
and wear extremely skimpy clothing- the Bride's gown is abbreviated to a
pair of shorts. Akio, Touga, and the male members of the Student Council
(even Miki) become middleweight champions in size- there's even MORE yaoi,
and even MORE sex between Akio and Utena, much more steamily presented.
But the plot is basically nothing but a long sequence of duels that don't
even use swordplay, just lots and lots of martial arts.  Everyone whines
that they liked Obari's work much more when he was directing BGC.

Hideaki Anno's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Utena whines all the time about how
much everybody hates her. Anshi doesn't seem to say much, as usual. Akio
sits behind his desk with his hands folded in front of his mouth when he
talks because the budget is starting to run low.  Eventually, revolution
comes, and because all of mankind's fate was left in the hands of one
neurotic bag of mental problems, Utena screws the pooch, wakes up next to
Anshi and strangles her to death, then comments that 'This ending sucks'.

Tim Burton's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Everybody is even taller and more
stick-thin than they were before, with larger eyes.  Everything is done in
shades of black and white, with the occasional blue thrown in. Johnny Depp
plays Akio. All duels are done in slow motion with beautiful Danny Elfman
music while inside a large snow globe, but the ending leaves audiences
fairly flat. Destined to be a cult classic.

Yoshiyuki Tomino's Shoujo Kakumei Utena- an epic war story in space
spanning fifteen generations and several dozen worlds, where the
Revolutionaries and the Neo-Ootori duke it out with gigantic mecha set to
operatic sweeping music. Almost everyone dies, leaving Utena and Akio to
fight bitterly with their Newtype powers to the death, although they
love each other. It's not clear if Akio actually DIES or not; he
appears in 14 other sequels. Utena goes insane at the end and has to be
put in an institution, but she's revitalized for later sequels. Character
intrigue puts most soap operas to shame, but despite being 'the next stage
of man' all newtype characters just kind of sit around and do for
themselves.

Sam Raimi's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Utena is a badass S-Mart clerk with a
gunblade ala FF8, and shows up to clean out Ootori Campus of the undead!
In a long series of running battles where the camera is sometimes swung
down on ropes, and where she falls for Anshi who then is turned into a
demon and then gets into a big slapstick fight, she eventually fights Akio
for about eleven minutes to the point where the orchestra gives up trying
to make it exciting and then blows him up with a flaming catapult. Anshi
and Utena drive off in an Oldsmobile to live happily ever after unless you
have the secret 'real ending' where she goes to sleep and wakes up after
the apocalypse.

Paul Verhoeven's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Lots of lesbian sex, lots of
stripping, lots of splatter and violence, lots of totalitarian propaganda,
big robots, coed showers, big guns, sex, sex, splatter, violence and
something vaguely resembling a plot. Director insists it's artistic.

Squaresoft's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Pretty, flashy special effects veil a
plot even more confusing and misleading than the original.  Red herring
sequences seem to imply that Anshi was born to die for a mysterious reason
and that her death will revolutionize the world. But is the revolution
also the end of mankind? No one knows. 30 minutes of Akio's planetarium
projecting star footage ends the story, which spans several continents and
a thousand cities, makes reference to OTHER stories that happened before
Utena was born, but ultimately after 90 hours just leaves you wondering
why you spent 90 hours on it.

John Romero's Shoujo Kakumei Utena - Delayed by about a year, with many
crew members walking off the set. Reports of the director's fits of rage
and failure to cooperate with others, and an actual rumor of his death
float around. Game is promised in the next fiscal quarter, honest, we
mean it this time, really.

Nintendo's Shoujo Kakumei Utena 64 - All references to sexuality removed,
all violence cleaned up. When repackaged, features the ability to train
duellists you defeat to fight for you, as you go around collecting roses
from the duel champions. Eventually you fight your rival, Akio, but the
only real way to win is to defeat all 150 duellists which is impossible
without trading duellists with a friend -- after getting all 150, your
reward is a little congratulatory message instead of the revolution.  Also
expected soon is Shoujo Kakumei Anshi 64, a special version which lets
Anshi follow you around on screen and supposedly follows the plot of the
anime closer.

What, you haven't had enough?  Want more?