As discussed in Part 1, Shiori’s locket in the Japanese anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena (Kunihiko Ikuhara, 1997) begins as a sealed object that preserves an image and holds desire in place. Once opened, it is no longer an object or vessel made to sustain the appearance of stillness and the stable fantasy that it contains. In this second blog post, I will place the “Black Rose Saga” in dialogue with Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Blue (1993), drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek to think through fetish, fantasy, and the strange space “between two deaths.”

Revolutionary Girl Utena, the Japanese anime television series that first aired in 1997, follows Tenjō Utena, a tomboyish girl who dreams of becoming a prince and knight in shining armour. Upon entering the fantastical and highly hierarchical Ohtori Academy, Utena soon entangles herself in the ritualised duels of the Student Council, fighting for the mysterious Rose Bride, Himemiya Anthy, a figure objectified by those who compete for her hand. The series has a particular cyclical structure, with each episode lasting less than 30 minutes and structured into three narrative sections—episodes 1 to 13 form the “Student Council Saga”, episodes 14 to 23 comprise the “Black Rose Saga”, and episodes 24 to 39 conclude with the “Apocalypse Saga”. The structural arrangements highlight the series’ heightened theatricality, resulting in a tightly choreographed work with a recursive and self-reflexive mode of storytelling. As the series unfolds, Utena’s story spirals into a vibrant phantasmagoria with variations on themes of adolescence, trauma, desire, and revolution.

When Arcane (Riot Games/Fortiche Production, 2021–) first came out, most people focused on how beautiful it looked. And that makes sense. The painterly animation is striking right away. But what really makes the series stand out is something deeper. It shows class conflict in a way that feels almost physical. Not just through the story, but through the world itself. In Arcane, inequality is not explained to you. You see it instantly.

Upon watching an animated television programme or a feature film, we do not always think about how it came to be. I do not mean what was involved in the production process, or the direction, rather about why it looks the way it does. Indeed, the American animation industry, over the course of a hundred years, has continually changed and evolved from what it has been before in drastic ways. With indie authors becoming more and more prominent within the animated landscape, we might witness a further new tide in the industry regarding the kinds of stories being told and explorations into the medium’s creative freedom. Still, since I was a child U.S. animation has evoked many questions in my mind. How did the American animation industry evolve over the course of its existence? How have it changed to become what it is now?

Anyone who has spent some time at film festivals will be familiar with a certain tendency in non-fiction cinema: film-makers turning process into therapy, and their film itself into a document of their psychological and personal journey as they deal with unsolved family issues or the need to find identity or come to terms with loss or (rarely) happier aspects of the human condition. A number of titles come to mind even as I type: from Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie (2015) to Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s How to Save a Dead Friend (2022). It is very much a formula, the popularity of which owes more than a little to the widely-held belief, among programmers and agents, that these films fulfil their obligation to the art-house crowds (you can’t go wrong with meta-cinema) while also basking in the broader appeal of shared human experiences.

Hoppers (Daniel Chong, 2026) is a true return to form for Pixar, albeit in more of a “shitpost” example of Pixar just having fun. The marketing leads you into thinking Hoppers is going to be an Avatar-esque film about environmentalism and yes, it is that but it slowly turns into a roller coaster ride of unpredictability and surrealism, somewhat akin to Monty Python and the Flying Circus (1969-1974) or a late 90s-era “gag” anime like Excel Saga (Shinichi Watanabe, 1999-2000). If that sort of millennials to early-boomer-humour is your style, then Hoppers will be for you (and if you’re like me and literally grew up alongside Andy in the Toy Story [1995-] movies, then Hoppers aligns up with your sense of humour, developed in the mid-2000s to early 2010s).

Over the last twenty years, the province of Quebec in Canada has built an internationally recognized cultural and digital ecosystem, particularly in the visual effects (VFX) (Mikros Animation, Rodeo FX) and animation (Cinesite, National Film Board) sectors. In 2023, these production studios and facilities represented more than $1.4 billion in revenue and thousands of jobs in Quebec, thanks largely to heavy involvement in successful foreign productions and fiscal benefits. However, in recent years, this business model has shown its weaknesses: the workers strike from the American entertainment union SAG-AFTRA in summer 2023, followed by the Quebec government's decision in May 2024 to cap tax credits for foreign entertainment companies employing in Quebec – reducing the credit rebate from 100% to 65% (Bongiorno 2024) – highlighted the structural precariousness of the local workforce (Arsenault, 2024).

When Wes Anderson unveiled his new stop-motion film Isle of Dogs in 2018, audiences perhaps expected another symphony of symmetry, irony, and warm absurdity. But here the action had shifted to Japan — a country whose aesthetic seems to reflect Anderson's style: strict and ritualistic, yet poetic and meaningful. Needless to say, Anderson has always been a Japanophile with a profound respect for Japanese art. "Some of the main inspirations for the film were Kurosawa's film noirs of the early 1960s, “The Bad Sleep Well” (1960) and “High and Low” (1963)," said Isle of Dogs production designer Nathan Harrod (qtd. in Desowitz, 2018). Indeed, Megasaki, the fictional city where the story unfolds, looks like a futuristic version of Yokohama from High and Low in particular, while Mayor Kobayashi is based quite directly on actor Toshiro Mifune, who played businessman Gondo in the Kurosawa’s film.