Revolutionary Girl Utena is a Japanese anime television series created by Be-Papas, a production group formed by director Kunihiko Ikuhara and composed of himself, Chiho Saito, Shinya Hasegawa, Yōji Enokido and Yūichirō Oguro. The series was produced by J.C.Staff and originally aired on TV Tokyo from April to December 1997. Revolutionary Girl Utena follows Utena Tenjou, a teenaged girl who is drawn into a sword dueling tournament to win the hand of Anthy Himemiya, a mysterious girl known as the "Rose Bride" who possesses the "power to revolutionize the world".
Tomoko Kawakami was a Japanese voice actress. She was also known by her pen-name Tomozou (とも蔵), and her Christian name Cecilia (セシリア). Having graduated from the Toho Gakuen College of Drama and Music, she was a member of Production Baobab.
Kunihiko Ikuhara, also known by the nickname Ikuni, is a Japanese director, writer, artist, and music producer. He has created and collaborated on several notable anime and manga series, including Sailor Moon, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Penguindrum, Yurikuma Arashi, and Sarazanmai.
Shūji Terayama was a Japanese avant-garde poet, artist, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. His works range from radio drama, experimental television, underground (Angura) theatre, countercultural essays, to Japanese New Wave and "expanded" cinema.
Shinkichi Mitsumune is a Japanese composer who writes music primarily for anime.
Tadanori Yokoo is a Japanese graphic designer, illustrator, printmaker and painter. Yokoo’s signature style of psychedelia and pastiche engages a wide span of modern visual and cultural phenomena from Japan and around the world.
Karen Surenovich Khachaturian was a Soviet and Russian composer of Armenian ethnicity and the nephew of composer Aram Khachaturian.
Kan Mikami is a Japanese folk singer-songwriter and actor. His music, heavily influenced by American blues, was popular in Japan in the 1970s. He re-wrote the lyric of the song "Yume wa Yoru Hiraku" for his cover version in 1972, which was banned for its negative portrayal of modern Japanese culture. Mikami also acted in cinema and is notable for collaborations with Shūji Terayama and his avant-garde theater Tenjō Sajiki. His autobiography, A Life in Folk, was translated into English and published in 2017 by Public Bath Press of Nara, Japan.
Tenjō Sajiki, also Tenjou Sajiki, was a Japanese independent theater troupe co-founded by Shūji Terayama and whose members include Kohei Ando, Kujō Kyōko, Yutaka Higashi, Tadanori Yokoo, and Fumiko Takagi.
Aquirax Uno, is the alias of Akira Uno, a Japanese graphic artist, illustrator and painter. His work is characterized by fantasized portraiture, sensuous line flow, flamboyant eroticism, and frequent use of collage and bright colors. Uno was prominently involved with the Japanese underground art of the 1960s–1970s, and is particularly notable for his collaborations with Shūji Terayama and his experimental theater Tenjō Sajiki.
Pastoral: To Die In The Country, also known as Pastoral Hide and Seek, is a 1974 Japanese coming-of-age experimental artistic surrealistic fantasy autobiographical drama film directed by Shūji Terayama. The film employs a film-within-film structure, depicting a young man wrestling with the film he is attempting to complete - a reimagination of his adolescence. It was entered into the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.
Yutaka Ikejima is a Japanese film director, actor, and producer. Considered the most successful filmmaker in the pink film genre in the 2000s, his films are popular with traditional pink film audiences, fans of cinema, and with critics. Because of his prolific contributions to the pink film he has earned the nickname "Mr. Pink".
Adolescence of Utena is a 1999 Japanese anime film. It is a follow-up to the 1997 anime television series Revolutionary Girl Utena, created by the artist collective Be-Papas. The film is directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara, written by Yōji Enokido based on a story by Ikuhara and produced by the animation studio J.C.Staff. An English-language dubbed version of the film produced by Central Park Media was released in 2001 as Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie.
Rio Kishida was a Japanese playwright and director. She wrote several plays about women and the problems they faced in a patriarchal society that run parallel with the second wave of the feminist movement in Japan. Even though she did not strictly identify herself as a feminist, she believed that the system of a male dominated society had to change in order for women to gain equal rights as their male counterpart.
Isao Yamada is Japanese film director, graphic artist, and manga author.
Angura (アングラ), also known as the "Little Theater" movement, was a Japanese avant-garde theater movement in the 1960s and 1970s that reacted against the Brechtian modernism and formalist realism of postwar Shingeki theater in Japan to stage anarchic "underground" productions in tents, on street corners, and in small spaces that explored themes of primitivism, sexuality, and embodied physicality. The term "Angura" was an abbreviation of the Japanese phrase "underground theater".
Izumi Suzuki was a Japanese writer and actress, known for her science fiction stories and essays on Japanese pop culture. Married to avant-garde saxophonist Kaoru Abe until his death from overdose, she is also known for her association with photographer Nobuyoshi Araki.
Kohei Ando is a Japanese experimental filmmaker, videographer, director, cinematographer, screenwriter, executive producer, and Professor Emeritus of Cinema at Waseda University. He is credited as one of the earliest figures in the rise of video art in Japan during the 1960s and 1970s, and a pioneer in Japanese experimental filmmaking.
