The bird is fighting its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wishes to be born must destroy a world. The bird is flying to God. The god is named Abraxas.
—Herman Hesse, Demian
Revolutionary Girl Utena, episode 16: “The Cowbell of Happiness.” Directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara. Character designs by Chiho Saito. Be-Papas, 1997 (Nozomi Entertainment, 2011). Approx. 24 minutes. Rated “16+.”
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This is, hands down, the worst episode in Revolutionary Girl Utena. It’s also one of the weirdest, which is saying something.
We have reached another of the so-called “Nanami episodes,” that is, filler episodes starring Nanami, the spoiled little sister of the student council president Touga. Nanami, just as a reminder, is not even a character in the manga version, but she gets lots and lots of screen time to herself in the anime.
Most of the episodes focused around Nanami involve her trying to show off or get the better of someone else, and getting owned for it. This is in that same vein.
The story of this episode is quite simple: Nanami is holding a party to show off an expensive new piece of jewelry, but before she can even make reveal and receive the praise of her sycophantic admirers, Juri walks in and effortlessly upstages her with a unique necklace from a top designer.
All is not lost, however: a mysterious package appears, and the emblem on it reveals it to be from the world-famous designer Sebastian Dior (a joke on Christian Dior, obviously). Nanami opens the package, puts on the jewelry inside—
And it’s a cowbell. Nanami is wearing a cowbell. That’s pretty much this episode’s only joke, and it proceeds to drive it into the ground.
Nanami continues to wear her new cowbell, convinced that she is the epitome of fashion, while everyone else continues to stare in shock. As the episode proceeds, Nanami grows more cow-like in her behavior: she eats all the time, grows docile and content, and finally wanders into a field where she starts eating grass. Tsuwabuki, her fifth-grade “boyfriend” we met in an earlier episode, is concerned, so he runs to Utena for help.
It’s pretty much all filler, and even the official commentary sounds embarrassed. There’s an attempt to explain the episode by claiming it’s hearkening to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but if you buy that, I have a bridge for you.
That being said, it has some interesting moments. At one point, Utena confronts Nanami over her cowbell, and Nanami fires back that Utena has no place to talk, dressing as she does in a boy’s uniform.
Perhaps more striking, Touga has a brief speaking part. Some of the filler episodes were shuffled around before the show saw its final broadcast order, so I suspect that they’d probably recorded his part already, since his voice actor was on another project during this arc.
Also, although the episode is pretty weird and pointless overall, there are hints that Anthy is, once again, engineering everything, whether unconsciously or deliberately. Much as in the episode with the explosive curry powder, it turns out that Anthy was behind it all. Since it’s a gag episode, this might easily slip past us, but since Anthy is the catalyst of so much else that goes on in this show, this humiliation of Nanami might further deepen our suspicions that Anthy really is doing it on purpose.
As an added note of interest, Ikuhara has commented that he made this episode, and especially its climactic scene, to annoy Nanami’s fans.
… She has fans?
