Utena is one of the most rigorously systematized narratives I've found, I can think of no story that so efficiently turns "people who didn't hate high school english" into active analysts of literature. What I find really interesting about this is that it gets to that point by changing its structure significantly, almost into something that doesn't totally act like a narrative?
Utena is cyclical in structure, acting as a series of expositions of its characters that increase in depth and penetration of the patriarchal narrative. all of its characters are strongly allegorical reflections of a set of relations (either three-part, patriarchy-oppressed-liberator, or two-part, patriarchy-oppressed). They have traits, that's what's great about them, but those traits never prevent them from being read very immediately as narrative functions (this also parallels how fairy tales work in a fun way).
These cycles of exposition are generated through the establishment, alteration, and expansion of motifs--burning coffins, sports cars, roses, shadows, you know the drill. All of these motifs, again, have a lot of clear symbolic resonance. They *look* like symbols. In this way Utena primes readers to read itself, making its entire structure orbit around ideas that are defined and placed within systems of other ideas until it reaches a climax of understanding, which the reader experiences *through Utena* as she processes the symbols of her own narrative at the same time we process the actual story of Utena.
But given all this, the end product is something that is structured like a sort of veiled compromise between shoujo anime and feminist philosophy. The archetypal responses to male domination are explored in their detail, their internal contradictions and complicities with patriarchal logics are explored, Utena recognizes through conflict with them the problematics inherent in her own uncritical assumption of the mantle of "prince", etc. It's kind of dialectical, actually.
What's fascinating, though, is that despite this Utena affirms its status as a story rather than a system by resolving itself in an act of creative destruction: Utena frees Anthy, and their "happy ending" is the anarchic void that systematic thinkers are really afraid of: an absence of legitimation, the vaunting of poetic desire, the flattening of hierarchy. By formatting itself in its intensely structuralist matter, its destruction of its own narrative conventions exposes the reader to the significance of its freedom--and this, I would argue, is a move that only a tale unbound by an obligation to retain its own logics could do.
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