Thread by @ohtori_nu

#UTENA STORY TIME! This image circulates pretty readily on account of being beautiful and gay af. However, keen observers notice that only a fraction of it appears to have been used in the closing credit sequence. So how, you ask, do I have this small image of the actual cel???

In 2010, this cel sold on Yahoo! Japan for what was, at the time, a pretty obscene amount. The auction closed at 244,000Y, or about $2,250 US. This is comical amount to an insane Utena fan in 2021, we'd have this shit twice as high, lmao...

The image I have in the gallery is from the auction. However. That's not how the story ends... togetter.com/li/60425
According to widely circulated but now I think? deleted? tweets by Ikuhara, the faces were never drawn for the ED credits, and the image was finished digitally.

*HOWEVER.* He does confirm that this cel was made in house, not for the ED credits, but for a magazine or some other thing that requested the picture of them kissing from the ending, where there was never a complete image. So the question is....is it 'real?'

The answer is of course hell yes, if it was made in house it's legit, even if it wasn't used for the purpose we thought, imo. Oh, and before you compare it to the ED credits to check, keep in mind that the remaster you're all familiar with itself cleaned up this image:

It's most noticeable on Utena's gem and epaulet, and the curve of the bottom of Anthy's open sleeve, and that in the original, they screwed up the background so that parts of it have the blue sky and other parts do not.

In other words, three 'legit' iterations of this image exist. The OG (that Ikuhara asserts was at least partially digital?), the full size cel that was made in house and sold, and the digitally remastered version that is now the default.

And that's the tale of the canon kiss!