While Sailor Moon puts together a number of conventions and stereotypes for magical girls, director Ikuhara Kunihiko and perhaps his writer Enokido Yōji seem to have a penchant for simultaneously deconstructing various aspects of that role (Enokido also wrote the excellent Star Driver series, which plays with the “hero” and “good girl” archetypes). In Sailor Moon SuperS, there is an episode with little other point than investigating “what would happen if the Sailor Senshi had a battle in a kitchen”.
In a moment of work-avoidance, I started re-watching in Revolutionary Girl Utena (though based on the Japanese 少女革命, it could also be Girl Revolutionary or Girl Revolution) and it turns out that having seen Sailor Moon since the last time was enlightening. In what might be seen as a continuation of the deconstruction trend, the repeating duel scene takes the taking-apart to a more abstract level.
While Utena isn’t nominally a magical girl, I would see that the duel has the elements of a magical girl battle. Utena herself is the girl, while the magical artifact is personified as Anthy. During the transformation sequence, Anthy performs the transformation choreography, but it is Utena’s dress that transforms (just enough to give the idea of transformation from the mundane to the sphere of magic). I would argue that in Sailor Moon, the artifact-of-the-day is a conduit for a greater power (such as that of the Moon Kingdom), and not a major source of power in itself. In Utena, Anthy qua artifact is a conduit for the power of Dios.
In a traditional magical girl battle, power is manifested as spell-style attacks such as fireballs and snake-like chains. Utena rarefies this power into one of the its most concrete form, the sword. Also, as Sailor Moon can gain the power of a greater entity in addition to that conveyed through the artifact when the going gets tough, as a special heroine Utena can also gain an additional power beyond that of the sword of Dios itself. This is again rarefied into a concrete skill, that of ultimate swordsmanship. This “raw” power conveyed without a conduit could even said to be greater than that of the “usual” power conveyed through the artifact. As Sailor Moon can defeat enemies that have withstood the combined attacks of the Sailor Senshi, Utena can defeat Saionji wielding only a cut bamboo sword or Tōga with little more than a handle of Jury’s sword.
Separating the artifact into the person of Anthy also enables a wider-ranging investigation into the nature of magical artifacts. For one, in traditional series, enemies rarely gain the possession of the artifact (except perhaps for a short while during the ending), while the possession of Anthy is gained, lost and regained. However, while this confers powers on the “bad guys”, the power cannot match the power gained beyond the power of the artifact by the special heroine.
Secondly, Anthy initially reflects the traditional character of magical artifacts as mostly amoral and unconcerned with the surrounding world. While the good guys/girls may use them for good, there is no fundamental obstacle to them being used by the bad guys for whatever. She doesn’t really care if she’s slapped around. All implications of this item are not yet quite clear to me [and may be updated later], but the “socialization” of Anthy by Utena, that is, the humanization of a magical artifact into a moral being and its significance is one interesting facet (which kind of reminds me of the humanized magical-technological artifacts of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha).
(At this point I should probably mention that “bad guys” is used here as a shorthand for “adversaries”. Those of Utena are rarely “bad” in any moral sense; they are again an abstraction of bad guy concept into something like an agent of higher forces, whose own nature and motives become inconsequential in the face of their agent-being. In the light of the Sailor Stars manga ending, I think Sailor Moon’s adversaries are much of the same underneath the decorations.)
Finally, there is the process of the duel itself. Magical girls may exorcise demons, but they almost never kill anyone. The baddies who cannot be rehabilitated are usually destroyed by other baddies or by their power running out. Magical girl battles are also highly formalized: there is a definite time for pronouncements, for transformations, for preliminary attacks and for the final strike. The Utena duel scene abstracts the whole messy process into a fencing match with a similar set of rules; however, seldom does anyone get hurt in a permanent manner beyond a few scratches. Rather, a token is taken. In Sailor Moon, this would be symbolized by foiling yet another bad guys’ plot. In Utena, it is simply cutting the petals off the opponent’s rose.
Also, the duel scenes sometimes fade the duelists into black silhouettes while Anthy stands in the middle of the scene, visible in her red dress. While obviously this stresses what the object of the duel is, I think it could also be read as stressing who/what brings about the elements of power in the duel.
Sailor Moon is a highly intertextual show that invites the decoding of its symbols and references (which is the subject of a whole another kettle of fish). While Utena has a similar outward appearance and many have attempted to explain all the spinning roses, I’ve come to think that Utena is more about a limited number of formalized, abstract ideas and the symbol-esque things are rather meant as a flow over and through the viewer. Ikuhara has allegedly claimed that they are “something we just came up with that looks cool”. In a sense, I think that is the truth, though not the whole of it.
(The Adolescence of Utena is quite another thing from the original TV series. Seeing how it partially reverses the roles of Utena and Anthy, this framework probably isn’t applicable there.)