Friday, October 5, 2012

Anno Domini 2015

As much as I avoid referring to the things I write here as reviews (a practice meant to avoid the pressure of ever feeling like this is something I should do in any way remotely professionally, or regularly), I should note that what follows is even less like a professional review than normal.

So.

It’s late September or early October of 1999.  I’m going to a community college, taking Gen Ed courses with the idea of earning some sort of computer sciences degree — networking, I believe — and gradually feeling that the darkness and the numbness that have been waiting in the wings for much of my life to that point (I hate to actually call it depression, lacking an official diagnosis, but I’m not sure what else it could have been) are about to take shape and close in for good and all.  It’s difficult to keep myself invested in anything that anyone else would call important.  Work, school, home life – I’m essentially just trying to stay out of trouble, wherever I am, and maintain some rough sense of tranquility.

It isn’t going so well.

A friend of mine wants to know if I’d like to join him and some other friends in an all-night anime viewing.  He’s being ambitious; we’re going to try getting through all 26 episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion in a single night.  I say sure, why not?  I’ve heard of this series before, it’s supposed to be pretty good, though my actual knowledge of it is limited to the ADV previews that feature on most of their tapes (this was back when VHS was not just a thing but the thing).  Since that was basically just clips of combat between giant robots and incomprehensible monsters, punctuated by explosions and set to "Ode to Joy", that didn't tell me much.  But it sounded interesting, so I said sure why not.

The day comes and we make it about six episodes in before the plan breaks down.  People who were supposed to be there now suddenly can’t make it on time, and we have to stop the festivities to go get them.  And then we get sidetracked along the way.  I’m frustrated because I want to get back to the show, but at the same time, driving around town and goofing off, I’m having what will (in retrospect) turn out to be one of the best times I can remember in my abortive pre-Army college stint.

Skip forward about a month, and I’m house-sitting for my aunt in a house that, some six years or so later, will be my house.  I own six volumes (of thirteen) of Neon Genesis Evangelion, although I can barely afford that kind of expense, and am watching them regularly.  I’ve called in from work for no better reason than because fuck that place.  Watching 80-meter tall berserk robots with children “piloting” them thrash the crap out of equally giant monsters is infinitely more engaging than operating a cash register, and I’ve pretty nearly run out of shits to give.

“What’s wrong with running away from reality if it sucks?” Shinji cries in Japanese.  I think the line’s been translated differently in later releases, but it’s still pretty much the same sentiment.  That sense of confusion and rage and despair and… I don’t know.  Absence?  I almost typed “loss”, but you can’t lose what you never had.  That feeling speaks to me.  

And while even then I knew this wasn’t the best response to the central dilemmas of life and relating to other people, it was in some way heartening to know that someone understood.  Here was a creator – Hideaki Anno, who certainly knows a thing or two about being a painfully shy and underconfident person who is often confused and sometimes terrified by the world around him – talking to all of us through his creation, sharing in the pain of being, saying “I don’t know what the answers are, either, but I know how you hurt, and I hurt too, and together maybe we’ll tough it out.”  Amen, brother.

This is not a cry for pity, or for help.  I’m better now.  Mostly.  (I think).  This is by way of explaining why and how Neon Genesis Evangelion struck in the way and with the strength that it did.

*    *    *

Occasionally in a given medium, you’ll get a work that, more or less by accident, completely revolutionizes everything that comes afterward.  It exerts an almost tidal effect on the flow of the medium, warping everything out of the direction it might otherwise have gone.  With rock music, it’s bands like The Beatles or Nirvana.  In fantasy fiction, it’s The Lord of the Rings.  In anime, it’s Neon Genesis Evangelion.

It was hard for me to pinpoint the exact nature of Evangelion’s impact for a long time.  Even now, I’m not sure if the way I think it impacted the medium is the way everyone else seems to think it did.  But here’s what I think, for what it’s worth:

Most anime had been pretty straightforward prior to this.  The technique of using the trappings of one category of fiction as a framework to examine more broadly applicable social and philosophical issues had not, to my recollection, been done in a big way previously.  Then Gainax came along, an upstart production studio which was run less by business types and more by animators and directors, with this weird giant robot show that spent most of its time exploring its characters and obsessed over its ideas.  After they did it, everybody else started doing it too.  They're still doing it.

Here was a show that started off as a deceptively “hard” sci-fi giant robot show with an unusual amount of attention paid to character development and growth, and an apparent obsession with (and sometimes clumsy application of) Judeo-Christian religious iconography, symbolism and philosophy as part of its overarching metaphor.  It descended into a bitter and often unsettling character drama, where the whole giant robot thing seemed to happen only when it was necessary to twist the knife even further than it already was.  The two – two! – endings constructed for it, which were essentially different ways of saying the same thing, were the result of the creator’s epiphany about the brighter side of life and the world, and largely seemed to stem from his recovery from the bout of depression that informed most of the dilemmas he explored throughout the show.  The first ending, which was the ending of the TV series, came at a time when the production studio was within bare inches of bankruptcy, and could not afford to do much more, from a technical standpoint, than what they did.  What they did was tell the ending of the story (and, incidentally, of the world) from inside the protagonist’s head.  The second ending was shown in a series of movies (collectively titled The End of Evangelion) designed to tell the ending of the story as it affected the world at large.  It is deeply interesting to me how both endings are vastly different in scope and in method of expression, yet equally baffling. 

The show was nearly pulled off the air twice during its original run, was the source of more than one death threat against the director, and was the motivating factor of at least one act of vandalism against the production studio’s property.  It also spawned manga, a few video games, models, toys, apparel, bath salts (I couldn’t make this up)…  The merchandise has been going strong since the show first aired.  It has not stopped at any time since then, and does not look likely to stop at any reasonably predictable point in the future.  Someone has made (and continues to make) a tidy profit, I’m sure.

So what is this whole thing all about?

*    *    *

Our story starts in 2000, when a scientific expedition to Antarctica goes disastrously wrong.  The experiments done result in an explosion of energy so massive it completely melts the polar ice cap.  Sea levels rise, the earth’s axis shifts, and in addition to the global climate change (Japan, for instance, has summer as its only season now), about half the human population perishes in the aftermath of it all.  The world slowly rebuilds itself.  The precise nature of this event is covered up, with the blame being officially cast on a meteorite impact.  The event is dubbed “Second Impact”, with the First Impact being a similar meteorite collision early in Earth’s formation, which caused the moon to split off the main mass of the planet.

Much of the world’s recovery effort is spearheaded by a mysterious internationally operating group called Nerv, which operates under special permission of the UN.  But as poorly understood as they are, Nerv are in turn backed by an even more shadowy organization, called Seele, which seems to have plans of their own beyond the scope of Nerv regarding a Third Impact.

The story proper starts in 2015, with Shinji Ikari, a 15-year-old boy who has been summoned to New Tokyo-3 (yes, there really are two other New Tokyos) by his father, Gendo Ikari.  Ikari the elder turns out to be the commander of Nerv.  Gendo left his son in the care of his teacher several years ago, not long after Yui Ikari, Shinji’s mother and Gendo’s wife, disappeared under strange circumstances during an experiment conducted by Gehirn, an organization which was later disbanded and reformed as Nerv.  With his mother dead and his cold, harsh father distant to a degree best measured in astronomical terms, Shinji quite understandably has trouble getting close to people.

Shinji arrives in New Tokyo-3 just as it is being attacked by an Angel*.  In Eva’s parlance, Angels are massively powerful beings whose forms and modes of existence appear to violate all biological possibility.  Despite their differences in shape, size, capabilities and methods, they are unified by a single goal: the eradication of all human life from the Earth.

At their most effective, conventional weapons, artillery strikes and missile barrages all seem to be a minor nuisance, no sort of real impediment at all.  An N2 mine, the next closest thing to a nuclear weapon, forces it to a temporary halt.  This halt gives Shinji just enough time to be taken to Nerv’s headquarters and discover why his father summoned him: to pilot Evangelion Unit-01 against the Angel.  Despite their robotic appearance, they have some of the same capabilities as their Angel enemies.  Chief among these abilities is the Evangelion’s ability to combat the Angels’ AT Field, a barrier virtually impenetrable to any attack, by generating one of their own.

In the process of fighting and defeating this Angel, Shinji loses control of the Eva Unit-01.  But rather than submit itself to certain destruction at the Angel’s hands, Unit-01 instead goes berserk, savagely annihilating the Angel.  In the process, a portion of its armored helmet comes off and reveals that the Evangelion is not, in fact, a robot.  It is a giant cyborg.  Protected, and harnessed, and restrained by this armored casing is the sort of monster Godzilla must have nightmares about.  For reasons unknown (at least at this point), only Shinji can make Evangelion Unit-01 work.

And there are more Angels to come.

This is interesting stuff all by itself, but Gainax goes one further and uses it as a platform to explore what I tend to think of as “The Dilemma of Being”.  The major characters around Shinji are all, like he himself, broken in some way.  None seem to be completely irredeemable (not even Gendo, not really), but all of them have failed or do fail at some point when it comes to being functional, stable human beings capable of honestly giving and receiving care and affection for others.

Talking about the subject matter and the impact of Evangelion is easy.  These things can be measured in more or less objective, entirely factual terms.  The impact is demonstrable.  The facts of the story and ideas are there for anyone to see.  What is harder to gauge is the quality of it.

I raved about it when I first saw it.  I couldn’t get enough.  Twenty-six episodes didn’t seem like enough.  As I progressed through it, my opinion grew, but the ending left me feeling soured.  Evangelion’s ending is a thing of rightly notorious reputation.  Its jarring turn into the bizarre and surreal is certainly proof beyond all doubt that Gainax’s intent for Evangelion was always that it be a character story first and foremost, but it discards any real sense of the story’s resolution for the wider world.

But this much is well known.  People who have only heard the show’s title could probably tell you (however much they’d be pressed for reasons) that the ending is unilaterally despised among series fans.

There are other problems with Evangelion, of course.  The characters are complex, but often find themselves shackled to specific philosophical viewpoints, so that they occasionally descend from being actual characters to being mouthpieces for dialogue that is (at times) turgid and frankly clunky.  I’m generally opposed to the blatant use of characters in this way, and it’s especially jarring for how unnecessary it is.  The exploration of the various personal and interpersonal dilemmas throughout is at times ham-handed to the point of distraction.  It gets the job done, but it’s clear that subtlety isn’t the director’s strongsuit, or at least not on a regular basis.

The movies which were later made to answer fans’ demands to know more of what happened in the world outside the protagonist’s head during the series finale, and also probably to close the tale in a way more satisfying to Gainax themselves, are a dilemma in themselves.  They mirror the TV series’s quality arc, in that they start off engaging, rise to a point of being gripping, tense drama and action, and then founder in a morass of philosophical pondering.  To top it off, the movies were released in a way that seems meant to deliberately confuse potential viewers.  The first movie, titled Death and Rebirth is comprised of two parts.  The first, Death, retells the story of the first 24 episodes of the TV series (essentially the entire thing, barring the last two episodes) in compressed form.  Some footage is reused, but has been retouched.  Some other footage has been altered, changing some scenes in subtle ways to better set up plot elements in the movies.  Some of this footage was later used in a re-mastered and re-cut edition of the TV series (marketed as a box set called the Platinum Edition in the U.S.).  The second half of the movie, Rebirth, takes up the story where the TV series’ 24th episode leaves off, this time showing us the story from the world beyond Shinji’s psyche.  It ends on a massive cliffhanger and resolves basically nothing.  The job of ending the story falls to the second movie, The End of Evangelion.  This starts off with Rebirth once again, but follows it up with Air, finishing the story once and for all.

So…  Is it worth watching?  I’d say yes, definitely.  While Neon Genesis Evangelion has its ups and downs, it is overall very well done, especially given the budgetary constraints under which Gainax was operating for much of its run.  As an anime fan, it’s practically required viewing for the history lesson alone.  As mentioned above, Evangelion has shaped the face of the medium, and cemented director Hideaki Anno’s career and reputation as an animator and director.  And as easy as it is to point to the never-ending parade of ancillary merchandise, I keep thinking that there wouldn’t be a market for all of this weird stuff (and trust me, some of it is pretty weird) if an overall love for the series didn’t create an equal demand.  Warts and all, the series is highly imaginative, and definitely worth the time.

*    *    *

In recent years, Anno has decided to return to what has become, whether he wanted it to or not, his magnum opus.  His intent is to retell the story of Evangelion through a series of four full-length theatrical movies.  Two of them are available so far: Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone and Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance.  The third, Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo, is due out sometime in November in Japan, and God knows when it will make its way Stateside.  I’ll leave off talking about them for the moment (maybe some other time), except to say that they appear to be the sort of thing Anno might have made the first time around, were he not hobbled by a crippling depression.  They are crazy, often unsettling and sometimes disturbing movies, and I have enjoyed every moment of them so far.  They, also, are worth the time.



*Some of the English terms in Evangelion are oddly chosen.  Angels, in Japanese, are called shito, a word that more directly translates as “Apostle”.  The title itself, Shinseiki Evangelion, translates more accurately as “New Century/Age/Era Evangelion”.  The given translations were, apparently, done as they currently are on the insistence of Gainax.