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.
