vsski wrote: Sun Sep 15, 2024 1:03 am
Mr Sausage wrote: Sat Sep 14, 2024 7:04 pm
Just finished watching
Neon Genesis Evangelion for the first time.
At the same time compared to other animes I now have seen it is a show that I have to assume was groundbreaking at its time in the way it does address many philosophical concepts and whose style of animation set trends that many still follow today.
It will be interesting to see what you think of the
End of Evangelion, which at least for me was some reconciliation with parts of the show I previously didn’t like or at least didn’t care for as much.
I have not seen the
Rebuild episodes as I may be foolishly waiting for a box set combining them all.
I spent the day dodging work by writing a very long post about a Seijun Suzuki movie I wouldn't even recommend––a post I'm pretty sure no one will read––and so I saw people talking about Evangelion and wanted to join in while it was fresh, but, well, that's where the time went. And now the subject is stale. But I still felt I had to stick up for the poor, old massive commercial success in a couple of ways, as perhaps one of the few people here, I think, who was watching it at around the time of initial release. First, in response to Mr. Sausage's absolutely valid issues with the show––I think this has been somewhat lost back in its era, but at the time most of us watching the show in the U.S. anime market, at least, understood the show to be vividly self-reflexive. I remember DVD liner notes, and magazine and book interviews that attested to this. Anno was well-known in Japan and in anime fandom around the world prior to the release of Evangelion most especially for Gunbuster, an innovative sci-fi OAV series, and for the Nadia: Secret of Blue Water TV show, which he took on as director when the studio he co-founded, Gainax, failed to get Hayao Miyazaki to helm. Gainax was an unusually creator-driven studio for the time, and those creators––especially Anno––were artists people were on the watch for. In interviews and public statements, Anno would frequently tell viewers that Evangelion emerged in reaction to a 4-year-long depression he had entered at the close of the Nadia series, and that Evangelion itself reflected the feelings he wrestled through at the time––including massive amounts of self-loathing, especially about sex and sexualization. Anno had come to dislike the hypersexualized nature of a lot of anime, and as a founder of Gainix––basically the inventors of "fan-service," he felt considerably responsible for it. That sexualization had caught on in the industry, and had flowered far beyond Anno's creative control. He was also equally drawn to that sexualization, and now commercially obligated to include it in his shows to one degree or another, and angry with himself for being part of the way otaku lifestyle was becoming synonymous with troubling depictions of sexuality and an emphasis on kinky perversion. In a way typical of a lot of 90s fiction, the approach to addressing his themes was not very coherent (Fight Club, anyone?), and it fell largely into the space where a lot of authors of the time reached for––i.e., creating a deliberately uncomfortable, taboo-breaking mis en scene in their work, where the things the author hates about the audience and about himself are reflected back upon the viewer to a deliberately overdone, excruciating degree. So the audience is forced to really scrutinize the awkward hypersexuality of the teenage protagonist––partly because he is a self-insert character for the principal author, and partly because Anno wants the uncomfortable sexualization to be at once a scold for the audience and a confession of frustration with himself for being at least partially the same sort of pervert. And since the series is by this point commercially obligated to continue the "fan-service" Gainax is known for (literally the jiggling of breasts, back in the days of Gunbuster––though it grew into kinkier stuff by the 90s) Anno finds a way to integrate it into the story that is at once uncomfortable, and at he same time, part of the story. So while I don't think that the sexuality presented is all that cool, it also wasn't really meant to be, either––or at least, it you were meant to feel conflicted about it––by End of Evangelion I think that's rather clear. That movie is even more loudly directed at otaku culture, this time aligning Shinji with the otaku who in real life vandalized Gainax's offices when they hated the ending to the TV series––you can actually see photographs of the vandalism worked into the film––and not as a part of the story; they just get edited in at the moment Anno really wants to underline what a sick, horny *sshole Shinji (and by association, the generalized otaku vandal) is.
But to jump to what vsski was saying, so incredibly god-damn many shows have stolen moments, approaches, and even attempted to steal the very soul of this show; it's ubiquity has hidden a lot of its groundbreaking elements (shows like Darling in the Franxx owe so much to Evangelion that they hardly have anything of their own––though Darling did manage to steal its hated hard-right-turn of an ending storyline from Gainax's Gunbuster 2: Diebuster). One of those innovations for TV anime was the multi-episode story arc; this was hardly a thing for long-running anime shows in Evangelion's era. And so I think experiencing this narrative at the time was very different than it would be to experience it today. Far fewer anime television shows were aimed at adults when Evangelion first appeared––with shows like Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, Vision of Escaflowne, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Outlaw Star, and others, that era marked a decided shift in the who was watching anime on TV. But even a show contemporaneous with Evangelion, like Cowboy Bebop, had discreet story arcs for episodes (with the over-arching storyline in that show being a more tentative experiment than Evangelion's more balls-to-the-wall bet that its viewers would return week after week to find out what happened next). Shows like Evangelion and Vision of Escaflowne were very unusual at the time for spreading their larger plot developments over a host of episodes. The paranoia undergirding Evangelion, threading all of its story beats together, probably helped it maintain its viewership not just during its broadcast, but over generations of viewers since. By comparison, Escaflowne's more low-key atmosphere of "adventure/road trip" hasn't sustained it quite so much. There are no mysteries left at the end of Escaflowne. By comparison, Evangelion remains ambiguous to the viewer (so long as they don't read too many forums).
On a larger scale, Evangelion debuted at a time when the giant-robot craze was at its artistic nadir in Japan. Gundam's revolution in that regard had been running on for more than a decade; the shows that tried to capitalize on Gundam's success had nearly all shot their wad by this point. And with Evangelion––and an OAV series now relatively forgotten by time as well, Giant Robo––we got the first sort of postmodern reaction to the giant robot––specifically, to its origins, as a boy's best friend. Both Evangelion and Giant Robo reach back beyond Gundam (which does initially feature a boy and his big robot) to shows like Gigantor, where a young boy commanded a Giant Robot friend in battle. Giant Robo, in this case, is a character from the 60s, from the era in question. And while that show embraces the legacy of the boy and his robot exuberantly (albeit with a deromanticizing sense that the world is harder for Robo and his boy, Daisaku than it seemed in Mistuteru Yokoyama's original 60s vision of human progress), Evangelion subjects the idea of a boy and his robot to considerable disquisition. And so you have the premise of Evangelion, based on challenging the assumptions of those 60s shows. Does the robot, for instance, feel pain? Why is the boy spared the harm that comes to their robot in their struggles (the scene in which Shinji first launches in the Eva, only to have the Eva's arm lopped off, has remained with me in my unconscious forever)? The kid wouldn't own the robot, would they? What would its owners use it for (this is maybe the dominant mystery of Evangelion, which tacks in some different directions in the various possible endings to the story, and it cuts against the grain of what had been standard for these shows––even though the Gundam is made by the military, for instance, the accidental boy pilot, Amuro, gets to keep it––but how would that ever be, unless he served a purpose which aligned with the true owner's agenda)? And there are even harder questions. What happens, for instance, to a pilot's sense of potency, when their human power is extended to the power of 10,000 in the cockpit? How would that play out in the real world (Evangelion makes some brutal suppositions here, which go far towards making Shinji and Asuka quite the unlikable characters that they are––this is to me a clear-eyed rejoinder to a movie like, say, Top Gun, where the jets turning their pilots into ultimate *ssholes is fully condoned by the film as something they have earned)? And the worst, and most productive challenge of all to the age-old formula: why a boy in the first place? Why not a man? The function of the boy in the older shows was audience identification, of course. Evangelion makes a whole lot of hay by really considering this, for what seems to be the first time. What if, say the child is the only one who could possibly pilot it? Why would that be? What do teen kids have that adults lack? From this, the show is off to the races. I think most of the objectionable material in the show comes from this way in which the filmmakers resolve a key question, never really answered in a diegetic way before. In this way, the teenagers are treated as real teenagers would be; they are willful, obtuse, awkward, frightened all the time, inappropriately horny, consistently frustrated, and having trouble coping with anything even before any of them show up in the series. Put that into a mecha, see what happens. This in turn enables a creepy subtext to the series, giving the show a lot of its X-files-style paranoia. How to motivate the children to act in the way an adult would? Here, the show takes on a more Freudian, psychosexual vibe. The father motivates the child by withholding love. But in this formulation, the Eva stands in for the child's missing mother (another indelible scene in my head; when Shinji goes dark and the Eva tears its armor off, revealing huge, sinewy, boiling flesh underneath and a mother's alleged capacity for violence in defense of her child). Asuka is drawn out blindly by an overweening competitive drive. And Rei is, for all intents and purposes, brainwashed; raised to do only this. But what is the outcome of what the children do, when the purpose of what they're doing is so fully abstracted from what motivates them to do it? The villains only the children can and will annihilate are called "Angels." Are we so sure we're the good guys, here? The last Angel appears to Shinji as his only true friend, and really does seem to love him. But just as Shinji is bound by a role in all this, so too the Angel can't go against its nature, and the two children can't share the same space. All of this was new when Evangelion arrived; the long-ranging continuity, the paranoid tension (that tension seemed at the time at least to be the motivating factor behind a lot of the show's most perverse elements), the psychology grounding the children, complicating their relationships with their robot buddies, and making deliberately problematic their role in the show. At the time, I watched Evangelion with a permanent pit in my stomach; a sense of growing dread over what would evolve. Cowboy Bebop didn't do this; Escaflowne didn't do it; even Giant Robo, with it's sturm and drang turned up to 11, didn't create this particular frisson. Yet in the decades after Evangelion, it seemed like every show tried to recreate that feeling. What were characters in the show really up to? What was the show up to, even?
This is a key question for Evangelion more than any of its subsequent imitators, because even as we watched, we knew that Evangelion wasn't exclusively about the story that was unfolding. Anno was direct in indicating that his own psychological state was the inspiration for Evangelion, as well as his guiding light when he wasn't sure how the show would evolve. His depression wasn't just the impetus for the show, either; it was the real subject he wanted to tackle. How could he, in the throes of depression and indecision, move forward? The show was full of hints that if you stripped away the cold war paranoia, the kink and simultaneous kink-shaming, the very surface-level religious cosplay, the fight theme song (another inescapable experience––the hairs rise on the back of my neck still whenever I hear the Evangelion fight theme)––even the mother robot who loves Shinji (though he can never really know it)––if you took away all of it, what was left was a tormented boy, depressed and hesitant, paralyzed by the world and his intensely contradictory role in it (a very teenaged feeling: on the one hand, he is the savior of mankind; on the other, a worthless boy nobody wants or even likes, loved only by his enemy and by the machine that kills as an extension of his warped and twisted will). How can Shinji move forward, when his mission is done, and he is no longer any savior, just a boy no one likes, alone with the crushing guilt of having killed the only person who really seems to have loved him? The ending to the series, then, was an intervention with the most extreme kind of therapy, over the final two episodes breaking Shinji's ego down to nothing, and leading him to the point that he could rebuild himself as he chose. The series ends with Shinji finding the validation no one else could give him; finding it within himself. And everyone burst out in applause. Has the whole show been a school play?
Of course not. And we see within that finale glimpses of things yet to come––Misato, mysteriously shot through the head (which plays out first in Evangelion: Death & Rebirth, and later in The End of Evangelion). The fates of more of Shinji's comrades-in-arms. But the rebuilding of Shinji's ego, peppered with these jarring reminders that this "happy ending" wasn't taking place in the real world, made it maybe the perfect ending, to me. The military-industrial complex would not stop making Evas and training pilots just because the Angels were dead. The whole nightmare would go on, with new targets (in fact, in the continuations of Evangelion, NERV itself becomes the next target). Shinji's nightmare existence would never be over. But at the end of all the torment, how could the show have a happy ending? What Anno chooses is a near-abstract fantasy. In this private space, we can imagine how Shinji might be saved, how it would feel for us for the boy we've been following to have his trauma put away, so he can move forward? I think, in retrospect, this is the result of Anno's own struggle with depression (which only sort-of seems to end with the start of the Evangelion production; he leaves the series to Kazuya Tsurumaki later on, and his follow-up series, His & Her Circumstances, too––it's only once he's out of animation that Anno seems like a confident maker of cinema––though I can't say I've ever liked a live-action film Anno has made, from Love & Pop to Shin Godzilla). Being able to move again is liberating, exciting––but it doesn't banish the dread entirely, and the only happy ending he can see for Shinji is one made mostly in the realm of the mind, in the creator and the audience's shared fantasy. To me, the ending to the show is brilliant and self-evidently right; it always perplexed me that this would feel unfinished to me.
As it turned out, a significant faction of people were not content with leaving it there, and Gainax was besieged by angry letters, and tormented by violence and threats of violence. The next leg of Evangelion following was the Death & Rebirth special and the End of Evangelion movie, both offering alternate conclusions––as well as the Rebuild film cycle, which I find totally redundant. End of Evangelion provides a conclusion, I suppose––I don't feel like contradicting anyone on that––but the ending is far more nakedly directed at the otaku who threatened Gainax and vandalized their offices; when Asuka looks at sexually-frustrated otaku Shinji (in the film the representative of the fans Anno has understandably come to hate), she calls him pathetic, and it's Anno addressing the viewer looking for that more satisfying ending. I have honestly never really believed in the later attempts to "end" Evangelion. The first attempt was frankly perfect to me.
Of course, I have not really gone back to the series, having watched it once in the 90s, once in the aughts, and never again. The films have felt like an ordeal––though their clear narrative insufficiency goes quite far towards underlining how much the TV series was the right format for what Evangelion was. I imagine that the perversion of Evangelion would feel more problematic than clearly communicative in the modern era. At the time it seemed apiece with the gentle, sometimes clever perversion of other popular anime shows, like Evangelion's competitor, Revolutionary Girl Utena. Utena was largely scripted by famous writer of perverted anime, Yoji Enokido. Enokido also scripted four episodes of Evangelion and worked on Evangelion: Death & Rebirth and all of the Evangelion movies, as well as later projects with Kazuya Tsurumaki that I love much more than Evangelion, including FlCl and Gunbuster 2: Diebuster. He did the very brilliant Adolescence of Utena (which features Anthy transforming her would-be lover Utena into a car and "riding" her to freedom at the end), and later did the very gently––even sweetly and innocuously pervy Star Driver (undiscovered classic) and Captain Earth. Enokido's normal approach to sexuality is naughty but positive (and always progressive in terms of storytelling), so I'm not too sure what of the perversion in Evangelion you can lay at his feet (and Anno's spouse, manga artist Moyoco Anno, has done a comic which outs a lot of Hideaki's pervasive otaku tendencies and perversions in a comic context). I can also say, there was a vast difference in the tone of the show's sexual presentation between the Japanese-language version and the English dub. The dub is constantly, literally promising fan service in every coming episode, and underlining it when it's featured in the episodes through the vocal work. The original Japanese version, to my recollection, does not even mention fan-service, and the voices don't rise to underline it when it happens. In my two screenings, it changed the whole context of the experience considerably, and it seemed a much pervier show in English. But I'm a very different person today than I was, so who's to say if I saw it now I wouldn't be more bothered by it? Keeping it in my memory, as I do, it has been pretty unsullied by comparison to later shows. It's vivid experiences remain exceptionally fresh to me. I remember lots of self-loathing coming off the show, an attitude towards sex that came from that...but I always thought of it within the context of a depressive creator, frustrated and humiliated by his own sexual feelings, reading those into his creator-insert figure, and into the show at large.
) it would be the perfect teenage boy series. It captures the power fantasies of perving over girls, saving them from monsters, only to go about violating oneself and having orgies, albeit for the 'hero' such behaviour is presented with the mitigation of having died and unleashed the repressed forces within oneself to do so! But it also captures adolescent fears as well: the uncontrollable bodily changes; the sense of becoming aware and caught up in horrifically compromised adult worlds that existed long before your birth, and will exist long after you are gone; the realisation of your assigned place in the world and lack of agency against suddenly having the power to lash out and take; and really the entire adolescent sense of every single thing that occurs presaging the apocalyptic end of all things (when elders know, in their own jaded and callous ways, that its really just a cycle of endless violating death and re-birth).
