Neon Genesis Evangelion

Heads up, there are some serious spoilers encompassing all of Neon Genesis Evangelion (and some vague comparisons to Gurren Lagann) in this, so be advised

 

 This is a bit unfocused and aimless but I don't feel like editing it so bear with me. 

 

Honestly, Shinji? I get it.

This is a bit different from most of what I've posted on here, but since the spirit of this blog is for me to talk about old things I'm catching up on it felt only right to mention it. So, as you can tell by the title, I watched Neon Genesis Evangelion. I thought it was great.

For as mainstream and boring as my history with anime is, I'd never given this show a shot. I knew people loved it but I kept putting it off. I didn't go into this completely blind, however, as there are things I knew about it (or thought I knew) by virtue of just, well, being on the internet for as long as I have. On a related note, I absolutely loved Gurren Lagann as a teenager (I still love it now) but I've always been conscious of the fact that that show's TVTropes page describes it as "what happens when Studio Gainax is asked to create a Saturday Morning Cartoon" so, in my mind, Evangelion was always just a more serious Gurren Lagann.

Anyway, that's all a long way of saying that I've finally watched this and it both is, and isn't, what I was expecting. All of the internet memes of "get in the robot, Shinji" aren't as accurate as I expected because Shinji, well, does that pretty early and any other time he hesitates he usually has a good reason to. Heck, there's even one point where his classmates tell him that not getting in the robot would be a perfectly understandable reaction to have. His life is rough and he is far from perfect (the opening to End of Evangelion being, uh, a prime example) but I liked Shinji as a protagonist way more than I thought I would.  To bring up Gurren Lagann again, I went into this assuming he'd be like Simon in the early-to-mid parts of that show, but he effectively grows out of that about as quickly as Simon does.

I jotted down a few notes before I started the show just so I'd be able to consult them after the fact, and I wasn't as wrong as I thought I'd be. While none of these character parallels are as one-to-one as I (naively) assumed they'd be, most characters who are similar serve different purposes and the overall arc of this show is radically different. I was also straight-up wrong about some stuff, which is something I always enjoy. 

Going into a story convinced you know how it'll go (and then being proven wrong) means you get to be just as surprised as if you'd gone in fresh.

I realize I've been talking around it for a while, but I really enjoyed this show. There is so much imagery in this that has clearly stuck with people for a reason, and while a lot of the philosophizing and religious symbolism feels a bit navel-gazey and superficial at times, it occasionally does have something it wants to say. The action is bombastic (and often unsettling) in some exciting ways and there are moments in the early parts of the show with some animation that seems impressive, even today.

The good animation of those early episodes, however, is the exception. I'm not going to claim to know what the reason for it was, but there is a stark drop in visual detail and motion in the back third of the show that I found incredibly jarring. Yes, the show itself is still good and maybe this is a superficial reason to criticize something like this, but add to that the fact that the show starts to veer off into some territory I had a hard time following near the end (I'm still not sure I understand the relationship between NERV/SEELE/The Angels) and these decisions gave me a good scapegoat to point to as a sign the show was taking a turn. I will say though, the stylistic decisions of the final two episodes (at least) seemed like deliberate choices that I appreciated, but so much of the other, later parts of that show felt cheap in a way that took me out of it.

The ending of the show, while admittedly not as complete as some may have liked, seemed like a fitting conclusion to Shinji's arc so, had it just been left there, I think there would still be enough to unpack and enjoy. Interestingly, End of Evangelion is not a retelling of that, not exactly, but an expansion that attempts to more matter-of-factly show what happened to Shinji as well as provide some closure for everyone else without directly contradicting (well, in any significant way I could tell) the events of the show itself. Taken together with those last two episodes, you can imagine what the ending of this show probably should have looked like and that's a really interesting side-effect of the somewhat unfinished nature of the show itself. 

I had spent a long time expecting this movie to be something abstract and incomprehensible but, maybe because I'd seen the ending of the show itself, I didn't have a (particularly) hard time following it. Also, coming at this having seen Gurren Lagann, it almost seemed tame by comparison.

 Now, the Rebuilds. These represent... another strange and exciting way to retell a story that fans have already seen. The first movie is largely a direct adaptation of the first few episodes which while not necessarily incredibly noteworthy on its own as a result, gave me a chance to see those early episodes in even higher quality than before which was refreshing after my disappointment with the later episodes of the show.

The second Rebuild is, well, where things get interesting. Things seem similar enough at first, but you quickly realize it's far less of a direct adaptation than the previous film. Different characters are involved in pivotal scenes, and maybe even more importantly as one friend put it, "it shows you how different things could have gone if people just talked to each other." Seemingly inconsequential changes add onto each other to make something different, yet not unfamiliar. It's hard to describe to someone who hasn't seen it, but so many of the same broad concepts and moments are basically there but they're just not the same as they were in the show.

The third Rebuild does, in some ways, cover some of the contents of the final few episodes of the show but it's also, largely, it's own thing. It's deviated wildly from the source material at this point and is advancing the story along an alternate track. Not necessarily a better or worse track, just... an alternate one.

The final rebuild is honestly largely just a continuation of the third one, and it continues that trend of effecting deja vu with seemingly unfamiliar settings. Despite the radical changes in the story that have taken place, the end goals are still the same and much of the ending is, in broad strokes, thematically identical to the original one. Those minor changes and additions from before, conversations or additional characterization that wasn't present in the original show, remain relevant however and manage to be incorporated into an ending that feels just as resonant to these new iterations as the original ending did to those ones.

It's certainly an ambitious undertaking and I have no idea whether or not fans are happy with it but, in my opinion, a world with these Rebuilds in it is way more interesting than one where we just got four compilation-movies. 

This has all gone on a bit long, I know, but much like my experiences with Resident Evil and Silent Hill it's been a relief to find out that this critically-acclaimed thing from 20 years ago is actually deserving of all of its praise.