(SHIN SEIKI EVANGELION)
and
END OF EVANGELION (Feature)
(SHIN SEIKI EVANGELION GEKIJO-BAN: AIR/MAGOKORO O, KIMI NI)
*** (out of ****)
Directed by Hideaki Anno & written by Anno and Shinji Higuchi, with English dub by Matt Greenfield
Featuring the voices of:
(Japanese) Megumi Ogata, Megumi Hayashibara, Kotono Mitsuishi, Yuko Miyamura, Yuriko Yamaguchi, Koichi Yamadera, Fumihiko Tachiki, and Tomokazu Seki
(English) Spike Spenser, Tiffany Grant, Allison Keith, Tristan MacAvery, Su Ulu, Joe Pisano, and Amanda Winn.
TELEVISION SERIES: co-written by Yoji Enokido, Akia Satsukawa, Hiroshi Yamaguchi
1995 NR (should be PG13)
FEATURE FILM: co-directed & co-written by Kazuya Tsurumaki
1997 NR (should be R)
I’ve never been partial toward anime, or Japanimation, or Japanime, or whatever you want to call it. I don’t like the overall look, with its heavy lines and washed out colors. I don’t like the bubbly, wet eyes the size of billiard balls, the triangular heads, and the slit mouths the size of a nickels; it’s an aesthetic distaste, not an academic one. I don’t like its genderless elf people, who would all look the same if their heads were shaved. I don’t like the endless, gruesome, often purposeless violence. I don’t like the superfluous exploitation of underage females, in which skirts the size of handkerchiefs and plunging necklines consume three-fourths of any given frame. I don’t like the flaming, nonspecific backgrounds where characters yell things just before whaling on each other. Violent, exploitive, and not pleasing to the eye. I don’t like the inappropriately cheerful disco scores. I don’t like the rabid fans that speak of Japan—where they’ve never set foot—like a Muslim speaks of Mecca. Your tastes may not be mine. You may like the goofy triangle-headed elf people, but I certainly see them on enough lunch boxes and Trapper Keepers.
Anyway, the twenty-five part “Neon Genesis Evangelion” television series is guilty on all counts, and to a lesser extent so is the two-hour “End of Evangelion” feature film. I don’t feel right being forced to look down the shirts and up the skirts of fourteen-year-old girls, animated or otherwise. “Evangelion” has more pre-teen panties than anything else I can think of off the top of my head, and regular readers should know that I can connect any movie to any other given movie pretty quick. And the giant robots, God, the giant robots, they fight on land, they fight on sea, they fight in the air, they fight in a volcano. They fight alone, they fight in pairs. They fight without ribbons, they fight without tags, they fight without packages, boxes, or bags. A few fights are okay, and actually some of them are quite impressive, but is anime the Japanese word for redundant? I watched Tokyo get leveled so many times I began to wonder why anyone bothered to rebuild it. Anime enthusiasts must be devastated to discover modern warfare has no plans for incorporating giant robots.
I made a pact with the Keeper of Tickets over at the Chronicles of George website: I would watch all ten hillion jillion hours of “NGE” in exchange for his watching “Citizen Kane,” “The Third Man,” “The Thin Red Line,” “Raging Bull,” “Ikiru,” and “The Wild Bunch,” with “Chinatown” and “Wings of Desire” in exchange for “Akira” and “Ghost in the Shell” (my original plan was more vicious, to subject him only to films that are slow, deep, and long, like “Lawrence of Arabia,” “The Deer Hunter,” “Children of Paradise,” and “Barry Lyndon,” but eventually my conscience got the better of me). K-of-T explained to me that much of the repetitive robo-slaughter and animated voyeurism is the work of something called “fan-service.” Apparently anime enthusiasts are so vocal about their craving for violence and nudity that animators are willing to satisfy them, no matter how extraneous the gore and thighs might be. It comes with the territory, he implied.
Great artists redefine the territory, or at least don’t conform to what they don’t need just for the sake of their fans. Maybe that’s my personal prejudice; my two all-time favorite filmmakers are Hitchcock, who only wanted an audience so he could toy with them, and Kubrick, who as far as I can tell wasn’t even aware of an audience. But once I got past the camera being placed at least once per episode at panty level, and once I tuned out the colossal (and colossally uneventful) robot battles, I found myself being pulled along by the inner turmoil of “NGE’s” characters, by the macabre delight in knowing that stomach-churning secrets were brewing in the background and waiting to come to the fore, and by the series’ ultimately philosophical goal. What starts out as robots beating each other with skyscrapers, like some kind of cosmic WWWF, turns into an intriguing examination of free will, evolution, God, the apocalypse, the commonality of souls, and why we must suffer.
Tokyo is under attack. Giant monsters called Angels are laying siege one at a time, tearing down buildings and generally making a mess of things. An agency known as NERV has at its disposal the only weapons capable of destroying the Angels: a handful of giant robots known as Evangelions (Eva). Piloting each Eva isn’t a soldier or a professional, but an adolescent, including a boy named Shinji, a girl named Rei, and, later in the series, another girl named Asuka. “NGE” mostly follows Shinji from his recruitment by NERV and his battles with the Angels, as well as his strained relations with his father and the beautiful NERV agent named Misato, who becomes his mentor.
The personal lives of those at NERV and the mysteries behind the Evas and the Angels gradually collide, in horrific and surprising ways. No one can give Shinji or Misato a straight answer about who built the Evas, or why the Angels keep attacking Tokyo. The scientists most responsible for the Evas are Misato’s old college roommate, Ritsuko, and Shinji’s own father, Ikari. Both know way more than they are willing to reveal, and we see glimpses of their uncomfortable relations with an entity known as SEELE, which has a hidden agendum concerning NERV and the Evas, an agendum that may save the world, or destroy it. Shinji is a basket-case of self-loathing, adolescent desire, and hatred toward the father he feels abandoned him; his battles with himself are far more intriguing than those with the monsters.