Talk about one of the most controversial anime here! Discuss whether you think the plot was great or it was just a depressed guy whining. Who is better, Asuka or Rei? Talk about how you loved/hated then ending(s)!
I liked the show.
i liked the show, i liked asuka, i hated the ending.
OMGZ TEH REI
I think it's one of these beautiful, flawed shows, like Kare Kano was, only better and more solid. I think, as a Superflat anime, EVA, like it's director, is probably the ultimate misunderstood show. And it just doesn't feel complete without watching "End of Eva". It's an apocalypse film after all, and Anno rather unnervingly, maybe terrifyingly, omits the actual apocalypse from the series, like some kind of twisted cliff-hanger. Don't be fooled by the music and the "congratulations" Everybody knows that was Misato's bloody body on the ground. It was kind of a cop-out ending without the "End-of" so I can understand if the fans hate him, but I think he largely redeems himself with the appended film.
I'd say it's a classic. There just aren't that many anime directors willing to screw around and try new things. Maybe Anno screws around a bit too much, like with other people's material in Kare Kano, but I still respect the guy as a funny satirist. In many ways, Eva is a gross joke, a good example of how anime no matter how rich, is a paper-thin, ultimately aesthetic, ephemeral, beautiful, and empty. So I hate it when the "fans" say such ridiculous things like that Eva is "deep". It's anything but. The whole point of Superflat is that it ONLY has a face value.
The fans may hate him, but it is definitely mutual. Really, End of Evangelion is Anno's big "fuck you!" to the otaku.
As for Evangelion being a classic, that's beyond obvious. It's still popular as hell over a decade later, and it's still moving immense amounts of merchandise - hell, you can find Eva figures in kombini these days. There's not a whole lot of shows with that kind of lasting appeal.
NGE fails as a war story due to the gigantic plotholes (like, for instance, why do the Angels attack one at a time instead of, ya know, maybe ALL AT ONCE?). As storytelling it jumps the shark in episode 21 and spirals down into the Black Pit of WTF, never to be seen again.
But the background is haunting and evocative, and the characters not only salvage it but put it on the short list of Best Anime Evar.
If you are male and under 25, you WILL fall in love with Misato, or perhaps Rei. If you are male over 25, you will probably fall in love with Ritsuko, or maybe Yui. If you are female, you're not on the Internet and you don't watch animoo so it doesn't matter.
As for the main protagonist, Shinji Ikari, he may be one of the more screwed-up heroes ever. He comes across as much more sympathetic in the sub than in the dub, by the way. And when you come to understand how much pain he is in, how hard it is for him to function at all (and in the sub, he does NOT whine constantly about it, you have to infer it, and it may take a while before you understand fully), watching him fight Angels to protect the people he loves will move you to manly tears. He is MIGHTY. And he is vastly more interesting than a generation of cardboard cutout mouthy idiot mecha heroes who came before.
And, yeah, episodes 21 to 24 were phoned in from Hideaki Anno's psychiatrist's couch. And episodes 25-26 were Gunbuster style, i.e., "oh shit, we ran out of time, money, and ideas all at once, oh shit, what do we do? I know, let's do a half-assed clip show with voiceovers of the protagonist contemplating his navel, and hope the audience will decide that it must be deep and symbolic." And of course EoE was Anno's one-finger salute to an audience that didn't play along.
It's a flawed masterpiece. It's not the GRATEST THING EVAR. But it's very, very good, and it is still capable of leaving people dumbstruck with awe. I mean, it's no Cowboy Bebop. But it will get inside your head and kick your head's ass.
After watching the ending, I was literally depressed for 3 days straight.
Yeah I like the series too, but after watching Ideon, you can see who stands on top. You'll see a lot of things that happens in Evangelion came from Ideon.
> NGE fails as a war story
It's not a war story. HTH!
I mean, it should be pretty obvious from the fact that they are never explained in any way that the angels really aren't very important at all to the actual story. A whole lot of Evangelion is just window dressing, really.
What the angels are, is a heirloom from the giant robot tradition that Evangelion both builds on and transcends. They're a silly cliché, which evokes memories of childhood wonder at giant robot anime.
For those with niconico accounts, the trailer for the first of the new movies is here:
Plus they have cool, evocative names.
There's definitely a lot more to Evangelion than "face value." And anyways, Superflat was an art movement that Takashi Murakami started long after the release of Evangelion.
Maybe calling it "Superflat" is misleading, since Murakami and his ilk really own that term. But I feel that Anno and Murakami are coming from the same place with this. Both have to do with the perversion, flattening, or abandonment of any kind of transcendent depth or meaning in their work. Like the 60's pop artists before them, EVA is kind of like a parody in the way it takes this rich Biblical lore and symbolism and "deifies" it as a kind of paper-thin, transient, pulp pop-culture. If there's any depth, it's to be found in the shallowness itself, or a kind of weird commentary on the nature of otaku culture or art in general. It's all in the surface technique and aesthetics, much like some excellent Floating World Ukiyo-e art. I think Murakami sees Superflat as a kind of postmodern Disney version of that Floating World sensibility. And when you consider Anno's other work it makes sense to put him in the same camp.
I think if you're desperately trying to extract anything BUT face value from EVA, you're kidding yourself. Because in this case, everything IS the face value, and it's not any weaker because of it.
Do elaborate. I mean, I agree that all the symbolism in Evangelion is entirely meaningless - Anno even admits so himself, not much you can do to defute THAT - but there is a real story hidden under all the meaningless decoration, about Shinji and how much it sucks to be human, and so on. It's not super-deep meaning or anything, but it's a bit more than "face value", I'd say.
Yeah, it's a good story, and there's a lot of rich things thrown in there from all over the map, Freudian themes, the primordial, cabbalah-esque human made in human's image, and so on...
But all these neat images and plot structures form a kind of convoluted hollow structure. The fancy plot devices are less of a skeleton to hold up the series, but like part of the surface decoration. The same way there are like 555,865,134... floating world prints that the depict the same themes, fuji, bridges, chrysanthemums, etc.
It doesn't make it any weaker because of it, I see it as proof that something doesn't have to be deep to be rich. Or that you can make a very rich story of value without having any "depth" or transcendant substance.
In the western tradition of art, we have a habit of trying to figure out what the films we watch "mean", always trying to peel off the "superficial" layer of what we see in front of us to try to find some kind of more meaningful core underneath. Shows like Evangelion, and just about every other anime, even the most "artsy" don't bother with that kind of mumbo-jumbo, I think Japanese art never has. So it's refreshing.
> ...there's a lot of rich things thrown in there from all over the map, Freudian themes, the primordial, cabbalah-esque human made in human's image, and so on...
>
> But all these neat images and plot structures form a kind of convoluted hollow structure.
Still, strip away all that, and I think you've still got something solid there. The characters, and their struggles. It would be a far more boring story if it wasn't dressed up in all the decorations and fireworks, but I still think it would be a solid story.
Boy Abandoned by father
Boy Meets father
Boy forced to pilot giant robot against will
Killing
Friends
Sex
Death
Apocalypse
Rebirth?
Yeah, I see your point, I guess you could say that about any good operatic story though, and any "apocalypse anime". What I asked myself while watching some of the slower, more drawn out, and rather vacuous parts is, does EVA take its story "seriously"?
I don't think it takes its story any more or less seriously than it takes the minute details in Asuka or Rei's character designs. Or the monotone, vacuous existential blabber in the final episodes. All the elements of the film are on the same level, they're all in your face and laid out before you. The hackneyed anime plot devices (although good and rich) are held by the same strings as the common, reoccurring Japanese sound motifs. It's all aesthetics. To say that the last two episodes are "empty" is like stating the obvious. They're not supposed to have any "meaning" they're supposed to just be cool, like most of the ideas in anime.
Anno takes this concept and he puts it on crack, effectively making us watch two hole episodes, and many segments, about nothing. He resorts to showing us ourselves as spectators in one sequence, and fans cosplaying in another. This is I think is what makes him a Superflat Artist, his work flattens out to the point where it spreads out into social, historic, and aesthetic commentaries, a little like Satoshi Kon and to a lesser extent Mamoru Oshii, and Katsuhiro Otomo who's Akira is probably one of the best "apocalypse films" ever.
I see a number of people complaining about the TV ending without really understanding WHY it was created. First, the studio was running out of money. Two, Shinji had a lot of emotional issues that needed addressing and the two final episodes neatly wrap that up (if you're actually paying attention to what's going on). It was an interesting way (for me, anyway) to end the series. For me, End of Evangelion definitely came off as a big "FUCK YOU!" from Hideaki Anno. I'd rather take the TV ending with it's blabber and WTF-qualities and optimistic closing than the movie, which slowly and mercilessly proceeded to kill and destroy the whole series.
That said, Evangelion's getting a remake! WOOHOO! I hope they close some plotholes.
Bah, you didn't get the OVA then. EVA is an apocalypse film. In apocalypse films, the apocalypse is supposed to happen.
And yes, I guess you could call it a big "FUCK YOU", but in a good way. The whole point of EVA is to destroy itself. It's the ultimate apocalypse film because it commits a kind of pop-art, aesthetic suicide, destroying all plot or structural elements in a way. It's all the more touching for the way the series was originally conceived as the ultimate "otaku" series. It draws the viewer in the way all good "otaku shows" do and then crumbles both the fictional world and the premises for the series.
It's a very sophisticated way to end a series IMO.
I wonder... at the end of "The End of Evangelion", when Yui says that everyone has the ability to come back, if they can remember their old forms and wish to become an individual again, how many people will come back to the post-apocalyptic world that Shinji and Asuka are plunged into? What will happen to them? The world looks totally barren now, so living will be a bitch...
I figured it was sort of an Adam&Eve type thing.
Also in Norse Mythology, when the Ragnarok apocalypse finally occurs and the world sinks into the sea, a single human couple is supposed to hide away in Yggdrasil, the ultimate, world tree, and come out at a later time, to reseed the world, supposedly, like a cyclical Adam&Eve.
You can't have an apocalypse film without an element of rebirth/feedback loop. Like in Akira, when the movie ends with the big bang.
>>Also in Norse Mythology, when the Ragnarok apocalypse finally occurs and the world sinks into the sea, a single human couple is supposed to hide away in Yggdrasil, the ultimate, world tree, and come out at a later time, to reseed the world, supposedly, like a cyclical Adam&Eve.
Not in all versions of the legend. In some, Odin, the Gods, the Einherjar, all the Heroes of Folkvang, all know they are doomed, all know they will lose against Loki and the Giants. Garm will devour the Sun and Moon, Jormungandr and Thor will kill one another, the Fire Giants will burn the World-Tree to ash. They know their fate and they will fight anyway, because it is their "wyrd," their fate-and-duty-and-doom.
Chilling, isn't it?
Doesn't Odin get taken out by Fenrir?
Seems kinda anticlimactic. I mean Fenrir's a pretty cool wolf, but I mean, we're talking ODIN here. You can't have ODIN get eaten by a wolf! That's so lame, the All-Father could run that fat dog through with Gugnir from a mile away.
I C U GUYS ARE TALKING ABOUT VIKINGS.
YES WE R.
The idea of the end of the world being cyclic, of the world being a Great Wheel, is very much an Asian idea.
Western eschatology (that is, thinking about the End of All Things) are more of a final ending. Ragnarok, Armageddon, etc.
And both of these influenced Hideaki Anno. Everybody knows he's Japanese. Not everybody knows that he's a BIG fan of American science fiction literature. "Instrumentality" is a word he borrowed and put into NGE just as a little shout-out to an American author he liked, Cordwainer Smith.
You have a good point, but I think the linear element of time you describe is newer than Ragnarok and other pagan ideas of the apocalypse. There's something very cyclical about the atrological world-view of the Greeks and other Mediterreaneans too.
A lot of that whole cyclical thing started in the Middle East anyway, in Persia, with the whole Zoroastrianism thing. I guess Westerners view Persia as being part of the "East", but Easterners view Persia as being part of the "West"! Poor Persians are stuck in the middle. Heheh, that religion also influenced the monotheistic Abrahamic views that would dominate the West for millenia afterwards.
So yes, everything comes from Persia, even ice cream.
From Iran west, man is of the world but also transcends the world, and the argument is about how best to adapt the world to man.
From India east, man is part of the world and the argument is about how best to adapt man to the world.
That's a gross overgeneralization, but gross overgeneralizations are fun!
I wonder if Hideaki Anno ever reads discussions like this. He must be laughing at us. ~_~;
>>27
"Fuckin' otaku. Y'know what? I'm gonna remake Evangelion just to rape your brain all over again. BEHOLD! REBUILD OF EVANGELION! Kefka laugh"
Yeah, somewhere along the lines, he's giggling to himself.
Honestly, I don't know what was wrong with the first Evangelion n' OVA, but I'm guessing he can only improve on the first model. The problem is then, when talking about it, you have to say "EVA the First" or "EVA the Rebuild" and people get confused.
There is no Evangelion "OVA".