|
| End of Evangelion, The |
|
  (8/10)
|
Runtime: 87 m |
| Public Rating: 8.05 (92 votes) |
Director: Hideaki Anno & Kazuya Tsurumaki |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Sci-Fi/Animation |
Year: 1997 |
| Writer(s): Hideaki Anno, Shinji Higuchi & Kazuya Tsurumaki |
| Reviewed by: Friday and Saturday Night Critic |
| |
NEON GENESIS EVANGELION (Television)
(SHIN SEIKI EVANGELION)
and
END OF EVANGELION (Feature)
(SHIN SEIKI EVANGELION GEKIJO-BAN: AIR/MAGOKORO O, KIMI NI)
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.
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.
Misato isn’t much better: a hopeless alcoholic and part-time seductress, she continually questions her own devotion to NERV, despite the structure it has given to her life. As the other two pilots, Rei is a laconic, expressionless creature that lives in an empty apartment and does whatever Ikari tells her, while Asuka is wildly insecure, desperate to prove her superiority, and hurling insults when none are necessary. All this is made more unsettling when we gradually realize how many characters lost their mothers while working at NERV. Part of the fun of “NGE” is in how it gradually reveals its secrets, and I wouldn’t dream of spoiling them. But I will say that for every answer an episode provides, about six questions are left delightfully unresolved.
Despite its cheap exploitation of its female characters, “NGE” is successful in showing us Shinji’s budding curiosity about the opposite sex. If there’s anyone who can’t be blamed for lusting after fourteen-year-old girls, it’s a fourteen-year-old boy, and “NGE” had more than a few moments in which I could recall what it was like when lust was a new thing. Because both are essentially orphans, Shinji and Asuka find themselves living with Misato in Tokyo, and their saving the world plays interestingly into their adolescent interactions. Shinji is attracted to Asuka despite her constant hostility, to Misato despite the pseudo-Oedipal complex this forms, and to Rei, for whom his sexual curiosity becomes just another element of his curiosity for her unknowable past.
“Evangelion” hits its stride in its final handful of episodes and in the feature film. After spending so much time with the characters we understand how writer-director Hideaki Anno uses them as examples in his philosophical treatise on suffering and immortality. Shinji and the others enter drawn-out, impressionist passages in which their self-loathing and weariness are examined with the freedom of animation. Shinji despises his suffering almost as much as he despises himself, but he learns that without suffering there is no free will, and, while in a limbo space brought on by his Eva, he realizes that a world of absolute freedom is one of solitude.
When “NGE” ends, it is open to an enormous amount of interpretation, if for no other reason than because it ends twice. The television series is completed in the twenty-fifth episode in an elegant set of sequences almost entirely within the minds of its characters, with no battles and no violence. The consequent uproar from the show’s fans was so intense, however, that a feature film titled “The End of Evangelion” was prompted. With higher production values, the washed-out look of hand-drawn cartoons is replaced with sleeker, sharper images, and while there is a lengthy robot battle just before the halfway point, it is much more impressive than its predecessors, kinetic and gory. The second half of the film is almost as cerebral as the ending of the series, but astute viewers will notice that it does not take place after the end of the series, but actually at the same time: the twenty-fifth episode is what is taking place in the minds of the characters during what happens during the film.
From a strictly narrative perspective, “NGE” is not airtight (where the Angels have actually been for millennia isn’t mentioned, and why, for instance, if an Eva can use its weapons to destroy an Angel, can’t those same weapons be attached to a tank or a B52?). But “NGE” is more surreal and cerebral than it is realistic, and questions like that aren’t really important. Its “story” is not resolved in any traditional way; in fact, the ending of the movie and the ending of the series, while ostensibly taking place at the same time, seem contradictory. But as a philosophical treatise about the duality of man—about free will and the limitations of freedom, about resigning to life or controlling it, about being an individual and being part of a whole—the two endings compliment one another. Most importantly, the two endings are good food for thought and discussion, even if they’re told under ridiculously perky music.
Hideaki Anno tells the story of Shinji, Misato, and NERV in images that are surprisingly stark and still, given the short-attention span reputation that violent animes have acquired. Tokyo seems constantly bathed in the songs of cicadas and “Neon Genesis Evangelion” is filled with many pensive silences. “End of Evangelion” even contains a few live action sequences, not for the sake of the story, but as points in an argument between Shinji and an entity that might be God. To save on animation costs—which is an easily excusable sin for a fourteen-hour series—still or repeated images are used whenever possible. Memorable setpieces include Ikari’s formidable, desolate office, and the vast underground lair where NERV is stationed. Religious imagery seems to accompany everything that NERV and SEELE are up to, and just keep in mind: Jesus is said to have seven eyes in the Book of Revelation.
Would I like “NGE” more if the same concepts and characters were conveyed with a different look, if everyone looked more like Bart and Homer? If the T&A were removed altogether, if the dozen-plus robot fights were reduced to four or five, or replaced by a different venue for Shinji and the others to find self-worth and defend the world? Chances are good. But I’m thankful for what I’ve seen and admire those involved, especially those responsible for the stream-of-consciousness sequences. Mainstream American feature-length animation may look more polished but, with the exception of Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life,” very little of it has the depth “Evangelion” acquires after growing tired of robots smashing each other. So, if you don’t squirm too much when animated bimbos bend over right in front of you, and if you can sit through twenty-story robots pounding each other over and over again, than “Neon Genesis Evangelion” is an entertaining and rewarding thesis about why we suffer, why we live, and why we hope. Maybe that’s a few too many “ifs” to deserve an unqualified recommendation. But what the hell.
Finished November 6, 2002
Copyright © 2002 Friday & Saturday Night
|
 Printable Version
|
Do you agree/disagree with this review of End of Evangelion, The? Let your opinions be heard in our forum.
|
Buy the Poster of End of Evangelion, The (Click Here)
|
|
|
|
