Review of Neon Genesis Evangelion
What made neon genesis evangelion one of the most incredible and unpredictable anime witch success remains over a decade with such a ridiculous plot as: “a very depressive guy needs to pilot a giant robot for the sake of saving the world but he do not really want it” was of course the way how the show manage to conciliate so concepts in a consistent and interesting story, and most of all how all the scenes, despite how simple they appear to be, has a hidden porpoise or even an double interpretive line – whatseems to occur a lot – and drives you to a fantastic mind blowing resolution without really resolving anything.
Of course this show would not have been so amazing without the magnificent character development over the episodes. This anime have done the perfect mixture of metaphysical elements like: “being”, “existence”, “conscience”, “identity” with the psychology ones that gives us the sensation of reality in the characters relation with each other. The majority scenes both tells us the story, with lots of metaphors that can be inferred, while develop the characters mind’s problems in a wonderful script. As numbers philosophers like to say 3 is a perfect number, since he is not alone as number 1 and is not imperfect as number 2 that means the dualism, in other words the triad: story/characters/narrative works perfect each one optimizing what is better in the other ones.
This review may contain spoiler:
One interesting thing is how the anime manage to relate the real explanations with good metaphors, for example Adam an Lilith with on the story are two forms of live that in contact to each other will cause a catastrophe that they called the third impact. Despite the Christian reference to an impossible love – what is quite obvious – the Adam/Lilith beings are also convenient ways to bring the men/woman dualism to the story. The way how a men and a woman feels attracted to each other and this desire of touch can generate something new – life – is well represented in the relation between Kaji and Misato and also means that human beings can open the chamber of guf an analogy to the place where the unborn souls rest. This is just a piece of how the most important philosophical concepts in evangelion are subtle showed during the day a day scenes.
Another objective concept is the LCL that is literally life in a liquid, analogue to cosmological and metaphysical thoughts on substance of matter and soul. (I’m saying objectively cause LCL is literally a substance) It’s also fascinating how these concepts are well put together with empirical science researches like perfluorcarbons a breathable liquid.
Since I don’t want to extend myself so much let's start what's important.
Because of what I said before I can’t separate the characters from the story so I’m going to analyze them together. The story starts showing us a giant monster resisting all the army ways to combat and what looks like a post-apocalyptical Tokyo without people except for a young boy waiting for a woman and in other scene the woman going to pick him up. The scenes are so well planned that you can deduce that they were expecting the monsters arrive, the army is irrelevant and Shinji hates his father just before those things come to be proven. The human instrumentality project is mentioned just in the start and it’s very easy to figure out that it’s not just about “save the world”. In the middle of the episode we discover the leader of NERV, Shinji’s father, called him because there are not a pilot to the robot called evangelion which can destroy the giant beings called Angels. The anime do not massively explains you why the world is in dangerous or why they are called angels, but since this might be a deep state secret you will find out as times goes by. Instead of that it is much more interesting to see what Shinji thinks about piloting the evangelion, his feelings and why he stills doing so.
What made me continue watching the anime was obviously the consistence of NERV as a military force. Misato really works like a battle strategist since all her strategies were interesting, creative and more than everything plausible. One of the common mistakes in mecha shows is to ignore the characters that support the pilot, but the way how evangelion use a few quantity of characters allow it to develop them as well as it could have been.
Besides Misato, another special mention is Asuka, who change the pace of the anime once she is the most energetic character with competitive sense and desire to pilot Evangelion. While I don’t want to spoil the story so much in this review I’m going to focus on how brilliant it was to show up the concepts of Angels – the beasts- and Evangelion – the robots – while develop Shinji Relation to Misato, Rei and his father before Asuka’s appearance. It gives you time to understand how NERV works and to understand some depressive and minimalist characters like Rei and Shinji, who don’t know very well how to express their feelings without being boring and during enough time to apparently running out of ways to entertaining you before Asuka’s arrival.
Overall the anime has pretty dense information to show in just 26 episodes and it would be not possible to develop the characters, presenting their uncertainty and mind problems, showing the hidden story of NERV and SEELE and their contribution in the second impact while made us entertained in epic robot’s battle without the entire director’s efforts. Hideaki Anno really emerged on the story to do the scrip perfect as it was and that’s why I can say without a sign of doubt that he is evangelion.