Review of Neon Genesis Evangelion
A decade ago, Jacob Chapman made the case that the fatal flaw of Neon Genesis Evangelion was its existentialist thesis, one that assumed the sustainability of "creating one's own personal universe" within its premise. To me, this critique got to the heart of the show better than any other that I had heard, and I retain that it is true. Now, however, I see so much more to dislike that the existential angle seems like just the outer shell of what is a truly rotten core. Neon Genesis Evangelion is a classic example of a common fallacy, the projection of "humanism" at the expense of havingany compassion for the individual. For all the series' musings about how you need to live, laugh and love, nothing here seems to suggest that the actual characters at the center of the story matter to the creators. "Emotional moments" seem jerry rigged to endear the audience to the characters and series by appealing to relatable struggles and classical melodrama (orphans, unrequited love, the betrayal of a friend), in the end all this does is prove that the characters themselves are nothing more than dolls for the series to play with. Shinji can do and say whatever the narrative of the show demands because he's not unlike Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter at heart, a faceless cypher for the audience that can be thrown into the depths of despair, bravery, rage, insecurity or compassion for the sake of a point. This is no less true of its objectified bunch of young women, who play as whatever their anime stereotype is combined with objectifying sexualization and a couple of one note clandestine desires that make the series appear "psychological" without it having to actually care about any of the characters.
It would be glib to suggest that a work can't preach a message of love and compassion while also having what I perceive to be flat characters, and I can't deny that evaluating the sincerity, believability and humanity by which a character is portrayed in a story is far from an exact science, but when this same work is also built around romanticizing the idea of all humanity returning to an amorphous collective consciousness, those flat characters begin to appear more suspicious in their intentions. Are Shinji, Asuka, Rei, Misato and Gendo husks because Anno and his team are bad writers, or because the message of the show, from the beginning, was to downplay individuality and act as an ode to giving up? Since I am a fan of Anno's, I would hope he would never intend the latter, and yet as a fan of his I also know for certain that its not the former. The show's belief in, nay, insistence on conformity and the death of the self (not for the sake of spreading love and kindness at the expense of one's own comfort but rather to serve a nebulous idea of "the greater good", which in this show's eyes is something like everyone in the world dying) contrasted with its disingenuous appearance as a "compassionate character study" is the essential problem in my eyes.
To even discuss the individual elements of form at play here may seem fruitless when considering the ideological mischief at the heart of the work, but understanding those component parts is a step towards understanding the how, what and why of the final product. Hideaki Anno is, relatively, a master of composition, texture and color. It would be hard, even, to find a television anime from this time period that equals the wealth of creative and detailed designs, appealing colors and fluid animation that is contained in Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's not as if these memorable images contain any pathos or expression of worth, mind you. Form isn't inherently artistic, and that is vividly expressed here in violent, precisely composed action scenes that serve no actual purpose in the narrative and suffer from a complete lack of humanity or kineticism. Some moments could be seen as tense, which I suppose is a compliment but exaggerated tension in a vacuum is a brief, insubstantial "pleasure", not unlike a cigarette except duller and more uncomfortable. The Hideaki Anno that crafted the wonderful, restrained mech battle at the end of Gunbuster episode 5 is nowhere to be seen here, a show where nearly every episode has a fight and not a single one is pleasant. "Horrific" could certainly describe a few of them, I won't deny the memorable terror of seeing a 14 year old boy stab a monster with a knife and scream bloody murder while doing it, but since that doesn't build to anything it isn't worth much. My point is not to undermine every aesthetic accomplishment Anno and his team managed with Evangelion, but rather to explain why I believe even those aspects are ultimately footnotes in what becomes the lingering memory and impact of the overall series. From my point of view, these action scenes serve to unnerve the audience, emphasize certain imagery, occasionally continue the characterization and pad out the episodes so they don't feel completely empty. Adept technique in service of insidious ends is only worth as much as those ends, and if there's a hint of showboating or glamor in that (as I very much suspect is present with the opulent, masturbatory action sequences in Evangelion), then it is even worse.
The music in Evangelion is far less superficially impressive than the way the show looks, though it has somehow maintained a hypnotic grip on the culture regardless. Atypically for Gainax, Neon Genesis Evangelion's score is made up of entirely forgettable tunes that do a decent job of convincing the viewer that what they're watching is anything other than a thin veil of color, geometry and sexualization intended to distract them from the real message lying just beneath. The show's opening and ending theme songs pretend to be worthy of note but are only so because of a few mysterious properties. The show's opening, A Cruel Angel's Thesis, is a generic, somewhat tonedeaf popsong played over some undeniably interesting rapid cut images that explain quite a bit of the show if you pay enough attention. As you likely already know, this song has managed to become incredibly popular despite not sounding that unique, and to be frank, this spell is not lost on me. I know every single word sung over the course of the 90 second sequence played at the beginning of each episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and I honestly don't know why that is. I've never particularly liked this show, nor the opening, even during times where I had a lot more respect for its construction. There are quite literally hundreds of anime openings I like more, from shows I like more, that I've listened to more times and more recently. Thus, I will give credit where it is due. It's a catchy song. As is "Fly Me To The Moon", the iconic ending theme which sticks out far more than the opening and yet is also a magic trick. It's a slow song, it's a famous song, it's in English, it's set to a somewhat striking, odd visual, and the lyrics are vaguely dramatic sounding. All of these surface level elements distract from it not really being a good ED at all. It's not particularly emotional, nor fitting for the series, nor are the lyrics or visuals meaningful or profound in really any way. Just like the opening and the fight scenes, it's memorable and shows clear competence of form, but in service of nothing.
"Memorable and competent but fundamentally illusory" is an apt descriptor for everything about Neon Genesis Evangelion that doesn't involve mankind's collective, unconscious return to the original ancestor. If there is any meaning to the inherent strange artifice of this series, of action scenes that look cool and frightening but evoke nothing, of characters who cry and hurt but have no souls, of music that affects importance but carries no weight, it is that it serves to disconnect the audience from their humanity enough to make the "medicine" of the show's ultimate theme go down easier. If the uncomfortability caused by the contrast between ostensible quality and internal darkness was intentional on the part of the staff, they would certainly be malevolent geniuses of some kind, yet I think its more realistic to say that goodness cannot be truly faked in the pursuit of ill begotten gains.
To say that a team of artists and their production committee decided to create what was, at the time, a completely one of a kind TV anime, only for the purpose of manipulating their audience into caring enough about the show that it can tenderly encourage them to give up on life at the end, would be a bit grim and unrealistic. Yet it would certainly be no more unrealistic than saying that the same effort (and capital) was put into sincerely helping an artist realize his selfless, sensitive vision of a new kind of mecha anime. The truth is most likely somewhere in between, as the series' messiness and uneven writing speaks to some kind of honest production cycle, while Anno's references to Godzilla and Mobile Suit Gundam reflect what we know to be his interests. I am aware as well that Anno has struggled with depression in his life, and that those struggles are very likely an inspiration on the characters and themes explored in the show. I am also aware that what I perceive to be callous and impersonal characterization is very common in anime (and art in general), even in other works by Anno, so it is just as fair to say that the depiction of characters in Evangelion was simply an aspect of the show that I feel does not work and was made with not particularly out of the ordinary warped intentions. On the contrary, however, studio Gainax seems to consistently advocate for the themes I find to be particularly heinous in Evangelion, those being conformity and misanthropy. It is also a bit unbelievable to me that so much money and marketing would be put into something that is actually bleedingly loving, heartfelt art, as many fans may see this series. Based on this information, I would conclude that the final product is a blend of the actual interests of its creators, the subconscious desires and biases of those creators, formal showboating, attempts to appeal to a popular audience, and fully self aware propaganda.
The core issue here, of emptiness disguised as understanding, is typified in the series' contrast to Mobile Suit Gundam. Tomino's original treatise against war made powerful use of its mechanical imagery. On the inside of cold, unfeeling husks called "mobile suits" were fragile, precious human beings. Amuro's virtues, flaws, pain and triumph were contrasted against one another to create a holistic portrait of a life, which then emphasized the anti-warmth shell which he inhabited. The whole environment was made to be unfit to sustain the sensitivity of what we see, and Tomino makes that clear immediately and constantly. There is no reason that Anno should make the same series that Tomino did, in fact that would be bad in its own right, but the choice to make the mechs biomechanical and the environment so nondescript reveals the intentions of this project. The humanity of the characters isn't contrasted with the inhumanity of the machines or the violence because, in the eyes of this show, they are one and the same.