Review of Neon Genesis Evangelion

I find myself struggling to write this, largely because I absolutely adore this series. It is much easier to review a series I didn't care for and list off merits and faults. As I see it, with Evangelion there are two types of people with regards to this show, you either hype the show up, or you complain that the show is overhyped, I'll try to be neither for the sake of objectivity. Oh and probably some minor spoilers, no details I promise. Story: The story overall is fantastic, it follows a 14 year old boy Shinji Ikari as he pilots the Evangelion unit 1, essentiallya giant mech, to fight the angels, creatures of unknown origin that one by one launch their assaults on NERV, the organisation that oversees the Evangelion project. He is joined by fellow 14 year old pilots Rei Ayanami and Asuka Langly Soryu. Why 15 year olds? Well in the words of the series, "We must use fourteen year olds." Works for me. As the series progresses it moves more and more to focusing on the characters as they... Erm... Well... Develop... Instead of the battles with the angels. Oh and I'll talk about the ending towards the end... It's special...

Art: Was phenomenal! Well, I mean when they were drawing the battle scenes... Those were really something. The level of detail there is truly above and beyond. As for the rest of it, it's mostly still good! But well... There were problems. Curse you limited budgets! There are numerous instances of characters holding things over their mouth to speak, which for the most part isn't too distracting, but two scenes in particular stand out. In both of these they play a static image for far too long with only background noise playing, one is at the train platform and the other is in an elevator. The other point where the art really slides is at the ending but more on that in a minute.

Sound: The theme song is a classic at this point, even Cartoon Network's "Regular Show" did a spin off of the opening sequence. Personally I love the rest of the songs on the soundtrack as well. Shiro Sagisu is a fantastic composer and his songs fit very nicely with the mood. This is one of the few shows that I've watched with the dub track as well as the subtitles and it is actually pretty good. It struggles at the beginning, but after only a few episodes the voice actors really start to match their role.

Character: Shinji is not your average protagonist with confidence and all the answers. Rather Shinji is a coward who has to remind himself "I mustn't run away." He is balanced by Asuka, who exhibits confidence to to point of arrogance, and Rei, who was designed to fall into the uncanny valley, but has actually spawned off her own character type. Most everybody gets frusterated with Shinji and initially hates Asuka, but part of the beauty of this pilot team, from a story point of view, is that they're imperfect, they don't have all of the answers, and this conflict of personalities causes clashes. The characters all have depth to their personalities which is only revealed as the series progresses and this depth is impressive in itself.

The Ending: This is one of the original Gainax endings, endings that leave you confused and oftentimes disappointed. I will admit that after the last episode I sat staring at my screen slack-jawed where I said to myself "what the f*** did I just watch." The art for much of the episode quite literally appears to be black sharpie on printer paper. I don't want to go into the details, but in essence it's an abstract ending and nobody understands it for sure. If you're looking for something a little more concrete watch End of Evangelion... Though that has its own set of questions. That being said this ending is one of my guilty pleasures, Anno always says that Eva must mean something different to everyone and watching the ending and finding out what it means to me is something I enjoy doing.

Conclusion: I love this show, however I recognise that other people have different views and that the ending can be disappointing. All in all it was hugely influential, it is an effective deconstruction of the mech genre and it is massively hyped. Because of its infulence, everybody should watch it, if not only to catch the references that are scattered across other shows.