Review of Neon Genesis Evangelion
"With great power comes great responsibility" - Some superhero movie. So what if you gave power to some adolescent 14 year old boys and girls that don't want power? People would probably relish and dream of having powers like Spiderman, but who would actually want to be in the same position as Shinji in Evangelion? What happens if you're the only person that can save the world, and as a result, you have to use that power that you never asked? That's basically the general gist of the plot of Evangelion (the first half anyway). What happens when the power of a superhero is given toa boy that can barely find the will to live? Will he rise up to the role, just because of the expectations of others? What's the internal conflict boiling within Shinji?
It breaks open the typical shounen hero archetype and tries something new. It realistically portrays what happens when some random kid is put on a pedestal, having to save the world against supernatural beings.
Honestly, all of the characters are a sort of commentary on these typically "too perfect" characters in shounen. All of the cast of characters are a sort of warped persona of some kind that is taken from a shounen archetype. Traumas, life events, and just the story progression in general is purposefully depressing in order to show a sharp contrast into it's shounen counterpart. Things that would be a mere blip in the radar for a shounen protagonist is the end of the line for a character in this show. Something that the protagonist would "get over it" would definitely not just be "getting over it" for our main cast of characters.
Ok, but who the hell really cares? I don't think anyone disputes that Evangelion is pretty good to start off with. It's really the second half, that I think people really start to have diverging opinions, mine included.
Basically, all of the characters have mommy or daddy issues, putting it simply. I could go in depth in terms of why, but there's no need! The show does it for you. The show puts the characters under a microscope and spoon feed you their frail egos and flashback sequences that no one asked for. The entire last couple of episodes is just psychoanalyzing every relevant characters so that you, the viewer, can clearly see what's going on in each person's head. Not that it was up for much debate. Honestly, it feels like I was watching a person who just read a book on human psychological development.
Did you know that people who don't have a great childhood in terms of nurturing, having loving parent figures tend to have mental instability? Anna Freud once said this "Defense mechanisms are unconscious processes that distort reality in order to protect the personality from intolerable feelings of guilt and anxiety. Moreover, they enable the personality to remain in balance in order to continue to adapt to the psychosocial world. " And people who don't have a good childhood tend to exhibit defense mechanisms more, which is basically what the entire main cast of characters do. I feel as though Hideaki Anno wanted absolutely no doubt in what the characters' feelings were and how they were coping with reality. It just feels like Hideaki Anno picked up Anna Freud's papers and put them in as explanations as to what the characters were feeling about.
Less is more. I more or less got each character profile before each of them were psychoanalyzed by the show itself. There was no need, seriously. The viewer doesn't need to be hit by a sledgehammer in order to understand each character. Show, don't tell.
The ending was dreadful, no doubt about it. It's a copout due to low budget and lack of a better way to find an ending. It's at least not a deus ex machina, but the show is purposefully cryptic and garbled near the end so that it can seem deeper than it actually is.