Review of Neon Genesis Evangelion

This is a very hard series for me to rate. On the one hand I loved it, on the other I hated it. Often at the same time. There is also the fact that it was my first anime and therefore I got more easily confused than I am now at NGE's mode of presentation and storytelling. I would not, incidentally, recommend this as anyone's first anime under any circumstances. Love it or hate it I think most people would agree with me on that. I started off loving it, only for the ending to put me off anime for a few years. Since Ican separate what I like from what I hate quite easily I'll split the review up in that way.

Love: The artwork here is gorgeous. Given the limitations of their budget they did a fantastic job, from the Evas to the character designs. My one caveat is the angels: I didn't really like them. But that isn't enough to keep me from appreciating the visual splendor on display. Also brilliant is the music. The opening title is one of my all time favorites and throughout the series there are wonderful themes that add greatly to the drama. I have several tracks permanently on my iPhone and listen to them often. Plotwise, the basic story has been done to death, from high-schoolers as the leads to the mechs being built to fight monsters destroying humanity, but I was lucky in that this was the first time I saw it and thus the cliche seemed new and fresh. Since this series created many of these cliches it seems only fair to give it a pass on them. It revolves largely around a monster of the week approach, although they do have a number of overarching themes. The plot really feels like it's advancing so you feel quite drawn to the struggles of the leads. It also features a lot of emotional soul-searching and character development. This was something genuinely new to anime, and is why this was one of the most influential animes of all time. The series does quite a good job of setting up the drama and danger and makes it very clear how important for the survival of the species this mission is. Which leads right into the problems.

Hate: I think that everyone can agree the ending sucked. A big part of the reason the show kept me hooked was because I wanted to know the answers to the many mysteries it set up. What were the Angels? Why were they named that? Why were the computers running the Evas named after the Magi? What was with all the Christian symbolism? What was Gendo's goal in all this? Well, you never find these out. The movie explains some of this, but to say that the answers it gave were unsatisfactory is rather an understatement. I naively assumed that this series was doing things for a reason, and when it turned out to be going nowhere I turned harshly against a series that I had previously been enjoying. Watching it again knowing that these questions wouldn't be answered I realized how pretentious it all is. Why throw in all this (often obscure) Christian symbolism if it doesn't mean anything? The major complaint shared by everyone is the characters. Shinji is a whiny brat, and kind of a wuss. Fans who point out that he is in fact an accurate depiction of an abused child are missing the point. This is a form of entertainment, not a documentary. Nobody wants to listen to someone whine about how bad their life is for hours on end (wah! my dad built me a mech and surrounded me with beautiful girls. wah!). Having an unsympathetic character is fine but they have to either be surrounded by better ones or improve. The series relies and focuses on the whiner FAR too much. People who like to go on about realism should note that there is in fact no way that people with such severe emotional flaws would ever be put in positions of such power. I put up with Shinji entirely in the hope that he would get better, and he does, only to collapse back in on himself again. The other characters aren't as bad, although his father Gendo is the worst combination of stereotypically distant Japanese father and incomprehensible supervillain. He does however have the best glasses in the entire world. The final few episodes were really bad, although here I'm giving the series a pass since I know it was budget constraints more than anything else. We get one obviously major character showing up, developing an instant bff relationship, and then vanishing an episode later. The last two episodes are told almost entirely in stills since they ran out of budget to animate anything. But even here, it is obvious that the series didn't have a plan of where it was going. It was relying on faith that it would get somewhere interesting and it didn't arrive there.

I don't want this to be a 5. Five implies mediocre, and Evangelion is never that. But since there is no way that I can provide a score that is both 1 and 10 simultaneously there's nothing I can do but average them together. And when you do that it comes out completely average. The series is one that should be seen if only because of all that it inspired, but be prepared going in for an unsatisfying conclusion and some seriously annoying characters.