Written by: Carl Horn
Source: J-pop.com
Dated: Circa 1996
Gainax, the singular studio which created THE WINGS OF HONNEAMISE, GUNBUSTER, NADIA: THE SECRET OF BLUE WATER, and OTAKU NO VIDEO, returned to anime after a four-year exile in October of 1995-bringing a 26-episode television series with the ancient Greek name of NEON GENESIS EVANGELION. Directed and largely written by Hideaki Anno, the return was a triumph, winning the 1996 Animage Grand Prix award for best anime of the year, beating out big-name sequels such as GUNDAM WING and MACROSS SEVEN, and fan favorites such as MAGIC KNIGHT RAYEARTH and SLAYERS. The original show ended in April, but EVA's success has continued unabated, with bestselling sales on laserdisc and video- even its music has gone through the roof, with volume 3 of the EVA soundtrack being the first anime album to hit #1 on the Japanese pop charts since GALAXY EXPRESS 999, seventeen years before.
Now the series that took Japan by storm is coming to the United States, with the simultaneous release in November by Houston's A.D. Vision of English versions of the first four episodes of NEON GENESIS EVANGELION. But EVA was no ordinary "hit of the year;" its success was both fueled and trailed by a fierce controversy over not only its use of graphic violence and adult sexual situations, but its nontraditional structure, narrative techniques, and an ending that over ten million Japanese tuned in to, only to raise a national howl of protest by the time the closing credits rolled.
The story begins in the year 2015. The twenty-first century came in with a bang: our protagonist, 14-year old Shinji Ikari, learns in his history class about the "Second Impact" : nine months before he was born, a meteor traveling at relativistic speeds struck Antarctica, powerful enough to melt the ice cap and wobble the Earth's axis. The resulting coastal flooding and climactic shift eventually led to the death of half the human race. Now is an age of recovery and returned prosperity, but dark secrets of the catastrophe threaten the human future.
When Shinji, a withdrawn boy used to living alone, is summoned to Tokyo-3, a super-technological "fortress city" built both above and below ground, by his taciturn father, Gendou, who heads the secret UN agency known as NERV, he is also drawn into the mysteries surrounding the legacy and the true nature of the Second Impact. His arrival coincides with an assault on Tokyo-3 by a monstrous entity which NERV refers to as an "Angel," one of a series which will attack this city that was in fact built to lure them in and destroy them. And much to Shinji's surprise, Gendou expects him to do the destroying, ordering his son to get into the giant biomecha code-named EVA Unit-01 and fight-now.
Much of the premise and many of the early elements of EVA are familiar, indeed stereotyped elements of Japanese TV science fiction: teenage boy is chosen to pilot a robot his father built and fight against the enemy. It's reminiscent of anime from GIGANTOR to GIANT ROBO ( on which Anno was special-effects director ), and the weird organic forms of the enemy, who attack one at a time, are reminiscent of the "monster of the week" tokusatsu shows such as ULTRAMAN ( Anno's favorite television show ) . The director of EVANGELION began from an immediately familiar and recognizable template, but in an interview before the show first aired, put the question up front: "If a person likes robot or cute girl animation, can they still be happy with it after the age of twenty?" It may seem like an odd question for Anno, 36 year-old super-otaku, who created in EVA an anime full of robots and cute girls, to pose.
But the director was quite serious: his studio, Gainax is known as the otaku who examine themselves. The personal, allegorical nature of their work was treated seriously in HONNEAMISE and humorously in OTAKU NO VIDEO, and it emerges throughout the length of EVANGELION, many of whose multi-generational cast of characters are painted masks for the show's staff and most especially for Hideaki Anno himself. Anno had a stark confession in his postscript to volume one of the EVA manga, speaking of a profound period of depression that had haunted him for the four years preceding the production of this show, making him impotent as a creator. Speaking in the same remarks about the similar problems of Shinji, Anno said that "he lacked even the courage to kill himself." The plot contains a labyrinthine darkness whose conspiracies are also comparable to the X-FILES, but the real darkness underlying a show full of intrigue comes from the personal depths, and the real sex and violence underlying a show full of "service shots" [a "fan service" to adolescent males - Ed.] and robot action comes from the hardcore land of human emotion.
In an industry full of interchangeable swipes and thoughtless singles, EVANGELION has the look of something cared for and made as if it might have actually mattered to someone. Mamoru Oshii, maker of PATLABOR 2 and GHOST IN THE SHELL, and often regarded as the most progressive director in anime, eschews watching anime himself in favor of such live-action influences as Andrei Tarkovsky and Luc Besson, but Gainax's continuing challenge to the industry is in some ways more intriguing, as it attempts to effect a revolution from deep inside-its otaku building their intricate fantasy castles in a super-detailed style of obsessive detail, then dismantling them brick by brick to show their sense of an underlying and inescapable reality.