Neon Genesis Evangelion will change your life

My original experience with Evangelion came in high school in late spring of 2000. I came across the first DVD during the early days of that medium at a Suncoast at the mall. I remember watching the first four episodes (DVDs tended to hold about 120 minutes of video) and being slightly impressed.

I was a big Gundam fan at the time. Gundam Wing had exploded on Cartoon Network’s Toonami and sent me on the hunt for anything mecha. Evangelion was definitely a mecha series and checked that box. Evangelion was something quite different, though, and the first four episodes betray what eventually happens in the series.

It took an extra year or so for me to finally track down the remainder of the discs and the movie to give them a proper viewing. And everything came together at that point. Evangelion just sort of unravels from the beginning to its end. It’s like a ball that falls out of your hand, rolls into the street, causes a truck to veer off course, and then fall off a bridge onto a passing oil tanker, causing a massive fiery blaze.

I mean that in a good way too. It was really hard to watch anime after that, because I felt Evangelion had done anime right, and there was little chance I was going to watch anything better or more provoking.

To a large extent, that’s still the case over two decades later. Modern anime lives in the shadow of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and I’m far from the only one who feels that way. Eva brought post-modern sensibilities to anime. Eva was far from the first anime series to comment on anime, but it was the first successful attempt to deconstruct the medium from episode to episode, peeling away one layer at a time. By the end of the series, you’re left with extended still shots, hand drawings, and utter nonsense.

It’s hard to explain how Eva is as captivating as it is. There’s definitely a lot of religious and apocalyptic iconography and jargon that overpower the series, but that’s really just window dressing. Eva, in reality, is a descent into madness over 26 episodes and a movie. Coming along for that ride are some of the best characters in modern anime.

Who are the characters

Shinji is a typical teenage boy, only severely and constantly in need of positive reinforcement and acceptance. Asuka is the fiery redhead who masks that she has a secret crush on Shinji by verbally berating him at every moment, and hiding her lack of confidence by regular ego trips. Rei is the quiet character, lacking anything resembling an overt personality, who nonetheless occupies a motherly role to Shinji. Shinji’s attraction to both, in different ways, creates a very different sort of romantic triangle.

To Asuka, Rei is nothing more than a doll. To Rei, Asuka is pointless. But all three are the chosen pilots of the Evas, a sort of super-robot trio that are holding off the Angels from making contact with humanity. Then there’s Kaoru, who makes an appearance later and makes vague passes at an interest in Shinji.

Understanding Evangelion

To understand Evangelion, you should consider the series as kaiju. Eva is a lot closer to Godzilla than Gundam. The ultimate message of the Angels (huge monsters from “space”) is that they want to communicate with humanity, understand them, and eventually bond with them.

To explain any further is to risk going into a long dissertation about the series. Long story short, it’s bigger than the sum of its parts, by a metric ton. After watching Eva, you’ll immediately look for a Quora or Reddit article about the point of the series because it’s hard to conceptualize without thinking about it over an extended period of time.

The only spoiler I can offer is that no character has a happy ending. Madness is the modus operandi from the midpoint of the series onward.

Evangelion changed the trajectory of anime

Rei is the very first modern moe character, and Askua is the first modern tsundere character in anime. There’s a piece of moe and tsundere in a lot of characters that preceded them (Lum was tsundere-like), but Evangelion wrote the book on the modern implementation of those concepts.

Again, I’m far from the only person who will advance that argument. A quick jaunt over to tvtropes.com will list all of the direct ripoffs of Rei and Asuka in the aftermath of Evangelion.

Anime has absolutely driven off the rails since the early 2000s, but the blame should be laid at drawing the wrong conclusions from Eva rather than drawing the right ones. Eva should have taught studios that audiences are willing to embrace nuance, complex concepts, and broken characters. Instead, studios seemed to have taken away that audiences want a milquetoast boy lead, dictatorial girl A, emotionless girl B, and vaguely feminine boy B. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, for instance, is just Neon Genesis Evangelion in a high school setting.

I haven’t even talked about the other characters, like Misato Katsuragi and Kaji, who have their own fanbases. Not to mention Shinji’s father, Gendo, or Fuyutsuki, PenPen, or Shinji’s classmates. There’s just too much to talk about.

How influential and important is the series? Important enough that Netflix rescued the series in 2019, gained global streaming rights, and then paid for a full re-dub of the series.

But what about the action?

No one really watches Eva for the action, but maybe we should.

The battles are framed like kaiju, often from the side and in a largely-abandoned city. It’s no coincidence that Hideaki Anno (the principal director of Evangelion) would be asked to revamp Godzilla for Japanese audiences.

I could go on all day. Just watch the series. Please watch it. Now that it’s on Netflix, it’s easier than ever to watch it. If you don’t have Netflix, just order the bluray, which contains the movie. Commit yourself to all 26 episodes, in Japanese audio with English subtitles.

Yes, the last two episodes are utter nonsense. But it reflects a reality of a failing studio with a threadbare budget and a director who is undergoing a mental breakdown. Then commit yourself to a movie that goes 120 mph and doesn’t stop until the ending credits. You will probably love every second of the ride, but even if you don’t, you’ll come out at the other end of it with some very strong opinions.

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