Eva. Whether you love it or hate it, you have to admit that it single-handedly redefined the genre, proved to the skeptical American market that animation is not necessarily for kids, and solidly placed ADV films on the map as a force to be reckoned with and feared. Eva is so well known that if a so-called anime fan admits to not having seen it yet, he or she can face social ostracism within the community.
—Neon Genesis Evangelion Review
Evangelion’s release history is almost as convoluted and multibranching as its dramatic dimension. The 26-episode TV series, aired in Japan in 1995–1996, climaxed with an unexpected ending as Hideaki Anno, left with inadequate funds to shoot the originally intended script for the two closing installments, resorted instead to a boldly experimental and open-ended finale. Enthusiastically received by fans who had already cherished the director’s forays into avant-garde territory in the course of the run, the show’s conclusion left others deeply dissatisfied. Feelings not merely of disappointment but also of downright rancor manifested themselves in the guise of death threats anonymously posted on the Internet. Evangelion had not, however, thereby come to an end. In fact, Anno resolved to produce an OVA utilizing—albeit with financially imposed alterations—the original script for Episodes 25 and 26 of the show.
Exceptionally generous sponsorship from a consortium of Japanese corporations eventually enabled the director to extend his ambitions to the creation of two feature-length films: Death & Rebirth and End of Evangelion, both of which were released in 1997. Death & Rebirth comprises two segments: the first, Death consists of a stylish reimagining of key moments from the series in montage format with approximately twenty minutes of new footage; the second, Rebirth, contains wholly novel materials. The scenes presented in Rebirth went on to constitute the opening thirty minutes of End, namely, an alternate version of the saga’s finale to the one offered by the TV program. End itself consists of two sections, namely, Episode 25: “Air” and Episode 26: “Sincerely Yours.”
In 1998, the Directors’ Cuts of Episodes 21 through 24, annotated as Episodes 21–24 and featuring extended and improved animation, were released on video. The same year saw the airing on the WoWoW satellite channel of a second version of Death, known as Death True. This included much of the footage from the aforementioned Directors’ Cuts. In 1998, a further theatrical release also took place in Japan: titled Revival of Evangelion, the movie included a third edit of Death dubbed Death True^2 and the End film.
In 2003, Gainax embarked upon a thorough remastering of the original show headed the Renewal Project. Undertaken almost ten years after initial planning for the series had started, this developed under Anno’s chief direction. New life was thus imbued into a chapter of anime history that had already yielded a global fandom phenomenon of unprecedented magnitude and vigor—to a considerable extent due to its shocking conclusion in both the televisual and theatrical formats. The world of the saga was reprocessed by recourse to the latest digital technology, eliminating jittery transitions and rendering the backgrounds more clearly detailed and defined. Acoustic effects were also boosted by completely remixing the dialogue and soundtrack in 5.1 stereo. The Renewal Project included the footage from the original episodes, the Directors’ Cuts of Episodes 21 through 24, Death True^2 and End of Evangelion. Multifarious ancillary merchandise was also released in the course of the Renewal Project. This included CDs, video games, cel-art illustrations and collectible models of all sorts (e.g., musical dolls, soapdish and bottlecap figurines, wedding-cake statuettes and incredibly detailed Eva Units with legion articulated joints).
In the United States and Europe, the series has been distributed by ADV Films, whereas the license for the features has been held by Manga Entertainment. The first DVD release by ADV Films was the 8-disc Perfect Collection in 2002. This contained the original 26 installments. In 2004, ADV released two DVD compilations titled Neon Genesis Evangelion: Resurrection and Neon Genesis Evangelion: Reborn, encompassing the directors’ cuts of Episodes 21 through 23 and Episodes 24 through 26, respectively. The second DVD release of the series by ADV, incorporating both the remastered original 26 installments and the Directors’ Cuts of Episodes 21 through 24, took place in 2005. Named the Platinum Collection, this was adapted from the Renewal Project, though it left out the theatrical releases.
In November 2006, ADV UK released the Neon Genesis Evangelion Platinum Limited Edition R2 Collection, arguably the most impressive European release of the saga to date. The collection contains all the materials produced by ADV for the purposes of the Platinum edition encased in a stylish tin box uncannily redolent of platinum and elegantly decorated with engravings of the three protagonists’ eyes. A year later, the same package was released in the United States by ADV alongside Limited Edition metal-cased sets of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi with the accompanying slogan “Full Metal Jacket Collections from the Bad Boys of Anime.”
This chapter examines the TV show’s diegetic premises, stylistic attributes and thematic preoccupations, providing illustrative examples drawn from individual installments. It deliberately avoids a sequential episode-by-episode analysis. This is because a substantial amount of information about the series is supplied in chapter 7 in the context of a detailed assessment of its reconfiguration in the first part of the feature Death & Rebirth. The reason for adopting this format is that it seems appropriate to address the original program and its theatrical reimagining in tandem as alternate, yet complementary, versions of the saga rather than as totally discrete enterprises. A comparative approach is thereby pursued.
The main portion of the plot unfolds in the course of the year 2015, fifteen years after the Second Impact, an apocalyptic cataclysm ostensibly caused by a meteor strike but actually unleashed by human arrogance, has melted the Antarctic ice cap, tilted the Earth’s axis and wiped out half of the planet’s population. The surviving humans and their offspring are tentatively beginning to recover from those horrors just as a new formidable menace descends onto the scene in the guise of polymorphous and seemingly invincible biomechanoids dubbed the “Angels.” Conventional armaments are completely powerless in the face of these portentous creatures, the only available weapon consisting of another breed of biomechanicanoids known as the Evangelions or Evas.
The Japanese word used in the saga to designate the Angels is “shito,” namely, “messenger,” which corresponds to the original (pagan) meaning of the Greek word “angelos.” The Japanese term for heavenly creatures closer in character to the angels in the Judaeo-Christian tradition is “tenshi.” The Angels invoked by Anno have nothing in common with either Western painting’s solemnly ethereal Gabriel visiting Mary with its baffling announcement or the plump cherubs in the Baroque style. Nor do they come equipped with wings, harps and haloes. In fact, they are invariably enormous, multiweaponed and downright scary.
The Evas are produced by the paramilitary organization NERV and piloted exclusively by chosen “Children” born after the Second Impact who are given very little choice in the matter.1 As the saga develops, it emerges that the actual cause of the disaster resides with the hubristic evolutionary schemes promoted by the shady organization SEELE (“soul” in German): the Second Impact was not instigated by a meteor but by mankind’s contact with the First Angel, Adam, and by the being’s resulting explosion. Yet more unsavory truths come to the surface as it is unveiled that although NERV is supposed to exist in order to prevent a probable “Third Impact” from occurring, both NERV and SEELE are in fact planning a Third Impact in their separate ways. Furthermore, SEELE seeks to engineer a macrocosmic metamorphosis through the implementation of the “Human Instrumentality Project,” which entails the merging of all people into a single undifferentiated mass akin to the primordial life soup.
Wings of Honneamise charts at once humanity’s rise into the promises of cosmic infinity and its plunge into tormenting emotional and ideological dilemmas. Gunbuster transforms the formulae of both mecha anime and high school comedy into an intense quest laden with ethical implications. Nadia analogously transcends the conventions of action-adventure to deliver a dark and thought-provoking epic. Evangelion extends exponentially the genre-twisting proclivities of these earlier productions. Translating its mecha element into an allegorical correlative for the characters’ inner struggles, the saga yields a hard-core psychodrama capable of matching David Lynch’s convoluted imagination at its most baleful.
Like many mecha shows, Evangelion features action sequences interspersed with massive-scale urban destruction and occasional dabs of comedy. Unlike other series, however, it delves dispassionately into the characters’ twisted personalities, as the fear of abandonment and betrayal, the omnipresent phantom of loneliness and a no less ubiquitous sense of disconnectedness from their world persistently threaten to paralyze them beyond remedy. The result is a deeply estranging yet engrossingly familiar mosaic of emotional turmoil.
Anchored to their legacy of childhood loss and rejection, Anno’s personae are relentlessly haunted by an acute sense of dispossession that cannot be adequately relieved by any promises of restoration or compensation. Relatedly, although they feel a desperate need for love and acceptance, they are terrified of being hurt and hence erect impervious affective barriers. This condition eventually involves a total devaluation of social bonds and of language whereby everything becomes meaningless or, conversely, everything becomes equally and overwhelmingly meaningful. As a result, the characters are incapable of grasping any clear notion of relationality and, though repeatedly forced to occupy communal contexts, are unable to open up to others and hence interact positively. They feel warped and stigmatized by their atomized insularity, which would seem to point to a state of undiluted solipsism, and yet, ironically, continually acknowledge the existence of others insofar as they tend to feel exploited and hated by them or, at best, dependent on their bond to others for their very existence.
The Angels themselves could be regarded as concretizations of the principal characters’ anxieties and fears. Their insistent intrusions, moreover, provide a metaphorical correlative for the compulsive repetitiveness with which the afflicted personae circularly return to their feelings of crisis throughout the narrative. Just as the defeat of all seventeen Angels does not lead to a neat resolution but rather to a chain of elusive riddles, so the characters’ quest for emotional stability remains inexorably inconclusive.
The various emotional maladies experienced by Evangelion’s dramatis personae are economically condensed in Anno’s bold characterization of the protagonist, the “Third Child” Shinji Ikari. According to Mike Crandol, the saga’s protagonist embodies the typology of the “Tragic Hero.” Prone to spiral into depressive acedia and to relate to others in a purely mechanistic and apathetic fashion, “Shinji is a departure from the more idealistic heroes commonplace in mecha anime (or adventure fiction in general, for that matter). Adventure heroes customarily represent the audience’s aspirations: they are people we’d like to be. Shinji, conversely, is representative of the audience’s realizations: his flaws we recognize in ourselves” (Crandol).
Susan Napier corroborates this point by proposing that despite its concessions to the conventional trappings of the mecha recipe, Evangelion actually subverts their import right from the start through its utterly uncompromising characterization of the saga’s protagonist. Whereas the typical mecha hero customarily embodies an adolescent male fantasy of technologically enhanced omnipotence, Anno’s tragic hero is intensely repelled by the task laid before him by his callous father Gendou Ikari—NERV’s chief—and his associates: “It is as if Shinji were looking into a distorting mirror and is horrified by the self that he finds there” (Napier, p. 97).
Confirming the saga’s unorthodox adventurousness, Anno’s storyline incrementally reveals levels of complexity far greater than any skeletal plot delineation may superficially indicate. Repeat viewings of the TV series (including the directors’ cuts) indeed disclose a rather convoluted story arc. Outlined below is a chronological reconstruction of the saga’s fabula.
[Approximately 4 billion years ago:]
• The First Impact takes place—this refers to the splitting of a godlike being into the Angels Adam and Lilith and concomitant emergence of the White Moon, which contains Adam and is embedded under Antarctica, and the Black Moon, which contains Lilith and is embedded under Tokyo-3, the saga’s key setting. The latter will later become the giant hollowed-out cavity hosting the “Geofront.” This is a deep underground conglomeration spreading below Tokyo-3. The NERV Headquarters are situated in the middle of the Geofront, and are surrounded by woods and a subterranean lake. The numerous high-rise buildings that hang downwards from its ceiling are the same buildings that stand in Tokyo-3 and are retracted below the city’s surface during Angel onslaughts. Some of these, dubbed “Armament Buildings,” are Eva support structures containing launch and recovery gates, sockets and weaponry storage facilities.
[1999:]
• Professor Kohzou Fuyutsuki, expert in metaphysical biology at Kyoto University, meets the highly talented research student Yui Ikari and the roguish troublemaker Gendou Rokubungi. In the autumn of the same year, Yui and Gendou start dating (upon their marriage, Gendou will adopt his wife’s family name).
[2000:]
• On 13 September, the Second Impact takes place. Officially presented as the result of a meteor strike, this cataclysm causes sea levels to rise and inundate the Earth, concurrently shifting the planet’s axis and wreaking havoc on the ecosystem. Famines, plagues and wars instantly escalate. The Katsuragi research team is in Antarctica at the time of the Second Impact and its sole survivor is Dr. Katsuragi’s daughter, Misato. Gendou, who has also been part of the team, fortuitously leaves Antarctica the day before the disaster.
• Far from constituting a natural disaster, the Second Impact turns out to have been instigated on purpose by Lorenz Keel and by the international cabal SEELE over which he presides. Keel and SEELE are guided by a prophecy included in the “Dead Sea Scrolls,” an ancient document containing descriptions of the seventeen invading Angels. Keel’s ultimate aim is specifically to trigger the Third Impact, and he knows that this cannot come to pass unless mankind has confronted seventeen trials in the form of seventeen Angels. The Second Impact, in this perspective, is instrumental to the unleashing of the Angels. Adam is exploited as the energy source necessary to cause the Second Impact in the first place. The First Angel is subsequently captured, shrunk to embryo size and eventually appropriated by Gendou, who proceeds to merge with the creature by having its chrysalis grafted upon his very body.
• It should be noted that the saga posits two kinds of Third Impact: the “Destructive Impact,” meant to occur if an Angel returns to Adam and expected to annihilate mankind altogether; and the “Constructive Impact,” in which all people are supposed to merge into a single being and Lilith plays the pivotal part. It is initially assumed that in order to allow the Constructive Third Impact to take place, mankind needs to defeat all seventeen Angels, to contain Adam and Lilith and to possess the “Lance of Longinus”—a giant spiral-shaped dart, also known as the “Spear of Destiny,” that is capable of piercing an A.T. (Absolute Terror) Field, namely, the portentous defensive barrier deployed by both the Angles and the Evas. However, matters become rather more complicated as it transpires that the key characters foster quite different plans. This aspect of the saga’s storyline is fully developed in End.
• What must be emphasized at this stage is that both SEELE and Gendou pretend to be endeavoring to prevent the Third Impact by destroying the Angels—and hence eliminating the threat of their return to Adam—when, in fact, they are eager to initiate it. The depth of their mendacity is tersely exposed by the revelation that the Angel imprisoned and crucified in NERV’s hidden bowels is not Adam but Lilith, the Second Angel. Hence, the danger of an invading Angel rejoining its “father” has never obtained but only served as a convenient fabrication meant to keep hosts of loyal employees in thrall.
[2001:]
• Yui and Gendou Ikari have their first and only child, Shinji.
[2002:]
• Fuyutsuki visits the South Pole on a formal investigation of the Second Impact at the UN’s request. In the course of the expedition, the professor meets Gendou again and learns that he and Yui have married and become parents. Fuyutsuki, already suspicious as to the real causes of the Second Impact and to Gendou’s personal motives, discovers that the official documents recording the cataclysm have been severely manipulated. The true nature of the Second Impact, therefore, has been unscrupulously concealed from the public.
[2003:]
• Fuyutsuki obtains further confirmation for the formidable lies surrounding the Second Impact and for the role played therein by Gendou, who works for SEELE as chief of research of the Artificial Evolution Laboratories (AEL). When Fuyutsuki visits the AEL and threatens Gendou with a public revelation of the truth, Gendou leads Fuyutsuki to “Central Dogma,” a massive cavity situated beneath the laboratories. There Fuyutsuki meets Dr. Naoko Akagi, an employee of the SEELE-sponsored organization “Gehirn” (the German word for “brain”) and the ultimate authority in the field of biocomputers. Gendou invites Fuyutsuki to join his team and the professor, after careful consideration, accepts the offer. About half of the Eva-00 has by now been built—this Unit will eventually accommodate elements of Naoko’s mind.
[2004:]
• Yui Ikari is absorbed into the body of the Eva-01 during an experiment before the very eyes of her son Shinji. Gendou vanishes for a week and upon his return informs Fuyutsuki that he has recommended the “Human Instrumentality Project” (a.k.a. “Human Complementation Project” or HCP). This consists of SEELE’s plans to instigate the Third Impact so as to reconfigure drastically the boundaries of human existence. After Yui’s disappearance, Shinji is placed by his uncaring father in the custody of a teacher until 2015.
[2005:]
• The victim of agnosia for five years, Misato is beginning to recover from her trauma. At Tokyo-2 University, she meets Ritsuko Akagi, daughter of the renowned Dr. Naoko Akagi, and Ryohji Kaji, a man who reminds her of her father and will soon become her lover. (Tokyo-2, incidentally, is the city built after the destruction of the original Tokyo in the Second Impact as a temporary capital while the architecturally more advanced Tokyo-3 is being developed.)
[2007:]
• Misato and Kaji separate: Kaji, it transpires, resembles Misato’s father too much for the relationship to work healthily.
[2008:]
• Asuka Langley Sohryu is selected as the “Second Child.” On the same day, her deranged mother hangs herself.
• Dr. Akagi completes the basic theory for the biocomputer “Magi.” The Magi system consists of three interrelated computers—Melchior-1, Balthasar-2 and Casper-3—and decisions are reached as a result of their conferring together. The Magi houses the thought patterns of its developer, with Melchior-1 corresponding to Naoko as a scientist, Balthasar-2 to Naoko as a mother and Casper-3 to Naoko as a woman. Ritsuko joins Gehirn, is assigned to the “E [Evangelion] Project” and learns that her mother and Gendou are having an affair. (A few years later, Ritsuko will take her mother’s place in Gendou’s private life.)
[2009:]
• Misato joins Gehirn and is stationed at the German Third Branch.
[2010:]
• The Magi system is completed. (There will eventually be five more Magi supercomputers under the command of SEELE in China, America and elsewhere. However, only the original trio will ever contain Naoko’s personal notes detailing additional program stratagems and shortcuts.)
• The First Rei Ayanami visits Gehirn with Gendou, who claims that she is the child of an acquaintance. Rei (the “First Child”) contains DNA from Yui Ikari and from Lilith. (SEELE’s counterpart to NERV’s Rei is the Seventeenth Angel Tabris—the Angel of Choice and Freedom—that contains Adam’s DNA.) Naoko recognizes Yui in the child and finds that she has no records. Having learnt from Rei that Gendou is merely using her skills and has no regard for her feelings, Naoko strangles Rei and then kills herself. The next day, SEELE disbands Gehirn and moves the entire team to a new organization, “Special Agency NERV.” SEELE’s agenda thus enters a new phase.
[2012:]
• On the eighth anniversary of Yui’s death, Shinji visits his mother’s grave with his father.
[2014:]
• The Second Rei Ayanami transfers to the Tokyo-3 First Municipal Junior High School.
[2015:]
• Summoned by his father, Shinji comes to Tokyo-3. On that same day, the first Angel attack occurs: its perpetrator is the Third Angel encountered by mankind (Sachiel, the Angel of Water). Shinji is hastily placed inside the Eva-01 to defend the city and narrowly defeats the enemy.
• The Angel invasions continue and are countered by NERV by means of the Eva Units 00, 01 and 02 and of the First, Third and Second Children employed to maneuver them respectively (i.e., Rei, Shinji and Asuka). The “Fourth Child,” Touji Suzuhara, is selected as the pilot of the Eva-03. During the initial activation test, the Unit turns out to be the Thirteenth Angel (Bardiel, the Angel of Lightning and Hail) and is dealt with as such by Shinji’s Eva-01. After this incident, Shinji rebels against his father and quits piloting but the advent of the Fourteenth Angel (Zeruel, the Angel of Power) compels him to return to the front lines. The Eva-01 goes berserk during this fight and devours the enemy, thus acquiring its “S2 [Super Solenoid] Engines”—the mechanisms that allow biomechanoids to operate independently of external energy supplies.
• Kaji, who is supposed to be working for NERV’s “Special Inspection” department but also appears to be secretly investigating NERV’s activities at SEELE’s behest, as well as acting as a spy on behalf of the Japanese government, is assassinated. Misato’s enduring attachment to her college lover despite her protestations to the contrary becomes blatantly and painfully obvious.
• The Eva-00 uses the Lance of Longinus in the battle against the Fifteenth Angel (Arael, the Angel of Birds), effectively vanquishing the enemy but also losing the weapon for good. (The Lance is recalled from the moon by the Eva-01 in End.) Rei’s Unit subsequently self-destructs in an effort to eliminate the Sixteenth Angel (Armisael, the Angel of the Womb) and protect Shinji. The Second Rei is also destroyed in the explosion, and soon replaced by the Third Rei.
• Embittered by the breakdown of her relationship with Commander Ikari, Ritsuko betrays NERV and destroys all the Rei clones (“dummy plugs”), except the one currently functional.
• Asuka vanishes and although she is found before long, it is obvious that she is no longer able to pilot an Eva. The “Fifth Child,” Kaworu Nagisa, arrives at NERV as a replacement for Asuka. Despite his humanoid appearance, he turns out to be the Seventeenth Angel and to be aiming to enter “Terminal Dogma,” presumably with the intention of coming into contact with Adam and thus initiating the Third Impact. However, what Kaworu finds is not Adam but Lilith, and hence chooses to be crushed to death by the pursuing Eva-01. Following this climactic occurrence, the TV show and the feature films proceed to offer alternate, though arguably complementary, endings.
In overturning many of the expectations traditionally surrounding its parent genre, Evangelion also questions, at times quite acerbically, dominant power structures and power relations. This is borne out by Episode 7, “A Human Work,” in which Ritsuko (in her capacity as NERV’s head scientist) first reveals to Shinji the actual occurrences underlying the Second Impact. In the same installment, a corporation critical of NERV’s methods performs the activation test of a pilotless and supposedly “superior” biomechanoid powered solely by nuclear energy, the creature goes on the rampage, and it is up to Misato, Shinji and Unit 01 to save the day. The installment brings forth a trenchant critique of corporational elites, exposing their greed, mendacity and myopic vision. In this instance, the mecha formula is turned into a vehicle for active engagement in political and economic satire.
The ending, moreover, discloses that Gendou himself has surreptitiously triggered the machine’s malfunctioning, which adds a further level of complexity to the episode’s unpalatable ideological message. The dramatization of wheels-within-wheels conspiracies is undoubtedly Evangelion’s forte. A germane topos is articulated in Episode 10, “Magma Diver,” in which Gendou is determined to retrieve the embryonic Eighth Angel (Sandalphon, the Angel of Unborn Children) from the bottom of a volcano. The mission is dramatized as a metaphor for pecuniary and territorial expansionism. Typically, Gendou pursues his goal with scarce concern for the mission’s potential outcomes, which could amount to another planetary upheaval of no smaller a scale than the Second Impact.
Evangelion’s generic distinctiveness is also borne out by its refusal to comply with the typical mecha show’s passion for hard metallic surfaces. In fact, it is rooted in the intractable reality of the flesh. This is attested to by the designs for the Evas, executed by Ikuto Yamashita, as biomechanoids whose organic components are ultimately capable of breaking through the mechanical restraints meant to curb and encase them with shocking repercussions, thereby emphasizing the bestial drives coursing beneath their sleek façades.
The series provides a number of clues to the animal nature underlying the Evas’ restraining plates from an early stage. In the flashback to Shinji’s first battle supplied in Episode 2, “The Beast,” for example, the Third Child catches a glimpse of Unit-01’s vibrant aliveness in the guise of a reflection of its bright green eye in a mirror-fronted edifice. The same image occurs in Episode 14, “Weaving a Story,” in the context of Rei’s stream-of-consciousness reflections, in which the gigantic eye stares out of a grotesquely zoetic skull. As Dennis Redmond emphasizes, the Evas depart radically in their design from conventional mecha made of “stacks of mechanical boxes and tubes which approximate a human figure” and actually “look and move like quasi-living creatures, thanks to extensible necks, tapered waists (very similar to anime characters themselves), gracefully elongated arms and legs, and unusually thin shoulder guards” (Redmond, p. 247).
The Evas’ animateness is not only communicated by the full-fledged Units in action. It is no less powerfully (though less sensationally) exuded by the unfinished prototypes seen in Episode 23 “Rei III.” In the installment’s initial version, the remains of each failed model are neatly laid out on the floor of a remote section of the NERV HQ, and their organic nature is alluded to by most of the flesh having rotted away, leaving little more than spinal chords and odd bones in its wake. In the directors’ cut of Episode 23, the rejected Evas’ body parts are amassed in circular waste pits symmetrically arranged on the sides of a huge cross-shaped cavity, which echoes the show’s governing iconography. Shinji poetically describes the space as a “graveyard” for Evas but Ritsuko characteristically sees it as merely a “dumping ground.” The scientist’s terminology mirrors NERV’s hubristic attitude to their weapons: although both Gendou and Ritsuko know full well that the Evas are organic entities capable of achieving self-awareness to horrifying extremes, they do not hesitate to handle them as lifeless automata. Rejects consisting of heads from which sinuous backbones ensue are presented in End of Evangelion, in which the creatures’ latent aliveness is hinted at by the remarkable degree of variety in facial layout that they exhibit. Three incomplete and unarmored Units (stored in the “Pribnow Box”) are also shown in Episode 13, “Lilliputian Hitcher,” where they are hacked into by the saga’s most formidable menace: the Eleventh Angel Iruel, the Angel of Terror.
Evangelion’s indigenous vocabulary likewise foregrounds the material dimension of its universe. The “entry plug,” a capsule-shaped cockpit accommodating the Eva pilot within the biomechanoid, is vividly redolent of a womb-like receptacle. Posited as a protective chamber throughout the majority of the Eva pilots’ exploits, this location nonetheless holds less than benevolent proclivities. Following Unit 01’s ingestion of Zeruel’s S2 Engines (Episode 19, “Introjection”), Shinji is indeed swallowed by his Eva as though its entry plug were an all-engulfing ancestral womb.
At the same time, the very process of activating an Eva is an intensely physical operation insofar as it requires the insertion of the entry plug into one of its most sensitive body parts, namely, its cervical vertebrae. The principal neural connector between a pilot and an Eva is the A10 nerve, a nerve that “travels from the brain stem through the hypothalamus ... related to high level brain functions such as memory, recognition, and carrying out motion, as well as emotions such as anxiety, fear, happiness, and pleasure. It is also said that it plays a vital role related to the feeling of love between family and lovers” (“Glossary”). The privileging of this vehicle within the series is amply justified by Evangelion’s psychological dimension.
(Please note that a pseudo-entry plug developed so as to activate and operate an Eva without the intervention of a human pilot is dubbed a “dummy plug.” The personal thought patterns inscribed in Rei’s mind in the case of NERV, and those hosted by Kaworu Nagisa’s brain in that of SEELE, are transferred onto the plug to make it functional.)
The uterine analogy is reinforced by the term describing the cord used to energize the Eva from an external source, the “Umbilical Cable.” Just as a fetus receives nutrients through the blood vessels extending from its navel to the placenta, so the Eva receives electric power through the Umbilical Cable. Furthermore, each of the main Evas appears to behave under the influence of the soul of the maternal figure whose vestiges it carries: Naoko’s in the case of the Eva-00, Yui’s in that of the Eva-01 and Asuka’s mother’s in that of the Eva-02. The most potently physical element repeatedly invoked by the saga is the “LCL”—“Link Connected Liquid”—a viscous substance endowed with an unmistakably blood-like odor. LCL fills “Terminal Dogma,” namely, NERV’s nethermost area, situated at the bottom of the 7-kilometer deep “Central Dogma.”2 It also floods the Eva’s entry plug and plays a key role in enabling activation. When the LCL is traversed by an electric current, its molecular arrangement alters and allows it to connect mentally and affectively the pilot and the Eva. Suggestively, the composition of the LCL is also posited as analogous to that of the ancestral life soup.
In portraying the Evas as entities pivotal to humanity’s survival, on the one hand, and bloodthirsty monsters, on the other, Evangelion throws into relief Gainax’s take on the relationship between humanity and technology. Influenced by animistic beliefs of Shintoist orientation, the saga suggests that technology can never be unproblematically regarded as an ensemble of inert tools amenable to total control by humans. Everything, in fact, is endowed with at least potential aliveness, and humanity and technology are accordingly situated on a continuum from which ethical and moral values ensue. As Frédéric Kaplan observes, this worldview entails that “Japanese people do not oppose the natural and the artificial but on the contrary very often use the artificial to recreate nature.” This idea is exemplified by the contrast between “Western fountains” and “small Japanese cascades.” Whereas the former seek to prove humanity’s “mastery over nature” by capitalizing on an entirely “unnatural movement,” the latter “mimic as closely as possible the way water naturally flows.” Ironically, despite their “modest” appearance compared to Western waterworks, “the hydraulic mechanisms underlying them turn out to be technically superior” (Kaplan, p. 5).
Stylistically, Evangelion marks Anno’s introduction into the realm of anime of forms of camera work virtually absent from earlier TV shows. These include the plan séquence (a shot in which the camera shifts focus from one plane of depth to another as the actors move about, allowing for a realistic rendition of both middle ground and background activity); off-frame action (the intimation of the presence of people or objects that are actually outside the frame, which extends an audience’s grasp of the story beyond the boundaries of the visible); a close focus on static details intended to encapsulate metonymically the tenor of an entire scene. These tropes are seamlessly amalgamated with more conventional anime techniques, which Anno boldly resituates within a decidedly contemporary—and arguably postmodern—vista.
Alongside intrepid choreography, a further aspect of Gainax’s experimentative mission deserving of attention is Evangelion’s handling of typography. Gainax had already shown a proclivity to incorporate textual elements prior to Evangelion. This is demonstrated, for instance, by the pivotal scene in Gunbuster in which Ohta lectures Noriko about the part to be played in humanity’s future by her and Kazumi’s courageous efforts and by the composite prowess of their mecha. The message is silently bolstered by the abrupt appearance of the kanji for “heart” and “double fire,” starkly rendered in black ink over a white background. In Nadia, Gainax’s fascination with textuality manifests itself in the guise of cryptic characters and engravings alluding to the heroine’s submerged past and to the vicissitudes of her race, while in Otaku no Video, text is brought into play in the course of parodic interviews with all manner of rabid fans.
Evangelion develops the studio’s attraction to textual elements into a full-fledged passion, utilizing superbold kanji in the Mincho font in the actual footage and design work in the Ryumin and Matisse fonts for the video and laserdisc covers created by Norihiko Nezu. The saga’s unique handling of typography, which caused quite a stir when the series was first broadcast, bears witness to Anno’s commitment to an aesthetic vision wherein every single graphic element is accorded a vital part. Following Evangelion, both His and Her Circumstances and FLCL will again emplace textuality as a major performative agent by means of scrolling and flashing letters and compounds presented in a variety of styles, whereas Mahoromatic—Automatic Maiden will harness typography to the evocation of a broad range of moods and generic situations.
Evangelion also brings textuality into play in the form of stills of newspaper clippings and pages from official reports regarding the Second Impact and related occurrences. Such pseudo-documentary evidence adds dramatic weight to SEELE’s and NERV’s allegations (and lies) in a dispassionate fashion. This would have been hard to achieve if events had been considered solely through the eyes of individual personae without any external mediation. At the same time, the obviously distorted nature of the information divulged by the authorities reminds us that putatively objective sources are no less subjective—and biased—than personal perceptions.3
Increasingly, as the series advances toward its shocking finale, temporal suspension and stasis dominate large portions of the action surrounding the hyperkinetic fight sequences. To some extent, the attenuation of Evangelion’s dynamic dimension is a direct result of budgetary restraints (felt by the troupe most severely from Episode 19 onwards). Yet, it would be ungenerous not to acknowledge that the unhurried rhythm exhibited by the show in its closing third contributes vitally to the communication of Anno’s unique style. The director was indeed able to translate what some would consider a flaw into a virtue, making deliberate pacing and even inaction into key expressive vehicles, and thus exploding the Disney-based assumption that animation must necessarily be rapid, bouncing and tumultuous.
This animational style is ideally suited to Evangelion’s diegetic mold: an intricate thriller that discloses its secrets in a highly methodical, and, at times, excruciatingly oblique, fashion. Although sensational coups de théâtre are not rare, the show’s essence more often emanates from suspenseful drama wherein the action element is minimalistically refined. The incredibly varied soundtrack, created by the composer, conductor, arranger and producer Shiro Sagisu, contributes crucially to the overall mix.
The main characters’ psychological struggles are most effectively conveyed, on the cinematographical plane, by means of animated trips across their psychic terrains. Perplexingly surreal analyses that gradually increase in frequency as the saga progresses, these sequences fathom dispassionately the characters’ minds to the point that these dissolve into digitized fragments of sheer color, language and light. The closing episodes, in particular, offer an uncompromising anatomy of the characters’ minds by deconstructing the art of animation itself. First, we witness a breakdown of the action’s flow into vignettes of the main personae intercut with flashbacks and flashforwards. Increasingly, the emphasis falls on various symbolic correlatives for their anxieties and fears in the guise of abstract sketches, collages, montages, still photographs, impressionistic blotches and flickering lights, as well as starkly minimalistic line-drawings and monochrome typographical elements.
The key message here conveyed is that people inhabit not one reality but rather multiple coexisting realities—or, more accurately, “reality effects.” Any one narrative shape that one’s life acquires is only a minute drop in an ocean of interplaying narratives—all of which are ultimately lacunary and arbitrary. What happens to fall into shape could have been something quite different: the apprehension of potential difference renders the contingently realized circumstances inexorably precarious, stressing their inextricability from legion might-bes and might-have-beens. What must be emphasized, in order to do the director’s accomplishment the justice it deserves, is that these experimental sections would appear pointless or even unbearable were they not underpinned by rigorously crafted, and hence utterly credible, human personalities, the disparate facets of which are brought into focus by Anno’s diligent attention to the various characters’ alternately somber, challenging or downright disturbing interrelations.
Psychedelic concatenations of visuals occur consistently at fraught junctures in the series. A case in point is Episode 16, “Splitting of the Breast,” where Shinji and his Eva are mysteriously suctioned into the dark shadow cast by the Twelfth Angel Leliel (the Angel of Night), namely, a gigantic zebra-striped ball. As Shinji resignedly waits for the life-support system to run out of energy, curled up inside his Unit, he falls into a slumber and is instantly assaulted by troubling visions.
In one of these, he finds himself in a subway car with his own double seated opposite him. One image corresponds to Shinji’s own perception of himself, the other image reflects the perceptions of Shinji held by those around him. These impressions are varied and even conflicting but none of them is ultimately more correct than any of the others. This same subway-car scenario is used elsewhere in Evangelion as the setting for moments of intense introspection, its yellow-orange glow, consistent use of a soft focus and fish-eye lenses, and suspension of the passage of time deliberately lending an eerie atmosphere of unearthliness to the character’s emotional ordeals. Fleeting scraps of disjointed reminiscences fill the screen, interspersed with newspaper headlines reporting Yui’s death and allusions to Gendou’s possible responsibility for the tragedy. When Shinji eventually wakes up, he realizes that he is still trapped inside the Eva-01 and that he has no chances of survival. Suddenly, however, the image of an ethereally beautiful woman reminiscent of his mother fills him with unwonted hope. Red streaks rapidly spread over the captor’s surface and Unit 01 bursts out of its prison, covered in blood.
Besides offering an unsentimental portrayal of Shinji’s disturbed psyche, this climax is also important to the saga’s overall logic, insofar as it throws into relief the Evangelions’ ultimately impenetrable nature. NERV’s own understanding of its biomechanoid weapons is scanty and its mastery of the Units’ mentalities lamentably limited. The ghastly image of Unit 01 emerging from its captor indeed induces Asuka to wonder what exactly she is piloting, while Misato expresses apprehension about NERV’s true purpose. Ritsuko, who knows full well that the Evas are intrinsically ferocious beasts, anxiously wonders whether the Units are “really on our side” or rather “hate” us. Another paradigmatic example of Anno’s penchant for dissecting his characters’ psyches by recourse to allegorical animational journeys is supplied by Episode 20, “Weaving a Story 2: Oral Stage,” in which Shinji is ostensibly “taken into” the Eva-01’s being, having lost his “ego border” altogether and merged with the LCL in a replica of the “primordial soup” from which all life is held to have proceeded. As the NERV staff tries desperately to release Shinji, only to have the “eject code” declined time after time, the pilot himself is assaulted by a barrage of mental images.
The Unit has already exhibited an uncanny ability to operate of its own volition in the sequence dramatizing the climax of Shinji’s first mission (Episode 2,), and flaunted the Beast-Within in all its brutal magnificence in Episode 18, “Ambivalence,” and Episode 19. It now appears determined to have things its own way once again. The images to which Shinji is incrementally exposed include recurring flashes of seawater (a further reference to an ancestral life-giving force), snapshots of people he knows, menacing pictures of his “enemy” (first in the guise of Angels he has battled and eventually in that of his father), flashing polychromatic text, quavering lines, splotches of pure hues, and hand-drawn sketches (including a highly allusive one of Shinji as a baby at his mother’s breast). This almost overwhelming array of images powerfully conveys the protagonist’s continuing confrontation of his inner demons with unsurpassed graphic vigor.
Analogous techniques are employed in Episode 22, “Don’t Be,” in which Asuka’s mind is “raped” by the invading Angel, and the horrors of her childhood cascade upon it in the form of visually disorienting whorls, squiggles, zigzagging lines, overexposed and solarized shots, and lurid chromatic juxtapositions. Flickering snatches of text are again employed as a means of succinctly encapsulating the character’s torment by means of semiotically laden captions. The images are invested with additional pathos by their recurring juxtaposition with images of Asuka as a bereft and helpless child, most notably in the directors’ cut of the episode. In the latter, the magnitude of Asuka’s agony is surrealistically underscored by the scene in which she walks backwards across desolate rail tracks and is gradually swamped by a crowd of hooded figures whose garments hide not actual bodies but masses of blood-red swirls.
Quite a different kind of psychological excursion is offered by Episode 14 with a focus on the most elusive of the saga’s personalities: Rei. The installment constitutes an adventurous piece of cinematography right from the start, as each of the Angels’ attacks to date is recapitulated by means of a palimpsest of data supplied by various characters’ reports, notes, testimonies and diary entries. The collage-like form adopted in the first part of the episode is exponentially intensified by the transition to an oneiric sequence in which Rei reflects, in an associative fashion, on the ultimate meaning of Nature in its multifarious manifestations. The vision is sparked by a compatibility test in which Rei is synchronizing with Unit 01, and the Eva’s feedback system seeps into her consciousness. Rei’s musings fluidly travel from the contemplation of mountains, the sky, the sun, water, flowers and blood, to a meditation about creation—the creation of cities, of Evas, and of humans. As her voiceover unfolds, to the accompaniment of a haunting musical score combining choral and instrumental melodies, the following images consecutively fill the screen: a misty ravine, a summer sky framed by puffy clouds, sun-kissed rice fields, and Van Gogh–style sunflowers (these images are intertextual “borrowings” from Episode 4, “Hedgehog’s Dilemma”).
With a subtle shift of visual mood, the picture then moves to a glass beaker (a detail associated with Rei throughout the saga), a blood-smeared hand, a nocturnal panorama of Tokyo-3, a gigantic moon, a close-up of Rei’s eye, a row of Rei clones, close-ups of Shinji, Misato, Ritsuko, Rei’s classmates Kensuke, Touji and Hikari, Asuka and, finally, Commander Ikari’s spectacles. The sequence reaches its climax with shots of the First Child herself, of the Eva-01 without its constraining faceplate, of one of the Eva’s green eyes and of a human eye, as Rei repeatedly asks: “Who are you?” The sequence thus indicates that Rei’s personal “I” is inextricably intertwined with the simultaneously singular and plural “you” she incantationally invokes.
The sorts of mental images implanted into Rei, fully documented by the sequence in Episode 14 here described, and alluded to by Ritsuko in Episode 23, are hauntingly captured by several of the works included in Die Sterne and Der Mond. The First Child is repeatedly associated with images of a full moon dappled with roaming flecks of vaporous clouds, cool palettes dominated by all conceivable shades of blue, green and lilac, both still and flowing water and, at least in one case, fireflies whose transience fittingly echoes the ephemeral status of Rei’s own being.
Episode 25 and Episode 26 are undoubtedly the portions of the series in which hallucinatory excursions through the characters’ psyches come most prominently to the fore. In Episode 25, “Do you love me?” Shinji is persecuted by guilt as he struggles to justify his destruction of Kaworu—the only being ever to have told him “I love you”—but can find no satisfactory solution. He is aware that Kaworu wished for death and that he had to kill him because he was an Angel, an enemy, but he can derive no conclusive solace from this knowledge. Seeking absolution from others and receiving no such thing, Shinji discovers that what he fears most, ultimately, is his own self and the hatred that his being may provoke. He then wonders why he pilots the Eva, and realizes that he does it exclusively to get appreciation from others. There appears to be no natural inclination, in the character’s makeup, to do anything of his own accord and this, it is intimated, may well be the ultimate cause of his unhappiness.
The focus then shifts to Asuka: curled up in her Eva underwater (an anticipation of a scene in Rebirth and of its reprisal in End), she dolefully reflects on her worthlessness as an Eva pilot and, by extension, as a human being. Asuka, too, appears unable to gauge her personal value independently of other people’s recognition of her abilities, terrified that she will lose her identity altogether if others abandon her.
The next “case study” addressed in the episode is that of Rei. Her various incarnations—products of her repeated cloning at Commander Ikari’s behest—discuss the nature of their respective identities, the First and Second versions maintaining that they are all “Rei Ayanami” because that is what other people call them. They also claim that the Third Rei is endowed with an entirely fake body and soul but she adamantly asserts that she is simply “herself.” The First and Second Reis, however, go on insisting that Rei III is merely Gendou’s fabrication, that she exists only because of his need for her, and will return to nothingness when she is no longer of any use. This portion of Episode 25 comes to a close as Gendou enters the room and tells Rei to follow him, for this is the day for which she was created (End is again foreshadowed by this shot.)
The scene returns to Shinji, as he struggles to make sense of the engulfing feeling of nothingness into which he believes to have sunk. Episode 25 now provides its first overt reference to the Instrumentality Project, with Gendou telling his son that what he senses as nothingness actually signals a return to a primal state. Ritsuko elliptically praises Instrumentality as a corrective to the feeling of incompleteness that unrelentingly haunts the whole of mankind, whereas Misato berates it as an entirely artificial means of controlling human life to which no scientist should feel automatically entitled. Misato becomes the center of the episode’s attention in the ensuing scene: Unresolved internal conflicts rooted in infancy instantly begin to surface, as it becomes patent that the character’s professional brilliance, sense of humor and playfulness belie a tormented personality. Seeking relief in erotic gratification has only served to magnify Misato’s deep-seated dissatisfaction with herself. Like Shinji, Asuka and Rei before her, Misato, too, ends up admitting that the presence of other people is pivotal to her self-validation.
At the end of the episode, Instrumentality is brought into focus once again as Misato apprises Shinji that the situation he is now experiencing—this vacuous world he can barely grasp and clearly gives him no comfort—is of his own making, regardless of his father’s master plan: wishing for a closed universe in which he could keep wholly to himself to avoid pain, the boy has spawned a forbiddingly lifeless prison.
Episode 26, “Take care of yourself,” develops its predecessor’s dramatic premises. Set in the year 2016, the installment first focuses on Shinji’s deeply ingrained conviction that he is unwanted and therefore worthless. Misato opines that wallowing in this belief is ultimately akin to running away, and concedes that she is also persecuted by the spectre of failure. She further maintains that all humans, deep down, feel lacking and struggle to fill in the gaps at the core of their being by merging with others. Instrumentality, ideally, provides a means of materially erasing the barriers separating one individual from another. However, the question of why one exists in the first place is still to be answered. Asuka suggests that one exists only in order to find out that one exists. In response, Shinji concludes that if such a discovery is to be made, the quest for self-understanding must never be abandoned and this entails ceasing to run away. The problem here is that for Shinji, not running away has meant just agreeing to pilot an Eva, which he sees as the guarantee of being accepted and even praised by others. This does not really amount to self-understanding since it depends on an external validating agency, which, as Ritsuko stresses, cannot be unequivocally relied upon.
As the animation shifts to an increasingly stylized modality, Shinji’s being is translated into spartan drawings expressive of other people’s perceptions of his identity and actions. Shinji, in this respect, is fundamentally an aggregate of fragmentary interpretations instrumental to his own sense of self. Were he to dissever himself from this web of partial readings, he could be free to do anything he wished but would also, in the process, divorce himself from others and hence preclude any chances of interaction, which is pivotal to the achievement of self-understanding, and hence to the psyche’s acceptance of its one unavoidable quest.
Thus far, the images presented in the final episodes have conveyed the notion that all the characters, though most pointedly Shinji, have taken refuge in insulated dark rooms of their own making so as to protect themselves from further anguish. However, they have thereby merely succeeded in rendering their lives even bleaker. As Shinji puts it in the climactic moment, a world in which he can do anything he fancies but only with himself on the cast is untenable because it lacks other people’s acknowledging agency: “It’s as if I’m here but not here at all.” Insofar as it accommodates “no difference between me and nothing,” a reality with only “me” in it ultimately amounts to an entropic field of unrelieved negativity in which one might as well not exist at all.
Suddenly, Anno offers an alternate scenario in which, conversely, a number of parallel realities dialectically coexist. In one of these possible worlds, Shinji inhabits a context utterly incongruous with the rest of the show, governed by the lighthearted conventions of domestic and school comedy. In this dimension, the Second Impact has clearly not occurred and no trace of either Evas or Angels can be detected. Gendou and Yui are just the sort of parents one would expect to encounter in stereotypical anime fare. Misato’s pet penguin Pen-Pen (a.k.a. Pen^2) is reimagined as a plastic doll. Asuka is Shinji’s childhood friend and her main concern seems to be to get him out of bed in time for school (following some scolding occasioned by the “objectionable” state he wakes up in). Even Rei is a ditzy bundle worried mainly about avoiding unwanted exposure of her lingerie. This last point of departure from the saga’s principal tenor sums up the magnitude of the last installment’s uniqueness. As for Misato, she is a gorgeous teacher whose attitudes bring out in a comedically magnified fashion aspects of her character seen in Episode 7 when she visits Shinji’s school in her capacity as his legal guardian.
If Shinji can accept this world, it is suggested, then he can feel entitled to occupy any available world without unrelentingly feeling he has to either hide or run away. The realization gains him unanimous approval from the rest of the cast, as each character treats him to a gleeful “Congratulations!” to which he responds with heart-warming gratitude. Previously trapped in a reality he could only perceive as hostile, the protagonist now seems willing to concede that no reality is utterly fixed or inexorable—not even the apparently all-encompassing visions construed by powerful bodies such as SEELE and NERV. Anno has commented on the proposition advanced in Evangelion’s finale in a letter originally published in Anime FX, Issue 10: “It is said that ‘To live is to change.’ I started this production with the desire that they [i.e., the characters] and the world change by the time the story reaches its conclusion” (“Ikari Gendo’s Ultimate EVA FAQs about the TV Series”).
The ADR director and English language producer of Evangelion, Matt Greenfield, has put forward an imaginative interpretation of Episodes 25 and 26 according to which the series as a whole is “a flashback from the last two episodes ... as opposed to what’s happening” (Greenfield). The axial importance of the numbers 25 and 26 within Evangelion’s diegesis is confirmed by their recurrent flashing on Shinji’s portable audio player. It is almost as though, with the show’s finale, Anno were telling us that the story we thought we were following was not really the story he was telling.
As Redmond notes, one of Episode 25’s most salient formal features is its extensive use of “theatrical tropes—spotlights, character monologues, and simple stage props.... During Misato’s own moment of self-reflection, for example, her childhood photograph is shown repeatedly, each time looking slightly more torn and frayed than before” (Redmond, p. 284). No less remarkable is the choreographing of flashbacks in such a fashion that they do not merely capture fragments from the past of the scene’s focal persona but also illuminate their perception by other characters as actual participants in the retrospective experience. Thus, in the presentation of Misato’s flashback to some intimate moments with Kaji, “Shinji silently watches them from within the flashback, accompanied by the steady rocking of a subway or train,” and punctuated by “shots of a whirring fan” (pp. 284–285). This kind of device serves to highlight, in a quasi–Brechtian manner, the staged nature of the action. In the final installment, the constructed status of the mise-en-scène is further underscored. Especially memorable is the shot in which Shinji’s monochrome silhouette is flooded in rapid succession with polychromatic snippets of frames from other episodes.
Evangelion abounds with biblical allusions, including “Eve,” “Adam,” “Lilith,” the “Lance of Longinus” and, of course, the “Angels.” The image of the Crucifixion, moreover, is iconically pivotal to the show in the rendition of both spectacular lighting effects and peripheral decorative details. Reference is also sporadically made to the Kabbalah, and particularly to its “Sephiroth”: the “Tree of Life” depicting the ten emanations of the divine principle. Babylonian mythology is also invoked in the use of the name of the deity “Marduk” to designate the institute held responsible for selecting Eva pilots but actually consisting of 108 dummy corporations. (108, incidentally, is the number of sins believed to afflict humanity in Tibetan Buddhism.) Although Evangelion’s religious frame of reference may at first appear dominated by a fundamentally Judaeo-Christian repertoire, oblique allusions to Shinto4 are also notable and may, in fact, play more instrumental a role in the overall diegesis than their biblical and Kabbalistic counterparts. As Patrick Drazen observes, in this respect, even though in the saga “much is made (though little is explained) about the Lance of Longinus,” this may have “less to do with the weapon of a Roman centurion than with the jeweled Spear of Heaven, given by the gods to Izanagi and Izanami, the male and female Shinto deities responsible for creating the Earth” (Drazen, p. 306).
It should also be noted that the saga’s use of religious imagery of Western derivation is neither entirely nor preeminently serious. Asked to comment on Evangelion’s biblical symbolism, Kazuya Tsurumaki has explicitly underscored the playfully utilitarian character of its employment: “There are a lot of giant robot shows in Japan, and we did want our story to have a religious theme to help distinguish us. Because Christianity is an uncommon religion in Japan we thought it would be mysterious. None of the staff who worked on Eva are Christians. There is no actual Christian meaning to the show, we just thought the visual symbols of Christianity look cool” (Tsurumaki 2001).5
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The latest product of Gainax’s ongoing reinvention of the mecha genre is the TV series Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (translatable as Making Breakthrough Gurren Lagann or Breakthrough to Heaven Gurren Lagann), which aired in Japan from April to September 2007. The show’s dominant attribute is high-octane action that allows relatively little leeway for introspective and romantic elements. Director Hiroyuki Imaishi, who is renowned for the kind of colorful and hyperkinetic style found in FLCL (to which he contributed as animation director), has underscored this point, describing Gurren Lagann as “full-on, balls-to-the-wall, guy-oriented drama” (Imaishi, p. 59). Nevertheless, the series does elaborate some serious motifs pivotal to Gainax’s cachet that occasionally invite quiet reflection. The orphaned hero left to his own devices in an obdurately exploitative world and brutal adults hell-bent on crushing youthful idealism are cases in point.
Moreover, even though Gurren Lagann thrives on sensational explosions and stupendous transformations as its primary visual effect, it is often from the gentler scenes that the story derives dramatic density. Most remarkable, in this regard, is the use of chromatic and textural contrasts, which, in defining diverse ambiences, also evoke conflicting emotions—for example, the suffocating gloom of the subterranean settings, the airiness of the aboveground locations, the hostility of scorched plains and rocky terrain, the rapture of starry skies beckoning the eye to the unknown, the vanilla-hued softness of urbanscapes canopied by billowy clouds, the smoke-saturated noxiousness of blasted battlefields.
At the level of mecha design, Gurren Lagann is especially original in its use of a face-based motif in the ideation and individuation of its numerous robots. Simultaneously, the show revamps to good effect iconographic elements associated with classic space opera: for instance, Leiji Matsumoto’s Space Battleship Yamato (1974). Structurally, the program’s most intriguing feature is its division into two story arcs separated by a seven-year time gap. This strategy enabled Imaishi and his team to chronicle various characters’ physical and psychological development as they endeavor to complete their quests, and thus present shifts in emphasis and perspective that a more conventional chronology could not have afforded.
Set in the distant future, the show depicts a depleted planet where people struggle for survival in claustrophobically murky subterranean villages under the constant threat of earthquakes and attendant landslides.6 The timid and introverted fourteen-year-old Simon unrelentingly digs away at the edges of his beleaguered underground town, Jiiha, until the day when a massive seismic upheaval sends a giant robot crushing through the ceiling. Simon’s life takes a drastically new direction as he and his mate Kamina—the charismatic leader of the punkish Gurren gang aiming to break through to the Earth’s surface—are enjoined to protect the community against the invading mecha. Help comes, no less unexpectedly, in the guise of the gorgeous Yoko, who drops through the crack opened by the robot’s fall equipped with a mighty rifle. Her mission is to hunt berserk “Gunmen,” robots such as the one terrorizing Simon’s home town.
As chaos escalates, Simon reveals to Kamina and to Yoko another robot that he had previously unearthed: the titular Lagann. Simon’s plan is to deploy the robot, piloted by Kamina, to vanquish the rampaging mecha from above. However, events take an unforeseen turn as Simon approaches the face-shaped entity and the crystalline “core drill” he wears as a pendant begins to interact with the Lagann, thereby bringing it to life. As a powering device, the luminescent drill proves instrumental to the impending quest and to its protagonists as they embark upon a perilous journey above the ground in the Lagann. The other mecha referred to in the show’s title, the Gurren, is acquired by Kamina in the course of the adventure. The Lagann and the Gurren are capable of combining into a single formidable creature by means of a favorite trope of mecha anime: the “gattai,” which literally translates as “combination.” (This term will be discussed in detail in Chapter 13.) In their subterranean existence, reaching the surface was Simon’s and Kamina’s ultimate ambition but the situation they encounter when they emerge into the open does not deliver the utopia of their fantasies. In fact, the place is caught up in the clutches of war and despair.
Central to Gurren Lagann’s diegesis is the multipronged conflict between three factions: ordinary humans, Spirals and Anti-Spirals. Spirals are beings that embody the power of limitless evolution and have been relentlessly persecuted by Anti-Spirals fearing the expansion of that power. The Spirals’ champion, Lord Genome, is reputed to have deployed the aforementioned Gunmen—mecha powered by Spiral energy whose designation simply means “face”—against the enemy. The Lagann was one of Lord Genome’s principal weapons. The Gunmen’s pilots, dubbed “Beastmen,” are non–Spiral creatures cloned by Lord Genome that rely on solar powered batteries (which renders them unemployable at night).
Defeated by the Anti-Spirals, the Spiral troops were forced to retreat to their original homes, continually threatened by the prospect of the “Spiral Existence Extermination System”: a program installed on every planet harboring Spiral beings. (It is worth noting that the extermination plan dramatized in Gurren Lagann is elliptically reminiscent of SEELE’s Human Instrumentality Project in Evangelion.) The danger posed by ordinary people, in this pugnacious climate, was that they might grow in number and strength and set off the Anti-Spirals’ System, which would result in the annihilation of their race. To avert this risk, Lord Genome decided to relegate humanity to the underground areas where, due to scarcity of resources, the species’ population level could remain low and hence be unlikely to trigger disaster.
In terms of sheer drama, a poignant moment is provided by Kamina’s death—an event that leaves Simon in a state of bitter depression. It is upon meeting the ethereally mysterious Nia and drawing inspiration from her disarming kindness and innocence that Simon begins to recover. Gradually, the youth ascends to leadership status, puts an end to the war, and is chosen commander in chief of the freshly founded Kamina City: humanity’s first proper aboveground settlement in a long time. Unfortunately, as the city flourishes and its human population accordingly grows, so does the threat of the Extermination System. When the one millionth human child is born, the Anti-Spirals indeed sanction that the time has come at last to wipe out the race.
One of the most memorable scenes in the entire series comes about two-thirds of the way through the narrative when Nia herself, to whom Simon has become deeply attached and to whom he eventually proposes, appears to be humanity’s most lethal enemy. It is indeed Nia who, deployed as the Anti-Spirals’ vehicle, cold-bloodedly announces that humanity’s extermination has been conclusively decreed. As Kamina City and the rest of the planet in its wake are thrown into civil unrest, it is up to Simon and to his new ally (and former antagonist), the Beastman Viral, to launch into deep space to put an end to the conflict with the Anti-Spirals once and for all.
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To commemorate Evangelion’s tenth anniversary, a special collaborative project named “Eva At Work” enlisting the talents of numerous Japanese artists from disparate fields was set up in early 2006 under the general supervision of curator Shinya Furui. The gallery thus assembled includes a textile design based on graphical symbols associated with the saga’s Angels, executed by Mizuki Totori; a food platter by Studio Big Art focusing on the explicitly tactile aspects of Evangelion’s imagery via the metaphor of food (appositely served on a Lilith-shaped platter); a folding screen by the traditional painter Yoshitoshi Shinomiya displaying a minimalist version of an Eva fight; bento (i.e., lunch-box) arrangements by Junko Terashima containing realistic references to several Evangelion characters—Pen-Pen included; a meticulously detailed stained-glass lamp featuring symbolic allusions to the show by glass artist Takaaki “Pucci” Tsuchiya; as well as various multimedia installations, a wedding-dress adorned with motifs from the saga and a full-back tattoo. The project culminated in December 2006 with a Noh performance inspired by the theme of Shinji’s emotional ordeal and by the related topos of maternal love, and featuring a gorgeously stylized Eva-01 mask, crafted by Shouhei Yamashita.
If Evangelion remains a pinnacle in anime artistry after over ten years since its original airing, which few would dispute, this has much to do with its flair for integrating conventional tropes derived from science fiction, romance and postmodern dystopia with mature themes associated with psychoanalysis, sociology, politics and anthropology. This synthesis would not, in and by itself, deliver engrossing spectacle, however. What enables Evangelion to yield a philosophical vision that does not at any point degenerate into dry sermonizing but succeeds, in fact, in drawing the audience into a vortex of eminently sensuous experiences is Anno’s determination never to let the conceptual deaden the concrete or, conversely, to let palpable dramatic effects trivialize the adventure’s abstract import.