Neon Genesis Evangelion

Seeing Evangelion 3.0 made me want to revisit the original Evangelion TV series. I haven’t watched it in full since I introduced it to my sister back in early 2010, so I was about due for a re-watch, and just finished it earlier today, so I figured I’d share a few thoughts on the show.

This viewing marks the first time I’ve seen it since becoming an Eva fan after seeing 2.0 in theatre a few years ago, and is the third time I’ve seen it all the way through. I first attempted to watch the series back in high school, in 2005 or so. I say “attempted” because Blockbuster only had the first two volumes and I couldn’t afford to buy the whole thing myself (such is the life of a high schooler), so for a while I knew the story more from Sadamoto Yoshiyuki’s comic version. Even now, it takes some effort for me to remember what happens in the comic versus the anime. Unfortunately, when I did get a chance to watch the full thing later on, a couple years I think, I was predisposed against it somewhat. Partly, I was uncomfortable with its use of Christian iconography_,_ but more than that I’d read some discussions on the series from people whose opinion I respected on how Evangelion is overrated, largely on the basis of the plot being nonsensical. Basically, they accused the series of taking a bunch of exotic-sounding words from different mythologies and throwing them together in a way that didn’t actually amount to very much.

I went to see Evangelion 3.0 at the Plano Angelika theatre yesterday, and though it was less fun than it could’ve been since the person I’d planned to see it with had to be out-of-state, I still enjoyed the experience and thought I’d share a few brief thoughts about it.

The highlights: driving down Dallas North Tollway with hardly any traffic was pretty fun; the one cosplayer did a fine job as Gendo; the Angelika is probably the nicest theatre I’ve been in.

Well, now that I’m mostly moved into a new apartment, I’ve had some more time to read. Part of my newfound free time has gone into resuming my study of Japanese, as well as my usual mix of film and anime, but on the literary front here’s what I’ve been up to:

I finally, finally finished Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. For the patient reader, the narrator’s frequent asides, long descriptions, and multitude of characters and plot threads can be quite entertaining. I enjoyed them for a couple hundred pages, but as the book dragged on and on I began losing interest. By the halfway point, I really only cared about Pip’s relationship with Estella, and that’s partly because I can identify a little with his feelings in a hopeless, one-sided romance.

In short, why do you watch anime?

A few reasons. One is that I enjoy the community. A few problems aside, I like exchanging thoughts with other fans on blogs, forums, and Twitter. Conventions and podcasts can be fun, too, and it also gives me something to share with my little sister.

Of course, there’s also my interest in Japanese culture generally; I’ve studied Japan’s language and history, and seek out Japanese films and literature. Primarily, though, the medium of traditional, 2D animation fascinates me, and Japan is the only nation that produces a lot of it.

As I mentioned in my Anime Autobiography series, when I first became interested in anime in high school, I couldn’t really afford much of it. However, I could afford the graphic novel versions of these shows. Since this was 2005/6, Tokyopop had standardised the $10 price point, so for the cost of one anime DVD, I could get two or three volumes of the graphic novels.

Once again, I’m not sure how I first encountered this stuff; I’ve always been an avid reader, though, so I probably stumbled on the ‘Manga’ section of a bookstore, and went from there. In any case, one of the first books I picked up, around spring 2004, was Megatokyo, by Fred Gallagher and (for the first couple volumes) Rodney Caston. Yes, I know it’s not Japanese and thus outside the scope of my retrospective here, but it is a starting point for me. After reading the dead-tree version, I started following the online updates. From there, I joined the forum in November after lurking for a while and it was in that forum that I started reading about what shows and comics were popular.

<– Previous: Anime Autobiography - Endless Delinquency and Despair

In 2010, my university career ended with a whimper, and I entered the “real world.” Actually, I just continued at the job I already had and spent most of the next year or so wondering what to do for a career. It was a somewhat depressing time, in a way, but hey - I still had my Japanese cartoons.

Now, at this point I’d seen enough that fewer and fewer shows offered really new experiences for me. Most of the shows I saw in 2010-11 stood out because they excelled at something that I’d already seen elsewhere. I also find it difficult to say much about some of these shows because they’re so recent that I can’t quite contextualise them yet. After reflecting on how to go about sharing my experience from these years, it occurred to me that the most significant event is probably a shift in how I watched anime. So here we go - how I watch anime in a modern fashion.

<– Previous: Anime Autobiography - Anime Clubbin’

Going into 2007 and ‘08, the combination of university, work, and commuting between them destroyed the vast amounts of free time I’d enjoyed in high school, though having my own car and a decent income for a college student did take some of the sting off that. My hobby of collecting hobbies, though, had to go. I dropped the time-consuming video games, especially the RPG’s I liked, as well as my attempt at learning to play guitar. Literature remained, and though I did as much leisure reading as I could manage, as a literature major I got most of my fill of that in class. Most of my leisure reading, in fact, consisted of graphic novels.

<– Previous: Anime Autobiography - serial experiments lain

Moving into 2005, though lain had inspired me to seek out more anime, I faced a couple roadblocks that prevented me from fully immersing myself right away. First, I lacked time. Though I had loads of free time in high school, I’ve long had a hobby of collecting hobbies, so anime had to compete with comics, video games, literature, guitar, film, and whatever else grabbed my interest.

I’ve been pretty busy lately, forcing me to slow down a bit on my reading schedule. However, I’ve continued to find time for a few things, so I thought I’d share a couple highlights.

The comic that’s most commanded my attention lately has been Akira, by Otomo Katsuhiro. I re-watched the film adaptation for the first time in years a couple months back, and liked it far more than I remembered, and since I’ve also read and enjoyed another of his works, Domu, I figured I’d try out the graphic novel. The first two volumes have not disappointed me.

A theatre about an hour’s drive away from me was showing the first two Evangelion Rebuild films, so after some deliberation I decided to go.

I had modest expectations, going as much to support the industry and encourage studios to release more animated films in theatres as I did to see these particular works. The original series has always struck me as decent, but highly overrated, Death and Rebirth is one of the worst films I’ve seen, and End of Evangelion, though gorgeous to look at, still seems like a disjointed mess. The rebuild, though, blew me away.