In the nineties, there were many children’s movies that conveyed the message that the worst thing you could do—not only as a caretaker of the Earth but perhaps as a human being period—was build something, particularly if “building something” involved (for instance) cutting down a tree. Even if that wasn’t the intended message, it was the message. Some of these stories were gratingly preachy (Ferngully), some of them were horrifying (Once Upon A Forest), and there were many whose names I can’t remember that were just about heroic children facing down evil building projects.1 In retrospect, maybe there could have been other environmental morals to hammer home, but we went all in on “don’t build anything.”

Pom Poko is this kind of movie, sort of. It is a much much better movie than the ones mentioned above. (Granted, it’s not very hard to be a better movie than Ferngully.2) The premise is simple: two clans of raccoon dogs (tanuki)3 that live outside of Tokyo are forced into an alliance as the city expands outward and human beings destroy the forests and hills in which they live. They decide they must stop the construction of new communities at any cost. Since tanuki, like cats and foxes, are creatures with supernatural powers, they can transform into other shapes and perform illusions. They plan to use these powers to disrupt the lives of human beings to such an extent that humans will be forced to abandon their projects and retreat.

How does that work out for them? They lose. I don’t consider that a spoiler. There’s no other possible way for things to go. Over and over, the movie uses a slapstick rhythm where tanuki try out a new plan, succeed in pulling off their stunts, and then celebrate the defeat of the land development prematurely. Then the announcer on the TV they’ve installed in their home says that despite everything, construction will continue. After enough of these moments, they stop being funny. Pom Poko is whimsical, but it’s also brutal, and as much as possible it takes place in the real world. (When the tanuki cause trucks to go off the road, for instance, people die.) The development that is destroying their habitat is Tama New Town, which is a real place. So there can’t be a happy ending to this story, in which they successfully repel land development, because that ending didn’t happen in real life.

The tanuki also don’t get some kind of noble loser ending, where they lose the battle but win the war. They eventually get the message across to human beings that they need to stop destroying the forest, but it’s much too late to save their own homes. Tanuki are left on the fringes of human society. Some of them manage to pretend to be humans, some of them can’t. Some of them just become roadkill. There is even what amounts to a mass cult suicide among the tanuki who can’t shapeshift.

If Pom Poko were just a cute but unusually downbeat children’s movie, I’m not sure there would be much to remember about it. However, it’s also wildly inventive. Until this series eventually reaches Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, I don’t think there will be another movie that takes advantage of animation’s total plasticity, its ability to show any reality, to the degree Pom Poko does. The tanuki’s transformations become more and more spectacular, and the movie’s highlight comes when the tanuki stage a “Goblin Parade”4 to awe and intimidate the people living in Tama New Town. The tanuki fluidly combine, recombine, and change from form to form. I can’t find a great clip of this sequence on YouTube, but this edited fan video can give you a taste:

However, this clip kind of diminishes the film’s achievement, because the movie itself doesn’t rely on rapid editing or cutting away. It’s the fluid change from one form to another that makes this sequence so incredible. The tanuki, too, are always changing forms in more mundane ways: when people are around, they look like normal animals. Around each other, they walk on their hind legs and look more like cartoon bears. They have a third, even simpler, even more cartoonish form that comes out when they’re really revved up or knocked unconscious. Though the natural world is depicted as attentively as it would be in any other Ghibli film, the tanuki are not wholly natural creatures, and thus they sometimes look like they belong to a different movie.

In some ways, Pom Poko is like an inverted My Neighbor Totoro. Instead of following people as they encounter a mysterious, alluring, and slightly frightening magical world, we live in the magical world as it attempts to negotiate a way forward in a frightening and mundane world. Even the allure of the “other side” is present: though the tanuki don’t form any relationships with human beings in the movie, they like aspects of modernity, like hamburgers. When one tanuki argues they should kill every human, another objects that without people there can be no tempura.

Ultimately, though, Pom Poko is not concerned with people, and that’s what makes it different from (and better than) all the anti-development stories I watched as a kid. There are no heroic humans with which to identify yourself and there are no villainous humans to oppose. There’s no clear lesson for children who want to start bullying their parents into being more ecologically conscious. People are not malicious or evil; like the tanuki, they want a place to live and raise their children. When the tanuki perform their final illusion, and briefly transform the countryside into what it was before the development came, the human beings realize that they need to accommodate wildlife. This realization simply comes too late to do any good.

If there is a message about people in this movie, it’s not really that people are terrible for building homes or suburbs, but that we will destroy things we don’t properly perceive or value until they’re gone. During the goblin parade, we watch two drunks reminisce about how they both once thought they saw something supernatural. Oblivious to the crazy things happening around them, both men sadly agree that these supernatural occurrences are nothing but a trick of the human mind. Then one of them turns around and tells the other: wait, it’s all real. The other guy keeps drinking. “They’re all in your mind,” he says. He doesn’t turn around. That’s how it’s always going to be: two kinds of people, those who see too late and those who never see at all.

• Yes, this is the movie where the tanuki attack the police by inflating their testicles. No, I don’t have a take on that, though it is another case of the movie using a slapstick moment to create a sense of false victory (the police have guns).

• There’s a lot of inventiveness in how information is presented throughout this movie: the video game image to demonstrate the tanuki’s population problem, an illustration of little steam shovels eating away at a leaf to show habitat destruction, and even one moment of live action television.

• I think I would have liked Pom Poko as a kid. I loved The Fox and the Hound and Bambi. I was a fully bought in member of the sad animal movies community.

• While I said that there is not a clear moral for children to adopt in terms of evangelizing to their parents, there is a moment at the end when a tanuki turns and speaks directly to the camera and says that you should stop pretending like they’re all dead. The practical takeaway of this message is unclear. But that is the lesson for children, I guess: the animals are still doing their best to live even though we’ve made it hard for them.

• I also love that creepy fox guy, particularly because the moment you see him you know he’s a fox and not a person. Until the mass suicide event I was hoping for an ending where the fox set things up such that the tanuki all moved into the theme park and did “special effects.” I guess that would be the Disney version of this movie—even while I was hoping for it the movie itself was so blunt about the constraints of space and need for food that I knew it wouldn’t work out.

• Aside from Grave of the Fireflies, all the Isao Takahata movies are first time watches for me, and so far they are all winners. I guess there are only two other ones left—My Neighbors the Yamadas and Princess Kaguya. Of the three I’ve seen (Grave of the Fireflies, Only Yesterday, Pom Poko), two are about starving to death. That may be part of why Takahata is not a Miyazaki-level household name.

• If you have dark undereyes, you might be a tanuki. Hm….

Taku, a college student, sees a woman at a Tokyo train station who looks like Rikako, a girl he knew in high school. He reminisces to himself about how he and his best friend met Rikako, how his best friend was in love with her, how everybody hated her, and so on. Over the course of this trip down memory lane, and with a little help from others, he figures out he himself is in love with Rikako and that she’s been in love with him for a long time. He sees her again at the train station and runs to catch her. He catches her. They smile at each other. Roll credits.

There’s nothing wrong with this movie but there’s nothing that right with it either. Ocean Waves is a movie you watch once and if anybody asks you about it afterward you say, vaguely: “it’s fine.” There’s nothing to find offensive. It has various small flaws: he script can be clunky. Early in the movie, Taku says to his friend “that’s right, you’re on the student council” as a way of working this fact into dialogue. Much of the dialogue has this odd, strained form of information delivery, yet since the whole story is narrated to us by Taku, there’s no reason for the expository dialogue at all—he could just tell us. (Also, the student council never comes up again.) The movie also doesn’t sweat its details: Taku has to forgo summer school and work to have money for his school vacation. He also gives Rikako ¥60,000 (around $400) without thinking twice. He doesn’t even worry how she’s going to pay him back.

But it’s also not a bad movie. It’s fine. The characters are not very distinctive. It’s fine. Every once in a while the movie makes a choice about how to frame a shot that should be interesting but just feels weird. It’s fine. I’m not sure anything in it is surprising. It’s fine. The most memorable part of the movie comes near the end, when we see Taku’s high school classmates gather again when they’re home from college. The ways in which they’ve changed—or haven’t changed—feel like a window into better movie. But that’s not this movie. This movie is fine. There’s not much else to say about it.

We’re not doing every single Studio Ghibli movie in this series. With the exception of Ocean Waves and Whisper of the Heart, I’m just talking about movies directed by Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. We’re not doing Goro Miyazaki’s movies or Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s movies or Yoshiaki Nishimura’s movie. I stuck Ocean Waves on the list because I was curious about it, and Whisper of the Heart on the list because I love it, but I’m content to leave the rest alone. However, even if Ocean Waves is not a very good movie—or really, because Ocean Waves is not a very good movie—it does illustrate a problem for Ghibli as an institution.

Ocean Waves was intended as a project for the younger generation at Ghibli to run. In 1993, Miyazaki was 52. In 1997, when Princess Mononoke came out, he would make one of his many threats to retire.1 So by 1993, I would guess the question of “what happens when Miyazaki leaves” was beginning to feel like something the studio should proactively address.

Both Ocean Waves and Whisper of the Heart look, to me, like attempts at giving people their shot. In each case, the director never made another movie for Ghibli, albeit for very different reasons. Ocean Waves went over budget and it is (as mentioned above) a fine but forgettable movie. “Over budget and great” or “under budget and fine” might have both have meant another movie, but over budget and mediocre is a kiss of death combination. Mochizuki has made plenty of other movies, but not for Ghibli. Whisper of the Heart, on the other hand, is a great movie and my personal favorite of the Ghibli movies I’ve seen. Its director, Yoshifumi Kondo, died of an aneurysm. Isao Takahata is dead. Yonebayashi and Nishimura left Ghibli to found their own studio.

What happens to Ghibli when Miyazaki dies?

Financially and legally, that is already a settled question: Ghibli is now owned by Nippon TV. So Ghibli will continue to exist. That’s not at issue. There will be Totoro merchandise and the Ghibli theme park. Artistically, though, as the “Ghibli” which has come to be beloved all over the world, it’s not at all clear to me what’s going to happen. It’s not that Miyazaki has no artistic children; he does. They’re just not at Ghibli. While Miyazaki’s flaws as an actual father are well known, it’s not a personal failing to found a studio that may not continue to put out great movies after you die. I’m not airing this to criticize him. Ghibli is also far from the only institution of its kind to face a succession crisis.

Still, I worry that Ocean Waves represents the most likely near term future for the studio: relaxed, nostalgic, artistically competent, uninteresting stories that will feel like “Ghibli movies.” It would make me sad if one day “Ghibli” functions the way that “Disney” does—as a corporate stamp that tells you you’ll get a reliable product. That it will make me sad is no guarantee it won’t happen.

• I don’t have anything to put here.…

• This movie is fine.

An admission before we get started: films that are made of a procession of surreal images are opaque to me. I haven’t done the kind of work that would let me appreciate them, and something about me is too verbal to get into them without some education. I’m always going: what is that? what is that? what is that?

Angel’s Egg is certainly composed of surreal images, and so I think in many ways I am a poorly suited critic for it, but here we are. Threaded through its imagery is a narrative, however, which I’ll summarize this: a nameless girl carrying an egg wanders a mostly deserted landscape and town, encounters a man with a sword, runs away from him, encounters some fishermen who try and fail to capture shadow fish, is reunited with the man, and listens to him tell the story of Noah’s Ark. She falls asleep and he takes the egg and breaks it. When she wakes up she kills herself. In the process of dying she produces more eggs.

As a series of images, Angel’s Egg is both beautiful and authentically weird. The animation often conveys the sense of being “a moving illustration,” as distinct from “an animated movie.” When the girl runs in an early scene, her hair and her clothes move as if they’re the same weight and she’s also underwater—that’s what I mean. The character designs are done by Yoshitaka Amano, who is probably best known for his Final Fantasy work. However, what one could call “technical limitations” mean that the designs in (for instance) Final Fantasy VI1 are stripped of their strangeness. In Angel’s Egg, however, Amano’s strange, elongated, and detailed figures are preserved.

The movie spends a lot of time on things that don’t seem like they matter—like the girl filling up endless water bottles—but which build to communicate a sense of purpose in this strange world. There’s a lot of stillness and unclear amounts of time going by. The sequence in which the fishermen, who are like the compulsive ghosts of past fishermen, hunt the shadow fish is spectacular. One touch that I particularly liked is that they might even catch one, but since it is not a real fish, their victory is meaningless. But there’s also an idea instilled through this scene that the girl is also trapped in a compulsion to carry her egg that will never hatch. So is the man, who is determined to find out what is in the egg.

All of this works. The problem is the narrative. Since his film is largely abstract and free of dialogue, Oshii has to lean heavily on what we already bring to his images—that is, he has to work in cliches. Angel’s Egg is a story about a young girl who is seduced into trusting a man, is betrayed by him, and then dies in the sense of being a young girl (she becomes an adult woman, who then also dies) and whose agony brings forth some kind of new life. There is a lot of very loaded imagery and even some dialogue that drives this home. The girl tries to get the man to promise not to break her egg; he’s silent. Walking around with the egg makes her look pregnant. When it is broken and she becomes an adult she reaches for her stomach, feels her adult body, and screams. The sequence in which the girl wakes to discover her egg is broken, and of her subsequent devastated cries, is obviously, obviously evoking rape.

Since, however, this violation brings forth something new, since eggs are made to be broken, since children are meant to become adults, this violence was necessary—or that’s the suggestion. I know this story, you know this story; it is a stupid story, particularly since even in this symbolic reading, it’s all really standing for something else, like “creation.” There’s no emotional reality to what happens to these people. And the story is certainly unworthy of the moments of real beauty in the film, like when the girl sees her reflection for perhaps the first time and talks to it as if it is another girl, or the startlingly and almost creepily clear water, or the ambiguously organic machines the man rides into town, or the giant chick sleeping in a transparent egg.

Is this kind of triteness the cost art like Angel’s Egg has to pay, to be as weird as it is in other areas? It’s certainly not the first piece of art I’ve encountered where extreme aesthetic complexities are put at the service of material that feels like it might not be worthy of adults. But I do resist the idea that there’s some sort of set amount of complexity available in narrative art, though I might accept it elsewhere.2

Angel’s Egg is a movie worth watching once, because it is beautiful. Whether or not it’s worth watching twice is a harder call. I did watch it twice, and enjoyed it much more the second time, because I no longer cared about understanding what was happening and just enjoyed the imagery, and I can imagine it becoming sort of a favorite movie to rewatch because there’s something sort of soothing about it. But when I read what I said above, I also still agree with it—there’s something troublesomely shallow about the movie’s use of the girl as the dreamer and the boy as her rude but necessary awakening. Hers is the hand that reaches out in the movie’s opening moments and his is the hand that crushes; I know what this stuff means and I reject it.

A postscript.… Angel’s Egg came to America via New World Pictures, a production company owned by Roger Corman. If you do not know who Corman is, he was a budget movie director and producer who occupied the niche of the genius hack that seems specific to Hollywood.3 New World Pictures did not set out to acquire Oshii’s movie—it came as a package deal—but once they had it they were going to use it somehow.4 That is the Roger Corman thrift principle. So the director, Carl Colpaert, edited the animated footage from Angel’s Egg together with live action footage of some guys in gas masks wandering around what is meant to be a blighted hellscape but is clearly California. The result is a movie called In the Aftermath.

In the first minute or so of In the Aftermath, it feels like you’re watching Oshii’s movie get edited into something with more of an American sense of timing, and hey, it might actually work—but then people start talking, and you’re like well that’s not so good. Then the live action bits start. This movie also has a long musical interlude, during which I will confess my attention began to drift. It might have drifted prior to the musical interlude but it was definitely drifting during and afterward. In the Aftermath really resembles the experience of watching a bunch of video game cut scenes spliced together. In that limited sense, I guess you could call it “ahead of its time.”

• People in anime are always ominously quoting the Bible.… Somebody should do an anime where people ominously quote from The Tale of Genji.

• At last, my under-eye shadows have been represented in anime:

  

• Angel’s Egg started as a Lupin III movie, according to Oshii: “The girl in Lupin lives in a strange tower which appeared in the middle of 20th century Tokyo. The one who created the tower was an old architect who surpassed Moses and Gaudi and the girl is his granddaughter. The old architect once had 12 disciples and she is served by the remaining four. It seems she spends her life in a wheelchair, without taking one step out of her room. A murder takes place in this tower and photographic evidence shows ‘the white hands of a young girl’. Lupin decides to tackle this mystery and sneaks into the tower. As he advances towards the interior, he discovers white feathers scattered on the ground and the corpses of small animals. According to Fujiko’s investigation, it turns out the girl wasn’t the old architect’s granddaughter. Then who in the world was she? She was actually an ‘angel’, who mocked humans and killed them. In my mind, the tower itself was based on Dante’s Inferno, while the strange girl was Beatrice.”

• Lots to say about that Lupin III concept, among them: Oshii, did you think Beatrice killed people? (She does definitely make fun of Dante.) (We love her.)
  

• Angel’s Egg almost destroyed Oshii’s career but he remains fond of it: “This work is like a pitiful daughter that I couldn’t properly introduce to the world. If this opportunity allows even one more person to see it, there is no greater happiness for me as a director. I would like to express my gratitude once again to the staff who endured the painstakingly detailed work.” Perhaps you can only truly love your failchildren.

3

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movies, regrettably

On 'Wicked: For Good' and the enduring cultural legacy of Cecil B. DeMille

Halfway through Wicked: For Good, the thrilling cinematic conclusion to Wicked: Part One, a lesbian and a gay guy have sex offscreen in a treehouse. When this tryst takes place, Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) has just defected from his post as the Captain of the Wizard’s Guard, just as he was about to wed Glinda the Good Witch (Ariana Grande-Butera) in an act…

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5 months ago · 25 likes · 4 comments · Ben Empey

Despite featuring multiple dogfights, a fascist government, pirates, pursuit by the secret police, an economic depression, and what is surely cinema’s longest fist fight, Porco Rosso might be the Miyazaki movie in which the least happens. If I try to distill this movie into “a plot,” I come up with the following series of events:

• Porco is a bounty hunter who thwarts air pirates. We witness him rescue some school girls being held for ransom (though it’s clear the girls were never in any serious danger).

• The air pirates hire a hotshot American named Donald Curtis to defeat him.

• Donald Curtis defeats him.

• Porco fixes his plane and comes back for round two.

• This time, he wins.

• The end.

Now I am doing this summary partly to demonstrate what I mean when I say not much happens. What’s at stake in the on-screen conflicts in this movie is pretty low, because everybody’s broke, except for the American. All the planes are held together with a wish and a prayer. The appearances of the …

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Most of the films under discussion in this series involve elements of the fantastic—or, at the very least, the unrealistic. A flying witch on a broomstick, a giant robot: these are natural choices for cartoons. (Even Grave of the Fireflies is narrated through ghosts.) But what about Only Yesterday, a film in which Taeko Okajima, an unremarkable woman in her late twenties, takes a trip to the countryside and remembers being ten years old? Why should this movie be a cartoon? In a previous post about Mamoru Oshii’s Beautiful Dreamer (1984), I commented that “the strength animation will always have over live action film making is that everything in an animated film is exactly as real as everything else.” It’s easy to see how that’s true when we’re watching a movie in which things are depicted that are not real and do not happen. Trips to the countryside, on the other hand, do happen. You could take one right now, unless you already live in the countryside. Even then, you…

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Kiki’s Delivery Service is a movie about growing up, which means it is also about what to do when things stop working. People understand and navigate the world through tradition, magic, technology, and art, but these practices will break down. Your electric stove stops working. Your paintings don’t come out right. Your broom won’t behave. Your dirigible crashes into your clock tower. These are the kind of failures all of us deal with every day as we try to fulfill our responsibilities toward others.

Plus, there will be times when you can’t turn to your family or friends for help, but have to face it on your own. Maybe your beloved granddaughter has turned into a snotty tween or your best friend has stopped talking to you. There will also be times you are doing something nobody around you understands. For instance: you might be a thirteen year old witch who is on her own for a year—because that’s how witches come of age—in a world where other thirteen year olds are de…

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A proposal: Machines are great. We love machines. Software is creepy. We hate software.1 At this point in time, though, the distinction between machine and software has mostly disappeared into the vague world of “tech.” Even if you don’t work a desk job because you’re a farmer and you refuse to allow a “smart” device in your home, if you rely on John Deere products, well, they’re computerized. Software rules your life and the domains in which it does not intrude at all, or can be prevented from doing so, keep on shrinking. For instance: do you want to buy a car with no—or at least minimal—computer? Good luck.2

The introduction of software, of more computer-driven machines, does two things. First, it increases the user’s range of abilities. (For instance, you no longer have to turn around when putting your car in reverse, because there is a camera.) You are no longer limited to what you can see with your eyes; you can use cameras. You can perform more delicate maneuvers.…

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If you read this post and feel heartsick about real children who are starving and / or living in war zones at this time, please donate! If you reply to this email with a receipt for a donation to a relevant charity I will comp you for a year of Notebook. (If you already have a paid subscription, that means a year will be tacked onto your current subscription.) World Kitchen would be one possibility.

Let’s spread the love,
BDM

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A girl named Sheeta falls from the sky, pursued by pirates on the one hand and the military on the other. They want the mysterious blue gem she wears around her neck—after all, it’s the reason she can fall from the sky and live. She’s found by a boy named Pazu; Pazu works in the local mines, but dreams of flying and discovering Laputa, the fabled city in the sky that his father claimed to have seen. He’s smitten with Sheeta and tries to help her run away—but after successfully eluding the pirates, Sheeta is recaptured by the military.

Sheeta turns out to be a member of the Laputan royal family, and her gem is the secret to finding the floating city.1 She’s the captive of Muska, an ambiguous figure who does not seem to answer to anybody, not even the military official who seems to be the official head of the mission to find Laputa. Muska threatens Pazu unless Sheeta cooperates. She agrees, but while Pazu is off recruiting the pirates to their side, she idly activates th…

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In the future, the moon is a mining colony. All the colonists live and work on the dark side of the moon, where there is also a mysterious machine called “Dallos” that is a kind of local god. We are told it sucks to be a colonist because you are referred to by number and when you die your body is chemically destroyed, leaving only a ring that was implanted in your forehead. It’s not really clear that it actually sucks that much. I mean it definitely gets bad later but among Dallos’s various flaws is that it never really gets around to showing what makes living on the moon so dystopian.

Anyway, there are also rebels on the moon, led by a man named Dog. Dog kidnaps the military commander Alex Riger’s fiance, Melinda, as a bargaining chip. There’s a lot of fighting between Alex and the rebels, which involves Alex bombing Dallos in retaliation, but then Dallos a…

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In the far future, after what is clearly the aftermath of nuclear war, humans live in small cities and towns outside of the “Sea of Decay,” a forest full of toxic spores and gigantic insects, like the ohmu, which are sort of like gigantic rollypollies covered in eyes. Humanity retains some machinery from the past, like planes, but all the airships we see in this movie are so rickety it’s safe to say they aren’t building new ones. The Valley of the Wind is protected from the Sea of Decay by its winds, which the town also uses to operate windmills. Nausicaä, the princess of the Valley of the Wind, is drawn to explore the Sea of Decay, even though it’s dangerous. (Her father is bedridden and dying from the effects of accumulated exposure.)

One day a giant airship crashlands near the Valley of the Wind. There are no survivors, but one girl lives long enough to tell Nausicaä that the cargo must be burned and destroyed. Nausicaä assures the girl that everything is being bur…

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The Castle of Cagliostro might be the film of Hayao Miyazaki’s that I’ve actually watched the most. It’s just such a good time.1 I love this movie. It is one of my feel-good favorites; it’s a perfect adventure story that does everything right. There are no false notes. The tinge of romance sweetens the story but never takes over and the action stays in that specific thrilling fictional register where somehow it’s all very dangerous but you’re never really scared someone you like will get seriously hurt. And if somebody does get hurt, it can be fixed by eating a bunch of food.

We meet Lupin III, gentleman thief, and Jigen, his friend, as they pull off a heist at a casino. But the money is counterfeit, so they settle on a new heist target—the source of all this counterfeit money. They travel to the tiny country of Cagliostro (population 3500), which is the rumored source of the money. Scarcely have they arrived before they see a runaway bride being chased by a bunch of g…

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I had a sort of hope that in this post getting delayed by various events I would find myself forgetting my massive irritation from the previous Rebuilds and would be able to be fairer to whatever this movie is actually trying to do. We’ll never know if that would have happened, as this movie opens with a brief recap of the prior films, thus punting me straight back into “I can’t believe this shit” territory, mentally speaking. And there I mostly stayed.

Anyway.… It’s certainly the best Rebuild movie. I don’t want to set my Bluray on fire, which is good because that would probably be hard to do. I don’t even really mind owning it, as I like the art. But I’m just not into it. If I do what I need to do to enjoy it, which is detach it completely from the show, I’m left with a bunch of characters who look like people I care about but are not really them. Even though the expository dialogue is constant, I still never know what’s going on. The emotional threads t…

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Fourteen years after Shinji almost ends the world, Asuka retrieves Unit 01 from space. Shinji has been asleep or in a coma or something up there the whole time, and when he awakens he is understandably confused and not even aware of the passage of time. Misato is there but she won’t explain anything to him. A battle starts but they don’t want him to pilot. “Don’t get in the robot, Shinji”—is this reverse psychology? No, they actually mean it. But why?

It takes a while for anybody even to mention to Shinji that it’s been fourteen years, a statement he finds confusing given that Asuka is right there and she’s clearly not older. Asuka says that’s because of “the curse of the Evas,” something neither she nor anybody else wants to explain. In any case, Shinji is a prisoner now, not a friend, and Misato’s attached a bomb to his neck that she’ll detonate if he ever tries to pilot an Eva again or if Unit 01 activates again.

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Even though it feels kind of like exalted fan fiction, and even though I can now understand what people are saying, the ending of this movie still kicks ass the second time around. I sort of hate it if I think about it—maybe?—but if I’m not thinking about it, it rules. Like hell yes, Shinji! The power of love! Save the girl! Destroy the… world? OK, sure, we all become our parents sooner or later.

Evangelion 2.22: You Can (Not) Advance starts by introducing us to a new character, Mari, who fights an Angel in an unfinished Eva unit and wins.1 As with Asuka’s introduction in the show, the Angel is attacking outside of NERV HQ because Kaji has something important in a suitcase. This time, the important thing is the “Key of Nebuchadnezzar,” not Adam, but Kaji delivers his cargo to Gendo just like before. And never fear, the introduction of Mari does not mean we don’t get Asuka; she arrives in all her glory and takes out an Angel in single combat.

There’s a middl…

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Evangelion 1.11: You Are (Not) Alone has the disadvantage of coming in this series after I’ve gone through the story of Evangelion’s first six episodes twice within the year. As the tortured American poet Taylor Swift says in “Exile,” “I think I’ve seen this film before.”1 So I will admit I approached this movie with, basically, this attitude:

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My main interest going into the Evangelion manga was what the material would look like in the hands of somebody telling a parallel, but independent, story. And the “somebody” in this instance, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, is also not a random guy, but somebody pretty involved with the creation of the show.1 I’m not sure how many other cases of a parallel work being created at the same time exist in this way, where what you’re looking at is not quite a “novelization of” (or “manga-ization of”) the original but something written alongside it. I guess The Third Man is kind of like this. However, the Evangelion manga is also a serialized work and it ran for quite a while after the show ended (and started a little before it), so… it’s still a bit different!

But as a work, standing on its own—I didn’t have that much interest in it.

A habit I fall into often, and find hard to shake, is talking about collaborative works like Evangelion as if they are novels—that is, as if …

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