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 could just go to a different countryside.

Yet Only Yesterday is and could only be an animated movie. Much like Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress (2001), which we’ll get to in a later newsletter, Takahata uses animation here as a way of flattening the distinction between what we remember and what we experience in the present. I was thinking of Millennium Actress when I wrote that line about Beautiful Dreamer, but now that I’ve seen Only Yesterday, it’s even more true of this movie, in which past and present and imagined future all coincide without one feeling more real than the other.

And at the risk of sounding a little dramatic… if every other new-to-me movie in this series turns out to be complete garbage, it will be worth it to have seen this movie.

As already noted, Only Yesterday focuses on Taeko Okajima, a single office worker in her late twenties, who has taken ten days off from work to go work on a farm in the country. As a child, Taeko always wanted to visit family in the country, but never had the opportunity, because she did not in fact have family out in the country. Now, however, her sister has farmer in-laws. This trip is Taeko’s second. On her trip to the countryside, she finds herself thinking more and more about her ten-year-old self and the experiences she had in fifth grade—a first crush, a school play—and how she was approaching the transformative chrysalis of puberty. One of her extended memories is of finding out about the existence of periods in health class and then dealing with the fallout when all the boys in her class find out about the existence of periods. The girls confer on whether or not to buy special underwear from the school nurse, deciding they might as well since they’ll need it sooner or later; the boys run around flipping skirts up to see who is wearing said special underwear. Nobody seems to be able to figure out how important they feel periods are—whether they’re not a big deal, or a big deal and akin to being sick, or disgusting, or.…

Meanwhile, in her adult life, Taeko is enjoying harvesting safflower. There’s a new guest at the farm this time: Toshio, her brother-in-law’s cousin. It is blatantly obvious to everyone but Taeko that Toshio is nursing a huge crush on her; in fact, a brief meeting with her last year is the whole reason he’s even visiting at the same time. Toshio has quit his job to pursue organic farming, a cause he clearly believes in without being able to articulate it very well. Toshio and Taeko seem doomed to almost connect: Toshio is just not confident enough to make the first move. Taeko is a too oblivious to give him an opening. It takes the blunt intervention of a third party to make Taeko realize Toshio might be interested in her.

But what about Taeko? What interests her? The countryside, the past, the picking of safflowers, the long process through which safflower blossoms become dye for clothes and for rouge. But until she’s very straightforwardly asked—and not by Toshio, who will never get there under his own steam—to contemplate a future where she marries Toshio and stays at the farm, her interest keeps her a little detached from the people for whom farming is a way of life and not a ten day holiday. They are part of the scenery. She likes them, but she did not expect them to have thoughts about her, or ideas about the future that included her own life.

If you decide to watch Only Yesterday, the first thing you will notice is that the faces look strange. In the “adult” sections of Taeko’s life, when people talk or smile, their cheeks move. That’s what happens in real life, but cartoon faces, as a rule, do not do this.1 The faces in much of Only Yesterday therefore go from looking fairly flat to bulging outward, with prominent smile lines. This look really takes getting used to. It is odd.

In fact, even by the end of the movie, I wasn’t quite used to it. However, I suspect that Takahata wanted the look of the adult world of this movie to stay a little strange. The sections of the film which present Taeko as a child are done in a much more traditional and refined style, with beautiful and often super-simplified backgrounds. When Taeko inhabits the same frame as her younger self, they remain in their respective art styles. If Takahata had maintained the more realistic art style for the whole movie, we’d eventually become accustomed to the look and stop expecting the faces to look otherwise. He doesn’t. He wants the contrast.

Part of what it means for Taeko to look odd is that it means she looks older, because lines appear in her face when she talks.2 Taeko, who is 27, isn’t old (or even middle-aged), nor is she presented that way to us. (When we meet her, she’s just shot down a marriage proposal.) But her older face sometimes breaks through the younger face, the same way the ten-year-old is insistently present. We can see how Taeko will look when she actually is an old woman, and we can see how Toshio will look as an old man. Their faces already contain their past and their futures.

One of my reading projects for this year has been Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which I mention because Only Yesterday feels truly “Proustian” to me.3 As works of art the two sit in accidental proximity for me, but I don’t think that is why they feel related. Takahata’s movie is Proustian first in the way time sits in layers on every face and every object in the landscape, but also in its depiction of childhood. Taeko’s childhood memories, like Marcel’s, recreate a state of alternating frustration and ecstasy. As a child, you are bored and jerked around a lot of the time, though even your boredom is an intense experience.

Lots of Taeko’s childhood depicts her irritation at being unable to do this or that thing, at being the youngest and dumbest in her family, and at the approach of an adulthood in which being able to divide fractions will determine her ability to find happiness. She is a little bit of a brat a lot of the time. In one vignette, she desperately wants to try a fresh pineapple. When her father gets her a pineapple, nobody knows to serve it. When somebody figures it out, it doesn’t taste good, because it’s not ripe. Her sisters take one bite each and abandon ship, but Taeko stubbornly keeps eating the hard slices of unripe pineapple, as if in disbelief that something that smells so delicious could be so disappointing, but also out of a loyalty to the general idea of pineapple.

When I watched this scene, I remembered a passage from the beginning of In a Budding Grove that I’d read a day or two earlier. Marcel spends days waiting to go to a play and see a famous actress. He is consumed with anxiety that at the last minute, his parents will decide he’d better not go, because Marcel is a sickly child and they worry about the effects of overexertion on his health. Once he goes to the play, though, he finds he’s let down by the actress’s performance. He wills himself into a state of non-disappointment that is not exactly enthusiasm either.

Yet in neither of these works is the disappointment of encountering the “real thing” depicted as inevitable. A boy who plays baseball has a crush on Taeko. In their first, apparently only, conversation, they both realize they like cloudy days best. The days leading up to this conversation have been full of intense personal humiliation for them both, as both feel exposed and vulnerable to their classmates. The realization that they both love cloudy days makes the boy so happy he runs down the street throwing his baseball in the air. Taeko, meanwhile, runs straight up into the sky with joy, a visual moment Takahata pulls off through a clever use of low-detail backgrounds that make it look at first like she’s running down the street.

Taeko begins to consider Toshio as a romantic prospect, not just part of the farmland scenery, when she tells him about an old classmate she had who was poor, dirty, widely disliked, and nasty to her even though she made efforts to be nice to him. When he left the school, he shook every hand in the school except for hers. She feels that his refusal is because he saw an essential nastiness in her character. He knew that she hated him the most and was only nice to him as compensation. To this story, Toshio says: well, maybe he liked you. Maybe you were the only person who gave him an opportunity to be tough. He was too weak to go toe to toe with the other boys, but he could act tough to you.

Up until this point, Toshio has not seemed very confident of knowing something that Taeko doesn’t know in his conversations with her. He is clearly afraid of looking stupid to her. (When they first meet, he quotes a poem; when she says the poem is a classic, he confesses he only just read it.) There are things he knows more about than she does, but he’s not great at talking about them. What he has not seemed like, until this moment, is a guy who has any particular insight into other people. His crush on Taeko hasn’t seemed terribly specific, either: she’s just a woman with a certain amount of glamor because she’s from Tokyo.

But in this exchange, we realize that he’s actually been paying a lot of attention to her. Her sudden outburst that she acts nice but she’s really a fake is not a shock to him. And what he has to say to her is that she has something to learn about vulnerability: that, for instance, sometimes we express vulnerability through a deliberate creation of distance between us and what we really want.

Taeko’s relationship with farm life is one where she is trying to be careful not to romanticize it to herself: she’s just here as a tourist. She wouldn’t really like to live like this every day. Farming is hard, constant labor. You are always at the mercy of the weather. Taeko spends a lot of time remembering the girls of the past who spent their lives picking safflower to make cosmetics that they could not even afford to buy. That’s what it would be like to be a farmer: to live with poverty and resentment. She’s looking at this life through rose-colored glasses. And so on. She makes a point of picking her first safflower without protective gloves—which is painful—then pulls them on. It’s an odd and pointed gesture, but it is a way of saying to herself: if you got what you wanted, you wouldn’t really be happy.

But maybe the anti-romantic eye is as immature as the romantic one, prone to making its own errors. Of course farming is hard, but what does that have to do with whether or not you want to spend your life farming? If you are reasonable, perhaps you’ll avoid some kinds of pain; if you’re unreasonable, you get to run up into the sky. Even if you never talk to that boy again, isn’t that worth it? Hundreds of safflower blossoms must be picked every day to be turned to rouge that quickly molds. It’s a lot of work for a transient creation, but so is everything. “It is quite possible that, even with respect to the millennial existence of the human race,” Marcel muses to himself, “the philosophy of the journalist, according to which everything is doomed to oblivion, is less true than a contrary philosophy which would predict the conservation of everything.” It’s a new day. Put on your gloves. Pick some more blossoms. Go to sleep. Do it again.

• No Animation Obsessive directly about Only Yesterday, but here’s one on a Ghibli background artist.

  Animation Obsessive

  What Kazuo Oga Thinks About When He Thinks About Backgrounds

  Welcome! Animation Obsessive returns with more. This is the plan today…

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  3 years ago · 144 likes · 2 comments

• According to the making of documentary, the adult parts of Only Yesterday were invented by Takahata—the source material is just about childhood! Also I’m so used to seeing pictures of Miyazaki as an old man that I failed to recognize him.

• I appreciate that Taeko is not especially good at anything. Two movies that Only Yesterday reminded me of were Whisper of the Heart (which will appear in this series later) and the Australian movie My Brilliant Career. Both of those movies are about girls deciding to get serious and pursue vocations as writers. But Taeko has no particular vocation—not even for farming. That’s not what the story is about.

• Another movie Only Yesterday reminded me of was Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray. (But… to get a little spicy… Only Yesterday is better.)

• When Taeko tells the story about the boy who refused to shake her hand and Toshio looks at her and then says “what happened at the farmhouse”… I laughed out loud.

• Here is the list of what is going to be covered over this series, by the way, for anybody joining in. Since Angel’s Egg is finally on streaming, we will do that next month, along with Porco Rosso. I may do Porco Rosso first and Angel’s Egg second—I also want to watch In the Aftermath, the Roger Corman–esque attempt to recut Angel’s Egg into a more straightforward movie, and since Angel’s Egg is so far out of chronological order it feels like there’s no reason to do it first.

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 dependent children.

That is Kiki’s situation, as she and her cat familiar Jiji try to make a life in the ambiguously European seaside town of Koriko. She’s left home with her dad’s radio, her mother’s broom, and the traditional black gown. At first, Kiki is intimidated by Koriko. Nobody there seems to know what a witch is. She almost causes a car accident and incurs the wrath of a policeman who wishes to speak to her parents. She can’t stay in hotels, since she’s a child. But as luck would have it she finds a place to stay in a bakery. She also finds a job to do: delivering things by broom.

And then Kiki’s off. She makes friends with Ursula, a cool artist who lives out in the woods named Ursula. She makes… let’s call it acquaintances… with a boy named Tombo who’s obsessed with flying and is trying to build a flying bicycle. We watch as Kiki keeps flying and running errands, getting better and better at it. And then, one day, she loses her magic. She can’t fly and she can’t talk to Jiji. Eventually Kiki regains her ability to fly. Her relationship with Jiji, however, is gone forever.

What’s the deal with that? That is what I would have asked when I was four—if I’d seen this movie when I was four. However, it’s never too late to ask. So, I repeat: What’s the deal with that?

It’s worth mentioning that Kiki’s Delivery Service is adapted from a book by Eiko Kadono and that in the book the entire final act of the movie does not happen.1 We are told that she will lose Jiji one day as a part of growing up and finding adult love:

When a witch has a baby girl, she searches for a black cat born around the same time and raises them together. As they grow, the cat and the girl learn to speak to each other in their own language. Kokiri used to have a cat named Mémé, and Kiki had one as well—a little black cat named Jiji.… Eventually the girl would grow up and find a new companion to take the place of her cat. The cat would also find its own partner and from then on, the pair would live separately.

But by the last page of the book, Kiki and Jiji are still chatting away. Their eventual parting seems years into the future. While Kadono eventually published more Kiki books, she hadn’t yet done so when the movie came out in 1989. In short, everything that happens in the final act of this movie is Miyazaki’s invention. Furthermore, Miyazaki removes the expectation that one day Kiki and Jiji will part. Instead, he severs their bond in a way that is sudden, upsetting, and irrevocable.2

The sequence of events that leads to Kiki’s loss of magic is as follows: after laboring heroically to help a woman make a pie for her granddaughter, flying through the pouring rain to deliver the pie on time, Kiki is shocked to discover the granddaughter does not care (and even resents the gift). Because she’s upset and has been out in the rain, she gets sick and stays in bed for a day.3 While Kiki is sick, Jiji begins to chat up another cat, Lily. Kiki feels better the next day, and can still talk to Jiji, but leaves him with Lily to make a delivery on foot. That delivery turns out to be for Tombo, and the two become friendlier, riding around on his bike (and then, crashing the bike)… until she realizes that one of Tombo’s friends is the spoiled granddaughter. Kiki leaves Tombo and walks home. When she gets back to her room and encounters Jiji again, she only hears meows.4 And, as she discovers a little later, she can no longer fly.

We might assume this loss of Jiji is centered around Tombo, as Kadono would have it work out in the book: Kiki replaces a fake boyfriend (Jiji) with a slightly less fake boyfriend (Tombo). But I don’t think that’s how it works in the movie. Kiki’s emotional problem is clearly about the other girl. On her day out with Tombo, she’s in a great mood right up until she sees this other girl. And, importantly, while Kiki has a strong reaction to the granddaughter, the girl herself is barely a character. We don’t get to know her and neither does Kiki. Her negative reaction is about something going on inside of her, not an external conflict with another person that she has to resolve.

We can put the granddaughter as a bookend to an earlier encounter Kiki has with a girl about he age. At the beginning of the movie, right after she’s left home, she meets another witch, who has almost completed her coming-of-age year. This witch is much more glamorous than Kiki and even a little aloof (Jiji thinks her cat is a snob). Unlike Kiki, who has only the basic talent all witches have (flying), she can tell fortunes. However, as Kiki and the other witch chat, the other girl warms up, and they part on friendly terms. She makes Kiki feel more childish because she’s how Kiki hopes to be at the other end of this process. As an aspirational figure, she makes Kiki first a little cowed and then a little inspired.

Once Kiki arrives in Koriko, her differences from the other girls her age are apparent, and she’s hostile to all the children her age. (Tombo probably asks for it.) She resents them for being able to spend their money on pretty clothes instead of food. While Kiki is self-reliant and works hard, in her delivery role she is still at heart a helpful daughter. She may happily trade insults with Tombo, a kid her own age, but she wants adult approval.5 Kiki would not, and probably could not, treat an adult gift with contempt. Even leaving home is about honoring tradition. The granddaughter6 has a kind of fake independence—money, nice clothes, makeup, a car—that is bound up with her lack of filial piety. Unlike the witch we meet at the beginning, Kiki does not exactly want to be this other girl. The granddaughter confronts Kiki with the ways in which she herself has yet to grow up because she is Kiki’s own inverted image, simultaneously more adult (sophisticated) than Kiki and more childish (dependent).

After leaving Tombo at the beach, Kiki tells Jiji: “I think something’s wrong with me. I make friends, then suddenly I can’t bear to be with them. That other me, the cheerful and honest one, went away somewhere.” At this point, though she doesn’t realize it, their connection has been severed. Up until now, Kiki’s second self and other half has been Jiji; her encounters with the granddaughter lead to Jiji being expelled from that position and Kiki seeing herself in an entirely negative light. In reaction to meeting this new other self, Kiki severs her ties to her parental home.7 She loses her magic, she loses Jiji, and she loses her mother’s broom.

The above is perhaps a long journey to the obvious conclusion, which is that Kiki loses her friend because she grows up. When she flies again, it is on a mission where it matters very much that she succeed—because if she fails, Tombo will die—and without the strength of her mother or the wit of Jiji to guide her. She loses her training wheels and she doesn’t get them back because… well, you never do get them back.8 However, I think the long journey is worth taking because what “growing up” means in this movie is not romance. Rather, it’s about finding a way one can stand both in tradition and for oneself. Jiji stays a part of Kiki’s life, but as a cat with a cat wife, a cat life, and kittens to care for.

In the period when Kiki cannot fly at all, she goes to stay with Ursula, the artist in the woods. Ursula comments that she once lost the ability to paint and realized it was because she only knew how to make paintings that were copying other people. Now, however, she paints with the understanding she may lose her footing at any time. She has developed coping mechanisms for blocks, but they will happen. That is the basic truth Kiki has to figure out: that things will fail and you have to cope. You can’t rely on things behaving like they should and you can’t force them either. You just have to be able to cope when they’re broken. And then you do that over, and over, and over.

• There isn’t an Animation Obsessive about Kiki’s Delivery Service (that I see, at least) but there is one about one of its animators:

  Animation Obsessive

  Pyrotechnics and Play

  Happy Thursday! Thanks for joining us for a new edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. This one is all about the Japanese animator Atsuko Fukushima…

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  a year ago · 31 likes · 4 comments · Animation Obsessive Staff

• Mitski named Jiji one of “History’s Coolest Cats” in a recent interview: “This is why we as adult women should watch Kiki’s Delivery Service. [Kiki gets] burnt out and loses her magic. She can no longer speak to her familiar cat, Jiji, and this is devastating. I feel like this is exactly why Miyazaki stories are so good, because it’s so real. You can’t get your old childhood magic back. The only thing you can do is move forward and find new magic.”

• Despite everything I said above I think it would be funny if Jiji lost the ability to talk simply because he got a cat wife. A kind of selkie situation. Kiki has nothing to do with it. It’s all Jiji’s drama. Loss of magic coincidental.

• I think what actually bothers me most about Jiji is that he seems to lose his personality when he loses his voice. There are lots of comic bits involving him, like this one, but now he’s just a cat. It seems unjust.
  

• One thing I like about this movie is that I have no sense of magic and technology as opposed. Kiki flies with her radio and she’s not offended by the idea of Tombo building a flying machine. In the book, magic is fading away, but in the movie Miyzaki communicates that witches are a minority group without implying they’re dying out.

• When Kiki turns on the radio and “Rouge no Dengon” starts playing… that’s cinema…
  

• Various people have made the “pumpkin and herring” pie and the consensus seems to be that it’s good? It’s too rich for me so I will take their word for it. I will admit my initial reaction was that sounds disgusting and when the granddaughter was a brat about it I was like she’s making some points here.

• Apparently Miyazaki has said that Jiji is Kiki’s “other self” which—had I looked it up beforehand—could have saved me a certain amount of typing. Well… the typing’s done now….

• Siskel and Ebert on Kiki:

• Next up is Only Yesterday, which should be on the 28th.

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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To the extent that I’ve cultivated a particular approach to Evangelion, it’s that I’ve tried to stay text-focused. We are “naive watchers.” There are a few places this approach shows its limits, and End of Evangelion is one. That is because this movie primarily (only?) exists because people simultaneously loved Evangelion so much they propelled it to a Star Wars–level ability to print money and they hated its abstract, surreal finale.1

I don’t think you can just bracket that out, because that Anno is partly reacting to the backlash to the ending of the show is in the text.2 He puts fictionalized versions of emails he got in the movie. The movie itself suggests that it exists to punish you—yes, you!—for being so annoying.3 End of Evangelion comes aggressively out of the gate with a scene where Shinji masturbates over Asuka’s comatose body, which I again feel is Anno saying: Oh, so you, a creepy little nerd, wanted an Asuka body pillow? That’s what I think of you. Are you happy now? I hope…

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Much like episode twenty-five, the Evangelion finale is basically people going around spelling out exactly what the show is saying. So… in lieu of summarizing the episode, I will summarize those points as I understand them. Here’s what Shinji discovers over the course of the process of Instrumentality:

• You want others to give you value.

• However, only you can give yourself value.

• Your reality is the product of your interactions with the world.

• It is always possible to imagine another world, another self.

• Limitless freedom means lack of definition and an inability to perceive oneself.

• The person who exists alone exists nowhere.

• To see oneself, one requires others.

• It’s okay for you to be here, but,

• You have to believe that yourself, others can’t believe that for you.

• Congratulations!

Or, to put more simply, human connection cannot give you what you want from it, but that does not mean that human connection gives you nothing and that you should learn to go without it.…

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A while ago I was trying to describe the Evangelion phenomenon to a friend of mine, and I said something like “imagine if Twin Peaks was so popular and such a huge success that we were having Twin Peaks commemorative happy meals decades later. But also, it’s still absolutely Twin Peaks! It’s not even slightly less odd.”

The last two episodes of Evangelion are where it really and truly merits this comparison. This is where the show is really trying to communicate, as directly as possible, an internal experience. In whatever triage of available time and resources created these episodes, a decision was made to value character and theme over satisfyingly closing the mechanics of the story. I think this was the right call.

And to me, the TV show is a complete object that does not require any of the rest of the stuff that came later. But it is true that I never had the experience of watching these last episodes without knowing a huge amount of other material …

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