I thought you left me because you didn’t need me.

neon genesis evangelion (episode one, "angel attack")

A couple years ago, I tried pitching something about the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion to a few different outlets. It was basically about how Hideaki Anno has tried to end Evangelion three separate times and asking why this story in particular seems so tricky to end.¹ I was like—to myself—I’ll call it sense of an ending, ho ho ho. Anyway, nobody bit.

In retrospect, it was probably for the best that I did not find any takers—as I would not have delivered, due to illness—but I still wanted to write the piece. However, as time went on, I did not really have a good hook for the pitch. And I’m very conscious of the fact that I don’t actually know Japanese and thus there’s a whole world of interviews and such that are completely inaccessible to me—even for a show as popular and well-known in the Anglosphere as Evangelion.² So I wondered about writing something as definitive-feeling as an essay about it, since there’s so much I do not really know.

But you know what I do have…? A newsletter. Where I get to be stupid! And so. Rewatch of Evangelion.³ I’m thinking once a week, up on the weekend? Until we hit the movies… then we’ll adjust.⁴

A couple ground rules: Anything that happens in the original TV show or End of Evangelion is fair game to be referenced here. Anything that happens in the Rebuild movies is not (until we get to them). That said, I will try to keep things “spoiler light” in the posts themselves (but not spoiler free).⁵

Comments, however, I am not going to spoiler police. So read them at your own risk.

In keeping with the spirit of this newsletter, these are not going to be exhaustively researched posts but rather speculative, open, off-the-cuff, etc. I definitely will welcome resources people have—like interviews with Anno etc—in the comments!

---

I mostly want to spend this first installment talking about my general take on the show going in. I have not rewatched it in full since whenever I watched it the first time, so while these are opinions I currently hold… who knows as we continue. And I haven’t seen all of Hideaki Anno’s work. But I have seen a lot! So I want to start off here by reflecting on what I think are some of his trademarks—as observed by watching his shows and movies, not by reading interviews and such. But in terms of plot, for anybody⁶ making the weird decision to read this without watching the show, here’s what happens in “Angels Attack”:

Shinji Ikari is summoned to NERV, the mysterious government agency where his absent father works, at the same time a mysterious alien being known as an “Angel” is attacking Tokyo-3. He’s picked up by a flirty woman who proves adept at hot wiring cars (Captain Misato Katsuragi) and greeted by a scientist at NERV named Ritsuko Akagi.

Shinji discovers his father expects him to pilot a top secret giant robot called an “Evangelion” to defeat the Angel. He initially refuses to do this but changes his mind when he realizes the other candidate is a seriously injured girl around his age named Rei. Once he gets in the robot and gets out there, he discovers he’s psychically linked to it, which means that everything the Angel does feels like something being done to his own body. The Angel first breaks the Eva’s arm and then shoots it in the head. There the episode ends.

---

First: Anno is somebody who is interested in cliches (and genre conventions). I think most of his projects are attempts to fully inhabit a cliche, artistically speaking, releasing it from feeling tired and previously done. Gunbuster is a perfectly executed robots-fighting-aliens drama that plays it all straight. Its characters are all stock types! But because Anno invests them with so much life, it doesn’t matter.

Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water is, similarly, a great adventure story, and it avoids feeling trapped by its basic normality because it’s so well done. In these instances, I think Anno figures out a way to believe in genre conventions so thoroughly that he makes them feel fresh and real.

With Evangelion, I’ve always thought that Anno goes back to what is (basically) the first episode of the first Mobile Suit Gundam show—so 1979—where an untrained civilian has to get into a robot designed by his single-minded scientist father and pilot it to defend against an unexpected threat. Amuro Ray proactively jumps into the Gundam and gets right to kicking ass.⁷ Obviously, that’s a real type of person, and furthermore Mobile Suit Gundam is not aiming for “psychological realism,” so to observe this is not to draw attention to a flaw. Amuro’s father is also, when we meet him, straightforwardly noble and a good guy.

But much of the first episode of Evangelion seems, to me, to follow just from asking: what would that be like? What would be like to be thrust into this situation? To pilot a powerful weapon with no training? To be a tool in your dad’s big plan… a plan which has already led him to disrupt your life significantly? And there’s also another question, which is: what exactly would that dad be like? Maybe the dad isn’t a good guy. Maybe he sucks. And maybe that makes you feel overwhelmed and angry at being manipulated by him. That’s what happens in “Angels Attack.”

The second thing—which is maybe just a restatement of what I just said—is what I think of as Hideaki Anno’s “genre humanism.” (Not the best term but it will do for now.) It’s obvious from his work that he loves genre. He loves robots, he loves Godzilla, he loves it all. He’s never slumming it. (His project after Evangelion was a romantic comedy which is infused with a similar kind of affection.) But I also think he has a warmth toward and interest in people and, for him, genre is the natural way to explore and communicate that. Whatever Evangelion is, it is not misanthropic.⁸

Evangelion itself is defined by a few things for me, separate from the above: its shoestring budget, which creates the show’s characteristic and iconic visuals; its warmth when it comes to its characters; and, finally, its shameless sleaziness. All of these are in operation here already.⁹ The sleaziness really starts to ramp up in episode two, but Misato’s first onscreen appearance is a photo she sent to Shinji with an arrow pointing at her cleavage. (Shinji… is fourteen.…)

Take the first glimpse of an Eva in the show proper (and not the credit sequence): a giant, creepy ghostly hand that nobody seems to notice. It’s so startling and it’s a great example of how Evangelion works around having no money to create indelible images, in this case by basically sliding a still frame of some silhouettes across a background.¹⁰ It also adds to the ways it is hard (for me, anyway) to figure out anything about how the inside of NERV HQ is structured.¹¹ There’s surely a fan-created model that accounts for where everything in NERV HQ goes but I like it as this sort of baffling place that is, like a lot of Evangelion, a mix of “cutting edge” and “run down.”¹²

---

As far as the episode itself goes, something that stood out to me rewatching the episode is the degree to which Gendo wants things to go exactly the way they do. I don’t mean he wants Shinji to get in the robot and Shinji eventually does. It’s the way Shinji is presented (essentially) with a false choice under enormous pressure, left to crumble under that pressure, and then manipulated into doing it anyway.

To the extent that Evangelion has anybody in its cast who is simply and uncomplicatedly an evil guy you want to see suffer as much as possible, it’s probably Gendo. So it’s not that I thought he was somehow Dad Of The Year.¹³ But I think rewatching this episode really highlighted to me that Gendo is not an absent and neglectful father so much as an actively malicious one.¹⁴ There was a way to bring Shinji into the Evangelion project where he’d not only enthusiastically participate but go into his first fight prepared—but Gendo wants Shinji cornered and demoralized. It’s hard to say how much he planned every detail in advance¹⁵ but his grin when he can see Shinji’s distress in the cameras makes it clear that this is his ideal scenario.¹⁶

Gendo deliberately creates a situation where Shinji can’t feel good about anything he does (because he didn’t want to do it) but he also feels worthless for not wanting to do it. Finding out your absent dad has been making a robot only you can pilot and use to save the world is the fantasy that powers lots of anime and manga, and if Shinji doesn’t know precisely that he is living out every boy’s dream (does Gundam exist in the Evangelion universe?) he understands at the very least that he is failing to live up to the occasion.¹⁷ His refusal to live up to this fantasy is why he was (maybe still is) one of the most widely loathed lead characters in anime of all time—but I love Shinji, personally. His personal mantra, introduced here, of mustn’t run away encapsulates the trap he’s been placed in but also—I think—his way out of it. Maybe.

---

Offhand observations:

• I like how Shinji clearly ripped up Gendo’s letter in a fit of rage (and scribbled on it?) and then taped it back together, but neither he nor Misato ever comment on it.

• Shinji’s first response to being presented with a giant demonic robot is to doublecheck the NERV orientation guide to see where it’s mentioned. Ritsuko’s like no… you didn’t miss the “giant biomechanical creature” part.¹⁸

• Everybody’s establishing scenes are great but I particularly like when Ritsuko appears in her scuba suit, unzips it to reveal her swimsuit, and then… chest slams Misato? intimidates Misato by bumping her? I feel like it communicates very well that Ritsuko is a cool competent buttoned-up professional who is also probably one key setback away from committing an act of mass violence at NERV HQ.

• Similarly, Rei’s first “appearance” is her flat and emotionless “yes” over the intercom and then when she shows up she’s half dead, bleeding, and clearly unable to pilot an Eva, let alone Unit 01.¹⁹ Her grimacing in pain is probably the most in terms of facial expressions we get out of her until… episode six?

• I truly hate that Netflix / Funimation could not get the rights to “Fly Me To The Moon” and instead uses a piece of background music. I feel like going from the cliffhanger ending to an unexpected bossa nova arrangement of “Fly Me To The Moon” is sort of essential to the experience. I almost imported the Japanese bluray set of Evangelion a while back just to be able to watch it with that included, but it apparently doesn’t have subtitles. (I do actually still have the old ADV remastered DVDs.)

• On that note, though—the credit sequence will always be the best.²⁰ So good…

1. Ripped from my “sent” folder:

I haven't seen the new movie yet, but the piece would probably focus on conclusions, since Eva has gone through, at this point, at least three different conclusions and it seems to be a hard story to satisfyingly conclude. (I'm in what used to be the minority—not sure now—that thought the original ending was the best.) What makes a story a) require a real conclusion (we don't need a definitive conclusion to "all star wars movies") while b) persistently denying its audience the kind of narrative satisfaction they want. I think there's also something to be asked about the appeal of this story, which has stuck around for quite a long time, is one of the few true breakout hits in the West, etc. And obviously the personal angle of "what this means to me."

My sort of guess without having watched the new material is that part of the reason is that the show develops various people whose happiness is mutually exclusive, but you want them all to be happy, which narratively ends up aligning you with the bad guys (who also want everybody to be happy in a typical anime "ending the world to make it better" way). But since there really are losers in the story the ending keeps on being punted and what's offered is deliberately abstract. The basic longevity of the show I think comes down in part to its being engrossing but pointedly unsatisfying.

2. Too much of a weeb to stop watching cartoons, too little of a weeb to commit to learning kanji.…

3. If this were an official Evangelion thing we could call it (Re)watch of Evangelion: You Can (Not) Move On.

4. The Sofia Coppola project is not dead, it just hit some technical difficulties.

5. If you’re asking “why,” that’s because I’ve seen the TV show and I’ve seen End of Evangelion. But I have not seen all of the Rebuild movies. I never promised to be a just ruler.

6. (

Clare Coffey

.)

7. Reader

Alex Scott

points out I’m strawmanning Mobile Suit Gundam here a little and I think he’s right.

8. Well… End of Evangelion kind of is.

9. Sometimes whoever decided to frame Evangelion’s shots remind me of those pulpy mass market paperbacks of classic novels that are clearly meant to trick you into thinking you’re getting some highbrow softcore pornography.

10. One of several memorable shots in this episode, including Shinji coming face to face with Unit 01 for the first time (another mostly still shot) and the light fixtures breaking against the glass in front of Gendo’s face.

11. Like: why is there an escalator that runs by the Evangelion holding tank?

12. You have these massive biomechanical robots… that plug in! Misato has a penguin habit in her crappy little apartment! And so on.

13. I’m aware there’s a fan theory that Gendo is himself a hapless manipulated puppet of his dead wife but I’m not sure it changes much.

14. I recently watched the first season of Hunter x Hunter and Gon’s attitude toward his similarly absent father really felt like it underscored what makes Evangelion different in its approach—he’s basically like I want to be a Hunter, like my awesome dad, because being a Hunter is obviously awesome enough for my awesome dad to abandon his family. (The manga of Hunter x Hunter started the year after Evangelion aired I think.)

15. Presumably, he didn’t know that Shinji would arrive during an Angel attack? Unless he did?

16. Like they say….

17. Via Wikipedia… it’s interesting to go back to this contemporaneous response:

Animation is average for a TV serial, with some interesting creature and mecha designs -- the series will probably appeal to the younger crowd in that respect. But when you get beyond the neato stuff, things really start to fall apart... I was very disappointed with the premise of the story itself -- unknown aliens are out to destroy mankind for no apparent reason, and only a young kid equipped with the latest and greatest untested piece of hardware can save the world. Of course, the poor kid doesn't know this... Where have we seen this scenario before?

18. I’m pretty sure this is also a reference to the first episode of Mobile Suit Gundam, where Amuro’s first reaction upon seeing the Gundam unit is to open the manual he’s holding. But there’s a lot of classic mecha anime I haven’t seen—including the one people always compare to Evangelion, Space Runaway Ideon—so I’m always a little worried about being this tweet:

19. The dialogue between Gendo and Fuyutsuki is pretty chilling once you know more about Rei, I think!

20. Friend of the Stack

Phil Christman

introduced me to this other influence:

Again… Anno loves genre!