Neon Genesis Evangelion
[related: Hideaki Anno, End of Evangelion, Fan Servicing]
A highly lauded and widely controversial mecha anime television series created and directed by the brilliant and emotionally tortured Hideaki Anno. Over the course of its 26 initial episodes, Neon Genesis Evangelion (NGE) recounts a Russian-doll system of existential battles against the "Angels", a series of mysterious seemingly extraterrestrial beings terrorizing "Toyko-3". The series featured a dizzying symbological swirl of almost byzantine complexity including numerous references to Judeo and Christian mythology. NGE includes numerous allusions to Midrash stories, Zohar imagery and other Kabbalah-derived materials originally stemming from the Book of Genesis. Anno often pointed to Schopenhauer and Freud as core influences - oedipal undertones abound throughout the series. The Freudian concept of "death drive" is overtly woven into various character arcs. Anno's refusal to identify a full origin story for the existence of the Angels and employment of occasional magical realism was seen by some critics as Tarkovskian in nature, an attribution Anno acknowledged and embraced.
The reception for NGE was lukewarm upon its release, but public support for the series built to a fervor over the course of its run [1]. However, the final two episodes of the series proved to be extremely divisive. Taking place entirely in the mind of the pubescent main character, episodes 25-26 paralleled Anno's own mental and emotional breakdown. The material was at times completely abstract, consisting of Kandinsky-esque shapes and muffled sounds, crayon drawings, and long dreamlike montages featuring almost indecipherable soliloquies. End of Evangelion, created following an extended period of mental health treatment, served as Anno's re-attempt at concluding NGE is a more coherent and compelling manner [2]. Anno later abandoned all further forays into animation in protest of stringent government content restrictions resulting from the Pokémon Shock Incident.
Throughout NGE, music played a pivotal roll. Anno, himself an amateur musician, insisted on a brutally economical approach to scoring, using essentially four alternating themes throughout the entire series to help demarcate specific sections of content [3]. NGE's opening and closing credit sequences became the subject of fan obsession. Due to cost cutting measures, the original credit music, including the legendarily strange "Fly Me to the Moon" closing sequence, was not licensed for the ill-fated American reboot of NGE. Poorly executed credit rescorings by the progressive rock group Octagon of Dex only fanned the flames of public discontent, contributing both to the cancellation of the reboot and the dissolution of the band.
- ↑ A surge in popularity attributed in some circles to increasingly aggressive levels of "fan servicing" centering on the cartoon (and sometimes naked) breasts of young teenage women.
- ↑ An effort partially thwarted by his decision to have Shinji, the pubescent main character, masturbate over the body of his comatose female counterpart in the second scene of the film.
- ↑ An approach he unsurprisingly abandoned in the final two episodes of the series.