Rebuild of Evangelion / Evangelion 1.11 You Are (Not) Alone

It’s three years since the Rebuild of Evangelion feature film was released in Japanese cinemas, and two years since it was dubbed. It is, however, only a matter of days since the extended Blu-Ray 1.11 version was released, with extra footage and beautiful transfer, and that’s the one I’ve waited to see.

I’ve written elsewhere that Eva means a fair bit to me. I watched it back when I was just Shinji’s age, when the Internet was a tiny place and it was fun waiting for strange and fascinating images to download with a dial-up modem. It was the first anime series I watched that wasn’t made for young children, and it was a pretty remarkable place to start. I didn’t actually watch the remainder of the series until some years later, but the characters and setting stayed with me, as well as the uniquely unorthodox and experimental direction style. I was happy to get the original Japanese dub, though, for most of the reason Shinji has a reputation as whiny is his dub actor’s grating voice.

So when I started to watch Rebuild, the first thing that struck me is how direct the remake is. A shot-for-shot recreation of the first five or six episodes, with a few parts trimmed down and a couple of added vignettes, the real question that lingers after watching is…why bother? Nothing new is added in story terms, the direction is the same, and it doesn’t even match up to the original because the character development is much more rushed. It has one great advantage, and that is its beauty, for everything has been redrawn to a higher standard, and indeed, other than one scene in which Shinji sits looking down at the city in the morning mist, it all looks so much nicer than the original series, which for all its advances and cleverness looks a little dated now.

But that is all, and covering only a quarter of the series, it becomes easy to call this a cynical and mindless cash-in. Almost no thought has been put in, and it made a lot of money at the box office.

It is worthwhile, however. It is worthwhile for the thrill of seeing this classic animation made as beautiful as anything released today, especially on a large screen. It is worthwhile because old fans will be impressed and new fans being introduced to the story for the first time will see it in the best possible way. And it is worthwhile because, yes, it will still make money for Gainax. And it is worthwhile because even if this is just a rehash, the later Rebuild films may not be. My only disappointment is how long I will have to wait to see the next one.

There wasn’t even any Asuka here!