ヱヴァンゲリヲン新劇場版：Q / Evangerion Shin Gekijōban: Q / Rebuild of Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo

Well, they can say what they like about being (not) able to redo, with this the third of the four Rebuild films, a whole lot has been redone. We’re a long way from the first in the series’ repetition of crucial scenes from the original here, and in a whole new and interesting continuity.

You Can (Not) Advance finished with a big deviation from the plot of the original – it seemed instrumentality was imminent, until Kaworu showed up with the Lance of Longinus and put a stop to that. ‘I anticipate a good half of 3.0’s length to be given to trauma and suffering and weirdness’, I wrote at the time, and I wasn’t exactly wrong – though what I got was nothing like what I expected.

Fourteen years have passed since then. Shinji, who was about to trigger the Third Impact from inside Eva Unit 1, was extracted, but remained asleep for that long. Asuka and Mari are still piloting Eva, but the three of them seem not to have aged at all as a side-effect of piloting. It is hinted that in the interim Touji joined the other ‘children’, but it is only a hint – though his little sister is now involved in the running of the Evangelion. She does not work for NERV, however. There the most dramatic changes have happened.

Misato and Ritsuko are no longer juniors at Nerv. Instead, they are part of WILLE, set up to oppose NERV and the machinations of Gendou. When Shinji began Human Instrumentality in his attempts to save Rei, many of the horrors seen in the original End of Evangelion’s version of the cataclysm seemingly came to pass, including immense crosses sprouting in a red wasteland and, implicitly, a giant Rei rearing up and having its head fall off. The simple act of trying to save a girl he cared about brought about the deaths of millions and only Kaworu’s intervention with the Lance of Longinus stopped it. Of course, Shinji is ignorant to this at first, to why Misato and the rest treat him like a criminal and fit him with an explosive collar, why they have taken his Unit 01 and converted it into the power source for a huge airship called the Wunder. He is still confused when Rei – some version of Rei – attacks in a new Eva and wanting answers, Shinji goes with her.

He is taken to NERV, now with the sky visible above it. Distant as ever, Gendou tells him he can pilot a new Eva alongside mysterious white-haired boy Kaworu. Kaworu is once again mysterious, gentle, deeply insightful and preternaturally knowledgeable, and takes Shinji under his wing to treat him respectfully in a masterful display of manipulation. They begin to play piano duets in some of the film’s stillest and most beautiful scenes, but part of their bond involves Kaworu revealing the truth – that what has happened to the world is Shinji’s fault. Shinji begins his descent into despair again, and if anybody wants to complain about his whining and angst, I think being responsible for the deaths of almost all mankind justifies it.

Kaworu convinces Shinji that recovering the Lance of Longinus – and also the Lance of Cassius, added for whatever reason and the iffiest bit of Christian mythological esoteria added here – the near-Third Impact will be undone and everything will be happy again. Now, for the plot to work, it must be that Kaworu truly believes this, and is not simply being manipulative, because otherwise his actions stopping the Third Impact in the first place, as well as his heroic, horrific actions once he realises that this ‘Lance of Cassius’ is not there, only another part of the Lance of Longinus, make no sense. He is still everything he was in the original and perhaps more, still oddly homoerotic with his affections, and still acts based on a piece of information that turns out to be critically wrong, but it seems that to make sense of the plot of 3.33 we must accept that he was misled and did not want the ‘doors of Guf’ (slightly iffy but acceptable Judeo-Christian mythology reference) to open or the Fourth Impact to take place. He has essentially become another of Gendou’s pawns.

As ever, the plot is complex and full of bizarre lofty ideas, but everything is presented in an exciting and fast-paced manner, and leads to an interesting cliffhanger with Asuka, Shinji and Rei together again, this time with no Eva units left. The fight scenes, explosions and huge flying battleships are a marvel, and the CG-heavy imagery is stunningly good throughout, even if it’s the human parts that are most interesting. The scale is a little overblown now, post-apocalyptic with advanced technology, and the human heart of this film is kept at a distance knowing Kaworu is not all he says he is. I hope that the next film has a little more humanity, but at the same time I will not be surprised if it is still more harsh and clinical – yet beautiful. 

劇場版 天元突破グレンラガン 紅蓮篇 & 螺巌篇 / Gekijouban Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (movies)

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Gurren-Hen
Kanji: Crimson Lotus Chapter
English: Childhood's End
Impressions written: 19.5.09

Watched the first Gurren Lagann movie, which honestly I found very redundant. I enjoyed it very much, because it was manly manly Gurren Lagann, and the altered climax, now having the attacks from divine generals happening simultaneously, made for at least some new experience, but generally it was a rehash of the first half of the series with next to nothing added…and the best gag (wonky first combination) done much less amusingly. Non-fans would’ve been bewildered by major characters getting introduced in a brief montage, so I really don’t see much use in this film version other than (a) big-screen experience in Japan, (b) recap and (c) money.

Fun for me as a fan, especially since it’s been a while now since I watched the series, but really kinda pointless.

Gekijouban Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Lagann-Hen
Kanji: Spiral Stone Chapter
English: The Lights in the Sky are Stars
Impressions written 11.12.11

Having been a bit underwhelmed by the first Gurren Lagann movie adaptation, I left it two and a half years before finally getting around to watching the second one. If the second film was, like its predecessor, to be more or less a recap of what I had already seen, it was better to give it some time so that I would have half-forgotten the things I was seeing. Besides, Gurren Lagann didn’t quite change the anime landscape like I had expected it to. Imaishi Hiroyuki’s successor to Gurren Lagann turned out to be Panty and Stocking, which despite its exuberance I didn’t like at all…and now he’s off to form his own studio, Trigger – so we will have to wait and see if that is a success. To see more in the Gurren Lagann vein, one has to go back to the lacklustre Dead Leaves, or possibly be content with that one episode of The Idolm@ster.

So it was with slightly odd expectations I watched Lagann-Hen. Neither the first film nor the Parallel Works had scratched an itch for more from the excellent series, and I actually expected a tiresome rehash. Luckily, I had rather a similar experience to when I saw You Can (Not) Advance after the expectations established by You Are (Not) Alone, and there was really rather more new and awesome stuff to see in this version than anticipated – though not a whole new storyline. While the second half of Gurren Lagann – after its timeskip – is certainly the weaker part, it’s also where proceedings get truly ridiculous, with universes and big bangs being thrown about and characters slipping into fantasy worlds in their own minds. It means a slow start soon gives way to the most absurdly grandiose setpieces in any anime, with lots of shouting about the strength of manly feelings and ‘Who the Hell do you think we are?!’-ing, which is always a good thing.

While the framework is the same, obviously much-truncated, there are little changes – mostly added details to please fans, from the Spiral King getting a funny little CG sequence for when he hacks a system to individual Gurren made for characters like Nia and Yoko – as well as a fun combined Tengen Toppa for Gimmy and Darry, appropriately split left and right. For this fanservice, the early world-building for the timeskip and the interesting internal worlds of the fantasy sequences are skipped over – and, sad to say, we get no adorable humanoid Boota – but that was no loss. This is after all not a film capable of replacing the half-series it retells whatsoever, and thus is only a companion piece – so the more original content we get, and the less reuse of animation from the TV series, the better.

Essentially, this isn’t a film for people who haven’t seen the Gurren Lagann series. It’s no good just watching the two films either. But this one succeeds where the first one stumbled – it offers enough new material to work well as fanservice, and I don’t mean the Gainax Bounce kind, though there’s plenty of that too. It worked especially well for a fan watching it after a few years away from the property, and I don’t regret getting around to watching it at last one bit.

この醜くも美しい世界/ Kono Minikuku mo Utsukushii Sekai / This Ugly and Beautiful World

Both at the time and in retrospect, 2004’s KonoMini seemed to be something very significant in the anime world, even monumental. Gainax heralded it as their 20th anniversary series, alongside Diebuster as a 20th anniversary OVA. It was one of several coproductions with Shaft just as they were really finding their feet – their Tsukiyomi: Moon Phase also came out in the same year and a few months later Pani Poni Dash would truly establish the studio’s style. The character designs and production values were nice and it had a great opening theme from Takahashi Youko, far closer to the opening for Evangelion than, say, the songs she sang for Shakugan no Shana or Pumpkin Scissors.

But sadly, the end result was something unoriginal, uninspired and unmemorable. A typical everyman teenager called Takeru and his friend Ninomiya-kuuun see a strange glow in the woods. Investigating, they find – what else? – a gorgeous anime girl short on clothing but keen to profess her love for our main character. Another girl soon appears for the best friend, claiming Hikari is her sister, so they call her Akari. Drama comes, as ever, from a childhood friend (in this case, a cousin) getting threatened by the new cute girl going after her man – a cliché seen most recently in C³. On the other hand, here her lashing out in her jealously almost causes the end of the world.

The most interesting part of the series soon becomes the comic relief – a weird, predictably giant-breasted alcoholic scientist from America called Jennifer Portman who manages to muscle her way into living with Takeru to study the strange girls from the sky and the well-meaning robot creature Aionios, who Jennifer loves to confound.

KonoMini never really goes anywhere, or makes you care much for its characters, who never really distinguish themselves from stock characters seen in so many other anime yet usually given at least some unique distinctions. The drama is all overwrought and unconvincing, and the nice art ends up repetitive because everything seems to happen in the same places, with the same characters.

Not a terrible anime, but severely lacking anything to make it stand out beyond its infinitely hummable opening theme.

新世紀エヴァンゲリオン/ Shin Seiki Evangerion / Neon Genesis Evangelion

It was close to a decade between me seeing the first two episodes of Eva, when the were the only episodes released on VHS, dubbed, in the high street, and my finally finishing it. This is where my anime experience really began – and for me, it is the big one. This is the anime that kick-started the current movement towards intelligent, eloquent and ambitious anime series that really drew me in. Just as Dragonball influences everything in the popcorn-entertainment side of anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion pushed back the boundaries of what can be achieved in just 26 episodes. And unlike Dragonball, Eva has yet to be bettered.

On the surface, the concept seems banal. Strange creatures are attacking the earth, and the only ones who can save the planet are 14-year-old pilots of Evangelions, which appear to be giant robots. Not the most original prospect of all time. But then we begin to see the references to Christian mythology, and though there is little real significance to the allusions, they give a veneer of intelligence that makes you pay attention. Then the characters begin to develop, and it becomes clear that not only are the adults very much adults, doing their laundry, having affairs and neglecting their children, but the children are children: they bicker, their hormones are out of control, they are confused about their sexuality – the boys fight, the girls menstruate, and Shinji reacts to extreme situations in increasingly inappropriate ways, until one incredibly memorable scene by the side of a hospital bed in one of the movies. People who think that anime is just for kids need to pay attention.

Honestly, the power and inventiveness of the storytelling makes this amongst the few things I consider to have most influenced me in my life – in any medium. I didn’t see it all when I was about Shinji’s age, but I saw plenty of it, and I am not exaggerating when I say that my ideas of visual impact, good storytelling and the way people interact have been shaped by the anime. It is that important to me, and while I know that there are some slow episodes, some bad ideas for angels that should have been left out in favour of more development of the exemplary peripheral characters, at its best, Eva’s untouchable. The angst-&-robots-by-numbers of Soukyuu no Fafner and Gundam just can’t compare.

But then there is an issue of contention in any discussion of Eva – the ending(s). There are three, essentially: first, the final episodes of the series. These left some unsatisfied, so two movies were made, one of which is mostly recap, the other of which basically follows on from there. These provide the ‘saabisu, saabisu’- ie fanservice - that Misato promises throughout the series. There are huge fight scenes, the characters get another chance to shine, we get sex, explosions and a high body count, including casualties amongst the principle cast. And the world ends. However, despite some fantastic scenes, these movies in my opinion don’t provide a more satisfying ending. They spell out what Instrumentality is a little better, but their flaws are their shallowness in delivering a trite climax that the audience wanted, and the empty ambiguity of the ending.

The last episodes didn’t go down well because they look bizarre. Taking place entirely within the minds of the characters, this alternate perspective is represented by different types of art, from line sketches to watercolours, which often look lazy, as though the episodes were never finished. This works far better than the empty symbolism of the movie, and crucially, it coheres. Shinji learns that he doesn’t want all the souls of the world to mingle. He wants restraints, and he wants the freedom to choose what he can be. He imagines his ideal, normal life (bizarrely, yet appropriately, given Shinji’s character, extremely like the beginning of a typical shoujo series), and then realises that he CAN change what is around him, and it is how he perceives things that really matter. This is what the series was building up to, and while the final scene is rather abrupt and a touch silly, it works far better than the explicit, bangs-and-flashes apocalypse of the movies, which only further complicated the story and irritated fans. The original worked.

Brilliantly adult despite its juvenile characters, Eva is a strong and cohesive story, a simple premise spun out into some fascinating character studies, and peopled with some of the best characters found in any medium. One of my top five anime of all time, and certainly the first one I loved, I cannot recommend it enough, ending included.

(originally written 28.6.05. Since then, the new rebuild movies have been announced and released: You Are (Not) Alone and You Can (Not) Advance)

フリクリ/ Furi Kuri / Fooly Cooly / FLCL

So Furi Kuri exists to be weird and silly, and is amongst the strangest anime ever to be made. Because the Japanese love quirky stuff, or perhaps because that rather defines much of their history, it got animated by animation gods Gainax, becoming a high-budget 6-episode series. It’s not just because it’s only a short mini-series that means it won’t take very long to review.

Okay, plot…plot…right, so Naota is a 12-year-old boy who lives in a town with a skyline dominated by a giant iron. Uh-huh. After Naota's brother left Japan to play baseball in America, his girlfriend is on her own, so Naota starts to hang around with her - getting used as a substitute for her affection. Then another girl appears and hits Naota over the head with her bass guitar, making his head an interplanetary transportation device. He gets weird bumps on his forehead, and when he is sexually aroused (which happens quite often, since he’s a pretty twelve-year-old boy, and of course, in anime world, 12-year-old boys get lots of attention from the ladies), huge robotic creatures burst from these distinctly phallic bumps. Riiight. And things get weirder from there, with the girl with the bass manipulating Naota to summon various robots and get absorbed into them until he can call out a godly creature called Atomsk.

The point of this guff is to have a lot of parodies of other anime and movies, plus to just fill every episode with total rubbish. There are countless visual gags: Matrix bullet time, animated manga segments, even a part done in the style of South Park. Why? Because it’s craaazy.

Yeah. Except…for all its expensive animation and extreme zaniness, it’s just not very funny. And that’s that.

(Originally written 14.10.05)

おたくのビデオ/ Otaku no Bideo / Otaku no Video

This 1991 OVA by Gainax, back when they were still highly experimental, is a bit of a mini-landmark amongst ‘otaku’, fans who obsess about a subject to the point of excluding all else. This is because it focused on them - it put the subculture centre-stage. It’s a strange little two-part OVA, alternating a fanciful animated retelling of Gainax’s history – with plenty of artistic licence – with mockumentary interviews with real-life otaku, painting them in the worst possible light: cosplayers are ashamed of their pasts but can’t go to work without a Gundam helmet stashed nearby, porn obsessives masturbate on camera, a gaijin otaku’s dialogue is dubbed over with really over-the-top praise for Japan, and otaku come over as the lowest form of life on the planet, just under the sea slug. It’s the satirical juxtaposition of silly, posturing otaku-takes-over-the-world-and-yet-sticks-with-his-buddies idealism and an exaggeratedly grim reality that makes the concept work, and because it’s so brief, it doesn’t matter that there’s not a whole lot to develop; Otaku no Video doesn’t overstay its welcome.

A few things have changed in 16 years, and not just because VHS is obsolete, posters on an Otaku’s wall would likely be less Galaxy Express 999 and more Gantz, and cosplayers more likely to shun Lupin III to embrace Loveless; there’s also things like the Internet’s presence on an Otaku’s daily life, and increased numbers of otaku meaning increased segregation between subsets (how many gun otaku mix with anime otaku now? Even the crossover between sci-fi and anime otaku grows exponentially less prominent). But nevertheless, the similarities between Otaku no Video and Genshiken are remarkable, down to the unlikely parts (how attractive female members of the club (and the main character) are, for example, how well they pull off cosplay), despite what is almost a generation gap.

Hilarious in concept, quite funny in execution, Otaku no Video is an amusing self-referential vignette, as well as a bit of a vanity project for Gainax (who enjoy pointing out just how good the Daikon IV animation is). It is well worth watching for anyone who identifies with otaku culture, but perhaps too bizarre for the uninitiated.

(originally written 28.04.07)

天元突破グレンラガン/ Heavenly Breakthrough Guren Ragan / Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

Not since One Piece has there been such an exuberant, wilful and just plan enjoyable anime, and indeed, Gurren Lagann is utter brilliance for very similar reasons. Both series thrive on being extremely over-the-top and power through their stories with big speeches and endless ebullient self-confidence, but both can switch gears to become something full of genuine emotion, something that really is epic despite poking fun at itself. This has to be the most fun action-adventure series I've seen beside One Piece, and can even go to places Shounen Jump’s flagship title cannot, because as a 27-episode series, it has a finality that an ongoing piece does not – or at least, has not as of yet.

There are several wrong ways to watch Gurren Lagann. It’s no good watching it as an important sociological comment, because it revels in saying that we should cast aside responsibilities to go and kick arse, and the consequences will work themselves out. It’s not good as a really coherent story, since it has a certain air of making-it-up-as-it-goes-along: this nasty king controls the moon, but oh wait, he’s in league with these anti-spiral guys, but oh no wait, he was actually against them all along and they just happened to be using his machines to their own ends, and this formless astral projection thing sends messengers and incrementally increases the power of its attacks rather than starting with full force because, um…because…it wants everyone to be in despair! Yeah! It’s also not exactly something that you can rely on for good science, seeming to forget evolution is reliant on aptitude for an environment, rather than just being indefinite. But those are all totally the wrong way of looking at the show. You sit back, you watch the show expecting it to just kick arse and go way, way over the top, and you’re rewarded with a magnificent display of silliness that will genuinely move you.

Here’s a story outline. Shimon is a young boy in one of the subjugated colonies of humans left on an earth ruled over by the giant robots of the beastmen. All he does all day is dig, so that the colony can eke out a meagre underground existence, until one day he finds a strange little drill, a drill that just might activate a little fighting machine. And good thing too, because the war between humans and beastmen soon bursts into the colony, a girl in a bikini with a very large rifle fighting against a giant robot. Along with his brother figure Kamina, a man so full of cheesy lines and dramatic poses that none can deny his awesomeness, they defeat the enemy and burst out onto the surface to wage war against their oppressors. But there may be more to the situation than they realised, and those that have long subjugated the humans may just be doing it for their own good.

Most of the early episodes are just plain fun, brainless fights between loudmouthed heroes and snarling baddies, but later on the series takes a brave turn and starts to question what it means to be a leader, when one should make sacrifices for the greater good, and how a society often runs on selfish, minor needs, but that angle is soon sloughed off when a few convenient attacks allow the heroes to reassert themselves as fighters and go rocketing off to kick some butt. But such out-of-hand dismissal works well; we see enough of the change of mood to know that the series could have covered that angle and done it very well, but prefers the adrenaline rushes of immense battles where galaxies and even Big Bangs can be hurled around, and huge personal sacrifices can be made. At its funniest, Gurren Lagann is hilarious, as when Kamina decides to try and make two robots combine for the first time, or when yet another massive robot grows out of the last. At its saddest, it really is moving, with all the self-sacrifices war films can allow. And it’s not afraid to just throw everything into the pot to see what happens. Got a mole-pig mascot? Let’s make it evolve into a cute boy-thing just for the hell of it, then forget about that in the next episode. Got a great voice actor who’s not gonna be used any more? Make him an exposition-spewing computer head! While you’re at it, take a typical anime side-story formula and give it to the gun-toting girl, but make sure you do it in typically awesome fashion. The whole point of Gurren Lagann is that it’s stuff you’ve seen before, done in such an excessive way, with so much style, that it’s totally brilliant.

And the show looks great, too, reaffirming my faith in Gainax after mediocre efforts like Melody of Oblivion and He Is My Master. The art style isn’t to everyone’s tastes, being loose and bouncy, but again, I think of One Piece’s often slapdash art and strange character designs that are made to work by the randomness of the setting. In Gurren Lagann, there’s no problem having talking armadillos or flat-nosed identical twins or a gunnery controller who looks strangely like Charlie Chalk – it all fits into the world, and helps tell the slapdash, hyperactive story, and looks awesome, especially the stylised eye-catches with snatches of the similarly overblown soundtrack (much of which is London rappers going ‘Ro! Ro! Fight da powa!’ while an opera singer screeches). It takes spirals as its theme, mostly because anime fans have a bit of a thing about drills, having appeared in some of the unintentionally silly 80s mecha anime and often being used in fanart for things like Marimite, and so big drills and loosely related things like DNA helixes are placed at the fore, and there’s nothing quite like an unfathomably huge robot attacking a huge stone face with a planet-sized drill!

Gurren Lagann exists for its moments of sheer idiosyncratic greatness, of ludicrously uplifting fights and moments of bittersweet love, of big speeches and bigger drills, and rushes of adrenaline. I’ll definitely file it beside One Piece in terms of fun, humour and all-round awesomeness, and I’m sure I’ll come back to it again and again. It’s not one for newcomers to anime, for thinking this is what all anime is like would be to miss most of the joke – the humour here derives from the fact that it’s so much dafter, so much camper than just about anything around it, which is why it will make fans of the genre laugh at it and love it all the more. If you’re an anime fan who’s even a little bit au fait with the tropes and clichés of mecha anime, you must watch Gurren Lagann.

(originally written 15.10.07. Spellings have since been solidified at least in fandom to 'Simon'/'Row! Row!' Movie impressions here)

マインド・ゲーム/ Mind Game

Before the masterful, childlike Kaiba and the somewhat disturbing Kemonozume, experimental and fast-rising director Yuasa Masaaki made this critically acclaimed but undeniably avant-garde feature.

It is the story of a loser who suffers an extremely humiliating death, only to get a second chance. His rebirth leads to an adventurous escape from the Yakuza with the two girls he just might love, and then in a surrealistic turn and Pinocchio reference, a period of self-contemplation for all three of them with a strange hermit in the belly of a whale. Despite the strangeness of both style and plot, the vast majority of the film flows linearly and makes a kind of internal sense, although the ending is purposely ambiguous, focusing on the idea that tiny changes can bring innumerable possibilities for a person’s life.

There are recognisable stylistic links to Kemonozume, the rather ugly, sketchy drawing style, angular animation and inventive angles in the mise-en-scene. Kaiba is evoked by the pastiche-y clips of a retro anime with the time-turning belt that reinforces the theme of the film, in some of the forms of God and in the strange organic nature of some of the worlds the characters must inhabit, even just for a moment or two, as well as in the often disconcerting editing style. These links are more remarkable given that while Yuasa's later work came from Madhouse, this film was primarily by Studio 4°C – also behind such visually quirky works as Tekkon Kinkreet and Mahou Shoujotai: Arusu – with contributions from Gainax and Production I.G. That the style is similar across studios shows Yuasa’s great influence and command of his productions.

But if anything, Mind Game is weirder than either. Often using photocollage effects, real faces inserted into animated worlds, it constantly draws attention to itself as artistic expression. We see the film changing the media of its art, bursting into a wild and sexualised parody of an animated musical number, slipping between exaggerated parody and heartfelt introspection, and fully utilising the animated medium to express strange things, comedic things, surreal things, always seeming to be aware of Walt Disney’s dictum that animators cannot show the fantastic ‘unless we first know the real.’

But while Disney may have firmly established what is real before using a dream sequence or drunken hallucination to introduce the truly bizarre and formless, Yuasa delights in setting up expectations, and then subverting them, even if those expectations are that there will soon be another shift in style or pace.

What is remarkable, however, is that even though the audience is constantly reminded that the characters are only works of fiction, even though they are presented as shallow, changeable, detached and often duplicitous, even though the situations are weird in the extreme, they are still believable, sympathetic and more human than many in more formulaic and straightforward films. Mind Game’s chief achievement is that while it is incredibly strange, it has heart.

Rebuild of Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance

If the first Rebuild film felt somewhat superfluous, this second part justifies it entirely. For the first time in many years, Evangelion has gone somewhere entirely new and very different.


This is still a film series for fans. I think that anybody who had only seen the two Rebuild films would find the characters underdeveloped and the concept confusing – even more confusing than it is for the initiated, to the extent that it’s probably impossible to quite wrap your head around without knowing some of the parts missed from the original series. There are also little sly references to the things that have been changed, such as one scene giving a nod to Touji’s different fate that would probably just bewilder if you do not know that in the series, he was a pilot.


And I find it something of a shame that Touji doesn’t get the chance to wear the plugsuit, in some ways supplanted by a strange new character called Mari, although I’m not sure her name is mentioned in the film. Mari is a peripheral figure, from a SEELE-affiliated company but not Nerv, who has a weird, knowing confidence that I don’t think quite fits into the Evangelion world. Even though she’s voiced by Sakamoto Maaya and it’s hinted she’s British, I see no reason to like her. She was annoyingly over-confident, detached and really had no development.


Anyway, from where the first film left off, Asuka gets a rather irritating entrance taking care of a new angel (fondly named ‘Clockiel’ by some online) in moments, then moves in with Shinji and Misato and gets her own version of one of the former’s embarrassing early scenes. They don’t have to do a silly synchronized dance, which was always a bit of a nadir for the series despite the adorable outfits, nor the deep dive. The next angel’s attack comes from the original, with the takeover of a new Evangelion, and the actions of the ‘dummy plug’ again deeply disturb Shinji. It is the film’s third angel and its climax that brings the biggest changes, and it almost seems that the very end of the series is coming early – until a long-foreshadowed intervention from a character bearing the Lance of Longinus.


The mixture of old and new elements makes for a moving, beautiful and somewhat disturbing film. Not everything in it worked all that well, and it does suffer from being the middle part of a trilogy, containing story arcs that ultimately have little bearing on the overall story and ending on a cliffhanger, but it sets up the final part well. At the very least, I’m sure that final movie will be devastating and after all, it makes sense for the end to be close, for I anticipate a good half of 3.0’s length to be given to trauma and suffering and weirdness. We shall see!

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!