Because nothing stirs up debate like the thought of yet more Evangelion endings to choose between…
I know what you're thinking. What the fuck?
Here's what little I know. As of August last year Hideaki Anno started advertising for animators for his new studio, named Khara. A month later the news about the Rebuild came out in Newtype Magazine, stating that four new Evangelion movies were in the works that would serve as a remake of the entire story. Sourced from Wikipedia:
In September 2006, the October edition of the Japanese anime magazine Newtype reported that the new cinema series "Rebuild of Evangelion" will be released in the summer 2007. [1] On September 9, 2006, GAINAX's official website confirmed that "Rebuild of Evangelion" will consist of four movies. The first three movies will be an alternate retelling of the TV series (including many new scenes, settings, backgrounds, characters), and the fourth movie will be a completely new conclusion to the story. Hideaki Anno will write the scenario for the first movie and will be the general director and manager for the entire project. Kazuya Tsurumaki will direct the movies while Yoshiyuki Sadamoto will provide character designs and Ikuto Yamashita will provide mechanical designs. Shinji Higuchi will provide storyboards for the first movie. It is reported that the first film will launch in September 1st, 2007, the second in January 2008, and the two final movies will be shown together in Summer 2008. [2]
According to an article in the February 2007 issue of Newtype USA, The first movie will end with Operation Yashima, an incident that takes place during Episode 6 of the original Evangelion TV series. The article also states that a brand new character to the Evangelion universe will be introduced in the second installment and that some of the differences between the original series and the new movies will take advantage of 3D CG technology not available when the series was produced back in 1995. Other differences will include new NERV and SEELE emblems (a partially eaten apple and an apple with a serpent, respectively) and slight retoolings of the uniforms and possibly the Evangelions themselves.
Click the link for further information from Novastorm.
Reading the new issue of Newtype, it seems that the entire creative staff of the original series and movie is back on board. Many of these are main creators in Gainax, so we can be sure that even if this is nominally a Khara release it will be share much of the spirit of everyone's favourite anime studio.
The character of Kaworu Nagisa is said to feature much more heavily and is likely to be introduced in the first movie, in a manner that "will turn heads." There are rumours that Rei Ayanami will be considerably different from how she was depicted in the original. And there are also whispers about a brand new character – identity as yet unknown – who may appear in the second movie.
There are apparently two posters that hint as to the tone of the series. Quoting from producer Toshimichi Otsuki in the Newtype article, "The first is by character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, who also did the TV series, and it makes it look like a school drama. In fact it's so cheerful and campus-y it's hard to believe it's really Eva! All of Shinji's classmates are there, and you could say it represents the central theme of the new series. The other poster uses live-action sci-fi shows as a visual motif. It was done by Makoto Kamiya, a special effects director who's worked on films like Bokuku no Aegis and Sinking of Japan. The art looks very realistic, but it feels like something out of a dream – the Unit 01 is standing tall amid a retro cityscape that looks like Japan sometime around 1970, when the World's Fair was held in Osaka."
He has this to say regarding the visuals: "They'll be pretty crazy. Anno is completely absorbed in the project. We're taking full advantage of 3D CG technology that wasn't available twelve years ago. The amount of visual information in each frame will be enormous. Our staff members are almost overwhelmed. You might have to watch the climax of the first instalment three or more times to catch all of it… They most certainly are not mere scaled up versions of the TV series. Anno already had many of the basic ideas and images in mind twelve years ago."
There's also this weirdness from the latest Anime Ain't it Cool article: AnimeNation reports that according to Sponichi Annex, executive director Hideaki Anno has announced that the first of four new anime movies, planned to retell the story of Evangelion, is schedule to premiere in Japanese theatres on September 1, 2007. In an odd footnote, two of the katakana characters in the Japanese spelling of "Evangelion" will be changed, resulting in "Ivangelion" becoming "Wevangeliwon."
Now, what to make of all this? I've had about four or five months to come to terms with the notion that there will be an alternate version of the entirety of Evangelion, and… I'm rather excited. For a number of reasons.
Firstly, it will beat the perennially in production hell Live Action Evangelion Hollywood movie to the punch. That project was supposed to have an a-list director attached by the end of last year, but there's still been no official word. I think that there's a certain… rightness that the original creator will have the first say in a movie adaptation of his source material. Perhaps this is one of the reasons Anno is doing this in the first place, to set his stamp upon his own creation before the moneymen get hold of it. It may also be an exercise in assisting the live-action adaptation process, doing it how it should be done. Let's face it, Eva is a nightmare to adapt. Quite apart from the problematic content it's terminally episodic with very passive protagonists who mainly wait around for the action to come to them.
Secondly, we've just seen in a Gainax produced sequel to one of their earlier works in the form of the stupendous Gunbuster II, over which Anno had final say. I never thought a series could come close to the first Gunbuster and having seen both series back to back a couple of times now I'm floored by what they accomplished in the sequel, so much so that taken together they're now my favourite TV shows. These creators have a track record of surpassing themselves.
Thirdly, it sounds a lot like they're leaving in the goofy high-school elements. This is the type of material that most writers would edit out as soon as they got their hands on the material. God knows, we might even get Pen Pen. There's a train of thought that leaves the silly stuff out of *serious works of art* – see the adaptation of Ghost in the Shell for a deeply daft-in-places manga that was given a sensible makeover to appeal to a Western audience as an attempt to duplicate Akira's success. Thankfully we should have humour in the new versions, perhaps more so than in the original, and I'm glad that it might not take itself altogether seriously.
Fourthly, and again referencing Ghost in the Shell, there's a lot more you can do with CG in anime than just create backdrops and depict technology. We know that a lot of excellent Gainax creators are involved, and so I'm thinking that the reference points for how this will work in practise are more likely to be FLCL and Gunbuster II, works in which it was integrated much more seamlessly into traditional hand drawn animation.
And finally, Anno is now a happy man from all accounts. He was enormously depressed when he made Evangelion, and it shows. In fact, when you take the original two alternate endings into account they both contain evidence to show that he was pretty reactionary regarding his creation, with a lot of anger and what seems to be deliberate perversity/rebellion. Here we may have a chance to see an ending without these difficulties, an ending that while not necessarily better will certainly be a lot less… bitter.
So that's about the extent of my speculation and information so far. Has anyone else heard anything? How do people feel about this?
Images aren't necessarily pre-production or in-production work from the Rebuild itself, but ones that I've found online that seem official and don't relate to any Eva material already seen. |
