I pretty much agree with everything that bandini has written regarding dubs vs subs. My own thoughts on the subject are here. I really recommend checking out the subbed version as soon as you can, Shiny Things. Perhaps downloading or streaming a single subbed episode will be sufficient to notice the comparison, if you have the facility. You can see the first episode subbed here, for example.
Transfer is also right. I really, really, really wouldn't want to see you robbed of the experience of hearing Megumi Ogata playing Shinji, or Megumi Hayashibara as Rei, or Fumihiko Tachiki's horrifying Gendo. Ogata's performance is terrifying in places, imagining her in the vocal both as she channels Shinji send shivers down my spine.
Please don't read the rest of this post though, Shiny Things. It will contain massive spoilerage that I wouldn't want you to see.
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...the parts that got in the way for me included the main hidden plots in the story taking too long to unfold, (I only sat up and thought the story was really beginning about halfway through.)
This is something I've noticed about a lot of anime series, particularly those that have a finite duration and an end point from the outset. There's often a very long, slow beginning that features seemingly stock character types, comedy situations, a focus on action and slapstick and a deceptively simple premise. Elements are introduced slowly and once they are all in place the joy is in watching how what seemed to be fairly basic core ingredients are played off against each other, or subverted, or were just downright misdirection.
(Although you could see Ergo Proxy as playing with this convention by treating the supposedly insanely complex procedural storytelling style of other anime shows and using that as it's deceptive starting convention before subverting that into a surprisingly straightforward character piece and then ducking back the other way once it's made you care).
There are distinct advantages of storytelling in this style. You can have some fun with manipulating expectations, stock elements that are behind other shows, references to other texts, straightforward action and comedic elements as a means of drawing in the casual viewer and getting them interested (this is a money-based industry, remember. Many viewers are put off by something that might appear difficult from the outset).
It also sidesteps the law of diminishing returns when done well. Too many shows start well and then lose their way. Evangelion builds throughout. Admittedly how well the early episodes work for you is dependent on how much you enjoy the high school comedy and farcical elements, which are rarely talked up. Eva can be very, very funny.
Then consider the single added detail in the supposedly recap/filler half episode, the detail that justifies such an exercise. We're shown everything that we thought we knew, only with one added detail that throws much of what we've seen up to this point into doubt. Can a moment like that work without a good deal of time and attention paid to understatement with bare bones foreshadowing?
I guess finally there is one hugely important note in Evangelion that justifies all the silliness and set-up of the early episodes: Shinji's alternate reality in the closing minutes of Episode 26. After around three-quarters of an hour of psychodrama played out like a radio play with still images, a deliberately torturous depiction of the character's internal states, suddenly the daft comedy music that we haven't heard for nearly half the series kicks in and we're back in Misato's apartment, only everything is different. This is arguably the most powerful few minutes of the entire of Evangelion canon, a sequence which works on multiple levels but would be meaningless and without any emotional weight without so much energy and effort paid to riffing on the classic high school comedy tropes in the first half of the show. I remember the first time I saw it and I still have the same reaction now after countless rewatches, it makes me both laugh and cry at the same time, puts me right inside Shinji's head as it shows the world not only as he wishes it was for himself but also for everyone he's come to love. Not many people focus on Shinji's compassion but it's here in spades. Seeing him recreate Rei as a happy, normal high school girl, or how he has depicts Gendo's previously deliberately cruel detachment turn into that of a typically emotionally withdrawn but fundamentally happy father and husband under gentle berating from Yui... it's one of the finest moments of television I've ever witnessed, and it would be nothing without such a long, slow set up.
and the Angels. Nearly every one of the Angels seemed too faceless, void of character, and lasted such a short time for me to really get interested.
The Angels are supposed to feel alien, unfathomable, as George Mastermind would write, "The bits you left on the outside when you designed the box called 'you'." They are literally the *other us,* humanity turned at an angle that makes it alien and unfamiliar. And they're also devices, Hideaki Anno's storytelling style for both Evangelion and Gunbuster involves him using sci-fi trappings to create psychological death traps for his principle characters that both shatter and illuminate them. Crucially they are all seemingly without an access point to easy understanding, and so much of this story's themes rely on how much you can get close a *person* and understand them. At the end of End of Evangelion I would argue that we're left with a Shinji and Asuka who are as alien to the viewer as any of these beings.
The utter coldness of Gendo Ikari towards his own son really frustrated me too.
I am firmly convinced that Gendo's actions towards Shinji are part of a systematic plan on the part of Gendo and Yui to destroy their son's personality from birth. During the Red Earth Purification Ceremony in End of Evangelion we are told that Complementation will happen through the destruction of the ego of Eva 1's pilot. Yui and Gendo deliberately place Shinji at the scene of the "accident" that wipes Yui from the face of the world in order to traumatise their son, to create a vast unconscious earthquake in his personality that will later enable him to form such an explosive and intimate Freudian bond with Yui when she returns to him in the form of Eva 1. We know that the incident in which Yui was physically obliterated and spiritually/psychologically encoded into the Eva was not accidental because in End of Evangelion we are told that Yui is "She who chose to remain in the Eva." Shinji is capable of such a profound bond because he was created to have that bond: he is the product of deliberate parenting. The repressed memory of the incident in which the child loses his mother is never depicted in the series because Anno has to frame it as that-which-is-too-horrific-to-show, it is the seed planted by both parents and nurtured by Gendo's systematic abuse and neglect that allows Shinji to be the catalyst that is amplified on the Tree of Life circuit in End of Evangelion. As his ego - or AT field - collapses it triggers the collapse of all egos and AT fields into oneness.
That he is able to pull himself back into coherence and rejects complementation, that which his parents designed him for, is Shinji's final "triumph." And true to Anno's cruel form you could argue, "Fat lot of good it does him."
I don't know...maybe it was that friction between the good guys and the bad guys that I couldn't find very much, because the bad guys rarely had time onscreen, or their own voice.
As DN says, there are no good or bad guys in Eva. Just a huge cast, some alien, some familiar, some unfathomable, some too close to home, all competing for the same goal whether they know it or not through whatever methods are available to them.
I thought that by the end it had been too involved with some of the characters emotional problems, to the point of becoming repetitive, and by doing that it sacrificed the strength of a lot of the story going on around them.
It's funny, but it's that very repetition that makes Evangelion so peculiarly psychologically accurate, particularly in the final two episodes. Anno is extraordinarily skillful at depicting depression in all its prison of negative self-talk and self-defeating circuitous logic. The more I consider the characters in Eva the more I think it is other texts that have it wrong in their depiction of a way out, a means of breaking the cycles of abuse and self loathing, addictive and compulsive patterns of behaviour, destructive relationships. Virtually everyone I know has remained roughly the same in their core beliefs and behaviours no matter how many years I've known them, always in similar patterns and cycles.
I know many people whose biggest criticism of Evangelion is Shinji, who they dismiss as "whiney." But last time I saw Eva in its entirety I was struck by his bravery, by how little he moaned about his situation. Yes, he's depressed, without drive, apologises for himself, seems to have no anima or spark... as I say above, that's what his parents created him to be. Given his impossible situation he actually hardly moans at all.
And then it struck me. The people who dismiss Shinji as "whiny" were without exception the whiniest people I know. I became convinced hating Shinji for it was an easier route for them than recognising it in themselves. And I came to see the repetitive, cyclical psychodramas and relationships of the Evangelion ensemble almost everywhere I looked to the point at which finding exceptions was the rare event. Everyone is dysfunctional and hurting in some way.
I think it's one of Evangelion's greatest strengths that it makes us question what kind of narratives of character we would like to encounter. Many of us love narratives of redemption, and perhaps the greatest riff that Anno plays on Judeo-Christian themes - and perversely the one that almost always goes unnoticed in critiques of the show that dismiss these elements as superficial trappings - is that it denies us our conventional redemption narrative. Shinji himself rejects Complementation (read: Heaven) as an unrealistic fantasy, a world of absence and finality in which he can never truly have what he wants, which is to work out his pain in relationships and seek loving intimacy. His "redemption" involves him choosing pain and confusion and a life of struggling in the dark, of never being sure. It's a moment of triumph that runs utterly counter to the narratives that most people are comfortable telling themselves, indeed that they tell themselves in order to comfort themselves.
The repetition of the character's internal conflicts and relationships is crucial to this theme, and it's such a challenging message that it's no wonder this series provokes such powerful dislike in some quarters.
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You can read again now, Shiny Things. |
