Neon Genesis Evangelion Highly recommended

Publisher
ADV
Director
Hideaki Anno
Production
GAINAX, NAS, TV Tokyo
Country of origin
Japan
Format
Series
Running time
26 episodes
Year
1995

Neon Genesis Evangalion: Is it *Really* Worth Your Time?

By Sapphira
20th Jun 04

If you have not seen the series, there will be minor spoilers. And be warned, this does not praise the series and rave about how great Rei Ayanami and Shinji Akari are. If you don't like it, and you read it anyway, it is your own fault; not mine.

Even when I was in the anime scene, I rarely heard of the anime Neon Genesis Evangalion and never really did until I met my current boyfriend, He introduced me to the series and a while before Spring Break, he lent me the series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Uninterested, I left the series on a shelf and eventually, to pass time during Spring Break, I gave a chance and watched the series.

I believe everyone may enjoy the series partially at first. It certainly perked my curiosity to see what happen. By the middle of the second episode, I cringed and switched the language from Japanese to English. The reason for that was it made no sense to me to follow what they were saying, even with the subtitles on.

Fine, I watch the first two episodes in English, which made a little more sense (but not much.) To say the least, the series is f**ked up. It starts off with the protagonist, Shinji who is being used a pawn for his father is starting the Third Impact so he could see his dead wife again. That was my assumption, anyway. There is absolutely no explanation for what NERV is trying to accomplish. Yes, I have seen both movies, and they are crap. Throughout the series, Shinji serves as a whiny angsty little twit who causes the deaths of everyone on Earth.

The secondary characters are equally as messed up. As mentioned, Shinji's father, Gendou Akari is using his son to become some form of god to see his wife, Yui Akari again.
Misato Katsuragi, who serves as Shinji's guardian; often has flashbacks of seeing her father die during the Second Impact. She has plenty of problems asides from that.
Ritsuko Akagi, who is a brilliant technician for NERV and seems to be the most normal character of the series has issues with her own mother, who was a lover of Gendou Akari, also has had an affair with him.
Rei Ayanami, perhaps the favourite character in the series, especially to otaku. She was created in an experiment that fused DNA from Yui Akari and apparently the angel Lilith. She shows little or no emotion and I don't believe she has more than twenty lines in the whole series. But that's a new issue in its own.
Asuka Langley Soryuu, a girl originally from Japan, but moved to Germany to live with her grandparents after her insane mother committed suicide.

However, one cannot ignore the better aspects of the anime such as the brilliant animation from GAINAX. The music soundtrack is my favourite aspect, it heightens the drama that the series was set to represent.

Granted, the series does have its good episodes that did make me think. However, the series soon goes from intriguing to what the fuck!? Perhaps too quickly. The director, Hideaki Anno created a plot with too many questions and as the series goes on, the questions begin to bottle up. And there are the last two episodes which were supposed to wrap the series up. Instead, we get bored to death with long monologues and still frames with crappy sketches. Let's not forget the last episode where there is an alternate reality for NO APPARENT REASON.
Hideaki Anno procrastinated the series and the last two episodes were probably made up at two o'clock in the morning, or so it seemed. This apparently upset the fans, so Anno creates two separate movies; Death and Rebirth. The former was just a bunch of recapping. Hey, you could have skipped the whole damn series and just have watched the two movies. The questions would have still been imposed and none of them were answered.
Then, finally, in Rebirth, the questions were answered. But in my opinion, everything was half-assed that consisted of the fanservice that was promised to you in the trailers. Oh, and pretty much everyone in the series, or world for that matter, dies. The end.

Rating:

3/10: The soundtrack and the two characters Misato and Asuka get a 10 from me for believability. The rest is medicore at best.

Any response can be e-mailed to me. Oh, and thank you for reading.

-- Sapphira 20th Jun 04

Neon Genesis Evangelion Images