Hoo boy. It’s time to talk a big one. This one franchise that has cast its shadow over Japan and beyond for the last twenty-five years, with more tomes of essays and analysis probably penned over this than any other animated series. With opinions ranging all over the spectrum, with designs and archetypes inscribed into anime in the east and films in the west, I’ve decided to narrow today’s focus onto what was for a time the end of Neon Genesis Evangelion.
The story behind Evangelion is an interesting one unto itself—it’s the tale of one Hideaki Anno, who by chance and perseverance hit the leagues of animation direction at a young age, bought aboard by none other than legend Hayao Miyazaki himself. Ending with up with the Studio Gainax, Anno formulated a project for his own take on an anime favorite—the giant robot genre, and it ended up being a take influenced by both contemporary Japanese cultural evolution and his own personal struggles.
And what did NGE end up being about? To put things as simply as possible, it’s set in the far future of 2015, where years after a devastating cataclysm, the United Nations is at war with an inscrutable line of invading monsters known as Angels, whose appearance vary from the bestial to the bizarre. A teenager by the name of Shinji is summoned by his father to the paramilitary corps known as Nerv, located in an underground city designated as Tokyo-3, to pilot one of the titanic mechas known as Eva Units (which, as we find out, are rather more than meets the eye). Shinji ends up backed up by a variety of other characters like the hotheaded Asuka…and being a teenage boy given access to immeasurably powerful machinery while meeting an assortment of girls…he…erm, naturally finds this all intolerable.
Okay, in all seriousness, there’s a lot more to it than that, and the series showcases both massive battles between robots and monsters alongside psychological introspections of its characters, alongside gratuitous visual references to Christianity that may or may not mean something beyond the superficial. Some people find it all profound, some pretentious, but there’s no doubt that there was something put into NGE, and that leaves no shortage of things to talk about.
Perhaps that’s part of the reason that the franchise, even now, casts an omnipresent shadow over Japanese pop culture the same way Marvel or Star Wars does now in the west—with public displays, merchandise aplenty, and spinoffs galore. While being about characters going through severe personal struggles and neuroses. But then I'll bet some probably just watched it for the giant robots, with all that influencing films like Pacific Rim and more.
My own thoughts on it all are somewhat mixed, often varying on my mood to be honest—but I won’t deny the appeal it has on several levels, and that brings us to the multi-part episodes turned movie End of Evangelion, which, like with everything about this series, has a story unto itself. The last two episodes of the show were rather abstract pieces, forced as a result of an overextended budget, but for a fanbase that by now was eating everything up, proved shall we say, less than welcomed. It got so bad that Anno faced outright suicidal feelings—let it not be said that fan toxicity is something born purely of our current age. Still, he ended up working on this film to serve as an alternate and perhaps definitive ending—and there’s no question that he bought his creation to conclusion in the most all-out creatively unrestrained way possible.
That feeling of irrevocable finality is present from the very beginning—where sinister cabal Seelee has the Japanese military launch an all-out assault on Nerv, with side-characters we’ve met now struggling for their lives while a desperate effort is made to find a despondent Shinji and get him to his Eva. Those scenes of a desperate, stubborn, yet gradually failing struggle in the hero’s base are genuinely intense, with some pretty gut-wrenching moments as faces minor and major fall to the onslaught.
And in the midst of it all, we have machinations come to play for none other than the end of the world itself. There’s a lot of dense references and names all coming very quickly, involving angels and seed of Lilith and maybe Adam and then the spear of Longuinius and all kinds of biblical names that in this context mean something very different piled on right in the middle of all-out action—and that can feel a little exhausting at times.
But in short order we have both the strengths and weaknesses of Evangelion on display. There’s a lot of words and high-minded if hurried concepts thrust out, but there’s also genuinely impactful moments—a standout for me being the final fate of Shinji’s overseeing father Genji, who through the series has presented himself as an ice-cold mastermind figure. Here, at his final moments, he calmly admits his self-loathing after accepting that what little chance he had to connect with his old love was futile—and it’s that kind of thing, besides the titans fighting and cataclysmic destruction, that really stick.
And, above all else, the imagery of Evangelion is something you won’t forget. There are some very visceral moments on display here, with humans and machines going through the wringer—and, despite everyone’s efforts, it all boils down to the inevitability of the change to come. That kind of absolute finality is something I respect—many a series and franchise is set up to be drawn out potentially forever, but right here, right now, we’re treated to exactly what the title promises, no ifs or buts. And it’s done in a way that doesn’t shy from a scale befitting all the references to scriptural things.
That’s before we get into those last bizarre postmodernist final segments where the viewership is essentially addressed, in something that feels like Lynch dropping his meds—and it’s here that Anno finally lets everything out regarding Evangelion’s audience, its reaction, and everything in between. Like I said, mixed my feelings might be on the result, but I won’t deny all the personal emotion going into this, and that, always above all, I will respect.
Hence why this piece for me is a good a representative as any for NGE as a whole—sometimes reaching to encompass every profound-sounding thing it possibly can with all the mixed results you’ll get from that, but at the end of it, it’s all the more focused, personal expressions that ultimately matter, and those do come through here, both for characters and for creator. Some might be overwhelmed by all the words and pictures thrust forward, but it’s something that makes sure it sticks with you.
Well. Like I said, it’s not like there’s little to talk about with this series. But that wraps up this little retrospective, with more nattering on the way…
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