Three Faces of Eva

Editors' Note

Two thousand eight saw the release of Evangelion: 1.01, Hideaki Anno's opening story arc in his remake of Neon Genesis Evangelion. The original series, first released in 1995, has become a major force in anime for directors, who needed to deal with the implicit challenges posed by Eva, and for fans, for whom it provided an endlessly fascinating opportunity for exegesis and interpretation. Events like the new Eva are not common, and so, wanting to provide different opinions about Anno's new work, we asked three reviewers to comment. Was it worth it to remake a classic, and what, if anything, is genuinely new about Eva 1.01? Here are their reviews.

• Cruel Angels? Cruel Fathers!
• Paul M. Malone (bio)

Forty-nine minutes into You Are (Not) Alone—exactly at the film's midpoint—Fuyutsuki Kōzō, aide to NERV commander Ikari Gendō, remarks that Ikari's son Shinji, troubled pilot of the enormous cyborg weapon known as the Evangelion or EVA, will eventually come to behave as expected. Ikari replies that it is now time to bring Shinji closer to his fellow pilot Ayanami Rei in accordance with a long-standing plan. Fuyutsuki then muses that they are working from a fourteen-year-old scenario and observes that they and their mission depend on children: "It's beyond cruel" ("Kakoku sugiru na"). Ikari remains impassive.

No such scene takes place in the 1995 television series Neon Genesis Evangelion (Shinseiki Evangerion), which provides the basis of the new film. In addition to its functions as social critique and philosophical exercise (and its pretentiousness in both respects), the original Evangelion was always also a parodic reversal of mecha stories wherein saintly inventor-fathers create giant robots to be piloted against evil by dutiful sons—the iconic pattern of Yokoyama Mitsuteru's Tetsujin 28-go (1956–66, Gigantor) and Giant Robo (1967–68).¹ Ikari Shinji is Evangelion's Jungian archetypal hero, raised in isolation after the early loss of his mother and recalled to the center of events in a moment of crisis, where his powers (here, to control his EVA even without training) become evident. Unlike many of his precursors, however, Shinji is already traumatized and embittered by loss; he has little taste for heroics or desire to accommodate his father. As for Ikari Gendō, his far-from-saintly behavior continually poses the question of whether a father obsessed with engineering and deploying macabre and powerful weapons—even if for the greater good—is deserving of filial piety.

Not much of this seems to have changed since 1995. Although the animation has been beautifully upgraded, expanded to widescreen, and augmented by well-integrated CGI (and the Shinseiki has been dropped, with the "new century" now almost a decade old), much of Evangelion: 1.01 appears deceptively familiar despite the early appearance of several well-known elements and hints at greater novelty in the three sequels to come. This may still be Evangelion, but here the critique moves beyond parody, and, for a Western viewer at least, this is Evangelion post-9/11, where the "war on (absolute) terror" waged against the monstrous Angels is in itself more absolutely terrifying and merciless than ever, and Shinji's training threatens at one point to turn him into a mechanized zombie without preparing him for actual combat.

I do not mean to imply, however, that Evangelion has been "rebuilt" with this specific political commentary in mind; rather, given the series' setting of institutionalized paranoia, with its attacks without warning, ongoing alerts, dissembling to the public, and supposedly cooperative national and international agencies competing and following their own, often extremely personal, agendas, it seems that history has caught up with Evangelion. Much of what constituted the show's science fiction atmosphere in 1995 has become, particularly in the first few years after 2001, the new normal.

And Evangelion has become more "normal," and less avant-garde, in its turn: the original series' convoluted narrative structures and multilayered visuals have been simplified, while...