well...

look who decided to pop his head up after quietly lurking for a bajillion years...

Carl Horn wrote:I'm not sure about "main basis," but it would have been impossible for Eva-- a show about a violent, religious-toned apocalypse planned by a power-hungry cabal--not to be viewed by many in the Japanese audience in light of Aum Shinri Kyo. Their sarin gas attack happened while the TV show was in early production, and the media frenzy had by no means died down when Eva premiered; Katsuhiro Otomo said in November of 1995 that by that point, the media seemed crazier even than the cult itself.

At Gainax's summer convention that year, the producer of Eva satirically wore a type of robe associated with Aum to demonstrate an "automatic anime plot generator," which perhaps helped to give rise to later rumors that Gainax themselves were associated with Aum. They weren't the only people in the anime industry this happened to; Mamoru Oshii has said that the police came to interview him after the subway attacks based on the gas attack depicted in his 1993 film Patlabor 2.

Nice explanation Carl, that is the sort of answer I can understand.

Which sort of means that (as usual) Greenfield gleamed some sort of gem of knowledge and then screwed up the explanation.

From an interview with Azuma Hiroki.

Interview wrote:Krystian Woznicki: So Anno changed the original plot of the story when he
saw the news about the invasion of Aum's hide out by the police. Did he
change it because it was too close to reality?

Azuma Hiroki: Yes, he said so.

KW: But did why he change it? What is the problem with >>Evangelion<<
being so close to the Aum case?

AH: Anno thought that the original scenario will not be suitable for
broadcasting.

The interview goes into much further depth.

Hunter21 wrote:

Carl Horn wrote:I'm not sure about "main basis," but it would have been impossible for Eva-- a show about a violent, religious-toned apocalypse planned by a power-hungry cabal--not to be viewed by many in the Japanese audience in light of Aum Shinri Kyo. Their sarin gas attack happened while the TV show was in early production, and the media frenzy had by no means died down when Eva premiered; Katsuhiro Otomo said in November of 1995 that by that point, the media seemed crazier even than the cult itself.

At Gainax's summer convention that year, the producer of Eva satirically wore a type of robe associated with Aum to demonstrate an "automatic anime plot generator," which perhaps helped to give rise to later rumors that Gainax themselves were associated with Aum. They weren't the only people in the anime industry this happened to; Mamoru Oshii has said that the police came to interview him after the subway attacks based on the gas attack depicted in his 1993 film Patlabor 2.

Nice explanation Carl, that is the sort of answer I can understand.

Which sort of means that (as usual) Greenfield gleamed some sort of gem of knowledge and then screwed up the explanation.

Not necessarily. It's also possible that Aum in fact was a main basis for Evangelion. The cult was was fairly infamous even before their implication in the March 1995 attack. I don't know of any assertions or evidence to support going as far as that, but I'm hardly omniscient when it comes to Eva, a series about which many, many different things have been said, least of all by Anno.

It's not at all unreasonable to think that Matt Greenfield knows things about the series' production history that I don't; as a matter of fact, I'm quite sure that he does. ADV announced the rights to Eva on February 16, 1996; which was even before the series had ended its original run on TV Tokyo. The dub was made during the period between the TV show and the movies, during which time there was a tremendous amount of communication back and forth between ADV, Gainax, and King Records. Eva was the number one topic of conversation in the industry then, and there was plenty of opportunity to hear things.

Again, I have no personal reason to believe Aum Shinri Kyo was a primary inspiration for Evangelion, but in as much as Anno has described Eva as a show directed at contemporary Japan, it's not an outlandish notion. Aum being an inspiration wouldn't mean it's pro-Aum, but an allegorical commentary using the substitution cypher of Western, rather than Aum's Buddhist occultism. If one favors that interpretation, Hiroyuki Yamaga (the producer of Eva, and one of Anno's best friends)'s remarks at FanimeCon '98 are interesting; when asked why Eva used Judeo-Christian symbolism, he said, "I don’t know exactly why. I suspect that Mr. Anno may have read some book about it, and there were some thoughts he wanted to express on it. I personally am glad that, rather than Christianity, he didn’t express some obscure Buddhist theme, because then it would have been linked more with Aum Shinri Kyo."