Postby Axx°N N. » Tue Mar 19, 2024 3:48 am
Time for the appreciation post!
I attribute a lot of the elements I've come to enjoy to a thorough dive into the dialogue. A pretty massive takeaway I've come to is that the official subtitle translation is sorely lacking, specifically in terms of retaining the full sense of the stylization, as a multi-faceted blizzard of the esoteric. I had previously thought of Shin as being a huge departure in this somewhat unheralded (but long-standing) part of Evangelion, its stylistic use of enigmatic language. This is pretty well known among the Japanese fandom, as it's discussed by staff in pamphlets and such, and it's reflected by how, on certain home video releases, the aesthetic is a busy collage of esoteric kanji. What I didn't know, because I hadn't looked into it too deeply, is that this element is actually retained in Shin, especially in Instrumentality.
Before I knew this, the overt and didactic nature of the Instrumentality scenes crushed me. It was all wrong. And to be honest, I still don't quite enjoy how final (how diagnosed and resolved) these characters are made, and much prefer the open-ended nature of their past iterations. However, I now appreciate the fact that structurally, the dialogue in these scenes is trying to thread a mass of almost impossible needles; the language here has a lot of double-meanings and is attempting to consolidate a lot of themes in ways far more abstract and open-ended than the translation can sustain. Only Kaworu's segment maintains some headscratchers in English, but there's still some loss there too. I guess a better alternative would be impossible without lots of pause-and-read footnotes, because the style leans into the untranslatable on purpose ... but I can't help but feel let down by the translation. Forgive me if this is all vague (although I guess that's fitting!) so here's an example. Although figurative language peppers the character-specific Instrumentality scenes and goes a long way in adding nuance, I'll use a bit of lore to demonstrate; when Gendo shows Shinji Eva Imaginary, a reference to a Buddhist concept (genze, or gense) is entirely omitted in English. It's not totally consequential, the same information is conveyed about Eva Imaginary's quantum nature ... but the flavor of language becomes more simplistic. I wonder how many viewers, if asked "did you get that Sakura was supposed to be lapsing into an accent?" would respond (if their response isn't "who's Sakura?") with "what?"
Taking this language barrier discovery in stride, I made a lot of slow and thorough dives. I surfaced from the Gendo Instrumentality scene, for instance, finally getting why it's many people's favorite element. Up until now I've been outright flummoxed at that fact. (I guess I still am, seeing as I had to do so much work to get to that point!) I previously thought it failed to capture a kind of pathology, perhaps as a result of me focusing too much on the potential Anno parallels; it didn't feel like a believable reclusive. But it is a decent character study. When you factor in the not unimportant way the scene is framed, it begins with the perspective painting detail of his lack of parental love, and that kind of unlocked the rest of his behaviors for me. And the other framing, the other plot elements overlapping and literally intruding on the scene, are relevant and resonate: Misato interrupts and breaks through the eye, and Misato isn't just acting as an example of a parent coming through, but is more exactly redeeming herself after her own failures that parallel Gendo's. And of course, the scene begins with a connection made between Shinji and Gendo through the music player. The overlap of characters here is interesting and works for me--there's a cycle of neglect, aversion, and redemption.
Theme coherence, especially its marriage to the visual choices, leapt out at me in many places. There are still many choices (particularly on the visual end) that guarantee I find it a weaker version than NGE & EoE, which is not to say that these are visually impaired films--for every touch-up or new idea I find way overboard (I still can't find place in my heart for Wunder's design, or the weightlessness of its movement), there's a different choice I find a welcome and fresh departure, some even that make it impossible not to let your guard down and marvel. Putting aside my preferences for traditional animation over digital, reviewing the related supplements and making-ofs emphasizes how dedicated this project was on a technical fascination level. Although I feel it often lacking in pathos as it connects to character drama, as every wide-shot of CGI modelling is less dramaturgy occurring, the sheer abundance of mechanical structures and desolation is basically its own theme and contributes (in its way) to the narrative. A kind of under-appreciated amount of work was put into, for instance, modelling construction equipment, pylons, buildings & c. starting all the way back in Jo. I think I was blind or hesitant to embrace this merely because it doesn't exist to the same degree in the original material. But even a cursory glance at production materials makes it obvious; covers of mooks a field of transistors, promo posters of train tracks and the innards of the core-ized Eiffel Tower. Comparing redone versions of action scenes in Jo and Ha, Tokyo-3 especially feels spatially dynamic and alive.
When viewed as a web of relations across entries, I saw a lot of my prior hang-ups dissolve. The method for distilling material across Jo and Ha is clever when you look at each scene in terms of how much load-bearing it accomplishes; many scenes are functioning to consolidate several plot threads at once. The best example would be combining Asuka's mind-infiltration with her replacement of Toji, seguing into a different context for Shinji's lashing out. When you view it as an experiment in narrative compression, I think it's fairly successful and, although it suffers from the expected pitfalls inherent (where compression ceases and immediately becomes over-saturation), it at least makes for an interesting viewing experience, to be actively picking apart the layers in each scene's intent. A long-standing problem I have with the time-skip, for instance, involves my feeling like a grounded setting was discarded, replaced with one free of prior suffered-for (as in, runtime spent on the set-up of) boundaries and limitations, and the sense that everything happening post-skip is more or less by whim ... it's good for drama to feel like anything can happen, but it's a needle to thread; there's a reason why, inversely, suspension of disbelief is hard-earned. And yet, I think I can now appreciate that there is in fact limitation, perhaps even an overwhelming and suffocating one--it's just it has less to do less with literal plot or setting and moreso how the narrative responds to and reconciles its emotional elements.
I was afraid Q wouldn't hold up over rewatches, but I find it working just as well, if not better; it was always the invigorating feeling of being in a barrage of inscrutable elements and ... it still is! While I think Shin suffers a bit from having to make so much time for so many obligations, it's almost like Q was structured on what you could make that would be most exciting by deliberately sweeping that into a corner for later.
Most surprisingly, I no longer feel like the existence of the post-timeskip set-up (Village-3, Wunder, Neo-Nerv) isn't justified enough or "lived-in" enough, because I think much of the dramatic load-bearing was already accomplished in prior entries and these places, although radically different, are just further along an already-established set of trajectories. So much of Jo is spent on the tactile reality of the surroundings, of Tokyo-3 and Nerv environments, that even in Ha I don't think a radical setting change is unjustified; the immersion of the setting is deliberate across many, many lingering shots, not to mention very immersive sound design.
I've often complained about no glimpses at how Wille functions behind the scenes--but, you know, the extended procedural of the last half-hour of Jo renders that redundant enough. The adherence to limitations is basically the crux of Jo, culminating in the classic Operation Yashima scenes; so much tech-jargon steeped in real-world technologies ... so that, if you close your eyes and open them again and just go along with the influx of unexplained new tech on top of new tech, the use of the Eiffel Tower as spear in tandem with rotary appendages seems like a fitting if not down-to-Earth culmination.
There's tons of nifty connections the more you look. There's a pointed shot of some farmers in Jo. The scene at Yui's grave early in Ha has an interesting bit of dialogue that connects with events in Thrice regarding Yui resting within Shinji; "You keep what's important inside of you." Also later in Ha, during Kaji's revelation to Shinji about Misato's past (and setting up much of the parallel between Shinji & Misato's characters), I couldn't help but notice that Misato's stated conflict, survivor's guilt, later also parallels with Shinji; Shinji ends up, like Misato, saved by his father. The subsequent line is interesting with this in mind: "You have to accept their loss and pick up where they left off," and it makes one consider Shinji's character outcome as a redemption of where Gendo strayed. Or consider that one of few scenes of politics talk--and thus acknowledgment of restraints and binders and the irreconcilable--is immediately followed by Shinji's first contact with Mari, a character emblematic of Eva breaking away from its prior foundations.
I can even appreciate the exposition-leaden lore-dumps (both Gendo's spiel of the Dead Sea Scrolls and out-of-left-field reveals such as Kaworu having been working with Kaji) as a stylistic exercise. If we take the theme of cycles to heart, and we accept these character relationships as near infinite in variation, it almost becomes pointless to have to explore them in detail--or at least, said variability being explored literally and at length instead of by example is just not Thrice's pre-occupation. It's not that NTE is making some sort of case that these plot threads are without dramatic promise, it's more that the drama of facing the inexhaustability of these dramatic possibilities is itself the dramatic conflict. Something like Anima, or the video games where alternate ending routes post-episode 24 are offered, explore only the literalisms of what happens when you let the setting and characters continue in their permutations and chemical reactions, until we hit the poorer late seasons of any long-running-enough TV series. I don't think it boils down to some kind of moral of "this is all pointless, only understanding one another matters," but more specifically, it's embracing the reality that the forms conflict takes are endless, but the solutions mostly universal. It's inevitably a more metafictional and self-reflexive version of the alternate realities, infinite possibilities suggestions of EoTV and EoE. Speaking of, in terms of something relevant to the over-stimulating nature of the modern world, and how one can form some kind of tack to persist, it's a pretty good one, not that that's the most important metric or anything. (All this coming from someone who has long complained NTE is disengaged from "the real world" or matters of consequence.)
The other tack seems to be a new, more measured angle on predetermination and one's responsibilities. Much has been said of the changes made to the characters, and while I definitely prefer the themes and dynamics explored in the original iterations, you can't say the treatment in NTE isn't consistent. The Shinji of Jo is a very different Shinji, but he makes sense as the beginning of the arc of the Shinji of Thrice. The conflicts of characters are different, yes, but they're also specific, and I think in Jo and Ha especially, it can be hard to see when they're in the context of familiar scenes, yet with different ulterior motives. When you step back and look at it in a holistic sense, the character drama across all 4 entries stem from the same source, actuated by the main difference in plot: a more authoritarian Gendo. Every part of the plot has been devised by him and so the undercurrent, the prevailing fact of every conflict, is that said conflict has no reality of agency. Misato leads a rebellion that itself is concocted as part of Gendo's plan, Rei and Asuka's existence as clones come with the baggage of pre-programming, rendering attempts to thwart said programming inherently suspect, Shinji's unwilling relationship as Gendo's son, a connection that can't be totally erased. Where I once found Gendo's role to be dramatically impotent, I now find it a somewhat interesting fictive treatment of what in real life is out of our control. I still find Gendo's character to suffer overall, but it's interesting from the viewpoint of dramatic necessity; the films couldn't exist without this change as the lynchpin. Maybe it suffers only in comparison, but the archetype is more or less the same, too; Ozymandias, no real escape from the full-stop inevitabilities of existence. Even after so much impossible keikaku-fu, even he's forced to own up, eventually. And not in spite of his efforts to circumvent the inevitable, but because of the refusal, and the form it takes impossible to separate from the contrary intent. It's a bit on the nose, but it's something.
And now we get to how I square the circle of NTE, Mari. My best effort is to factor her less as a standalone element (the sense that she's 'outside' Eva can kind of get one off-track) and more an extension of the core Gendo-Yui-Shinji conflict. Perhaps Mari can begin to make sense as arbiter of finality when we connect it to the fact she was also arbiter of where it began by introducing Yui and Gendo. I think the apprehension of this so far has been too literal among the fanbase. Her presence in Gendo's flashback is odd in a very specific way: Gendo never meets her outside these scenes, and does not acknowledge her presence in these frames in a way that makes sense. He talks only about meeting Yui, whereas the drawings illustrate an apparent friendship and intermediary in Mari. This fact, more than anything else, is what abstracts her and makes her a metaphorical character in my mind. What if her function here ties into her function in the last train station scene? Which is to introduce a person to the person to whom he belongs. With this in mind, Mari's reaction to Shinji's descriptor "beautiful girl with big breasts" sounds knowing in a strangely disaffected way; it almost seems less that she's a character here, but is acknowledging, as an ideal, that what Shinji has stated is a bare-bones ideal; or perhaps to be more exacting, a previous source of anxiety.
Or maybe you could say that she's meant to serve a more visually distinctive purpose. The framing is really deliberate: her last appearance follows Rei and Kaworu's brief appearance where a correspondance is made to the vision of Rei that recurs; a presentation of these characters hard to take as anything but symbolic. I suppose if you were to mathematically craft an image that furthest jars from precedent, it would be Shinji managing to have a casual exchange with someone like Mari. It's decidedly un-Shinji-like, but any further implications you can draw beyond the exchange itself aren't really guarantees.
It seems there's much agreement that Mari is metatextual, but not so much what specifically her function is as a metatextual figure. But in rewatching scenes with her I found it interesting how she can be read as the presence of that voice in yourself that works as self-encouragement and drive. Perhaps even her final scene with Fuyutsuki makes sense in this way, in that she's representing by way of link to Yui the thing that's been keeping him going in his role.
I don't think it's a coincidence that Mari's presence seems to literally be that of support. Most clearly as a point-man for Asuka in strategic offense, and bunk-mate. But let's keep going: she glides in and crashes into Shinji at the moment in the narrative when he's at his most confident and hopeful about his relationships, especially that of the central father/son conflict. And speaking of being Asuka's other half ... can it be any coincidence that Asuka is the most self-assured of our central characters, battle-hardened as she necessarily needs to be?
Or perhaps the best explanation is more literal. I can understand those who not only don't understand, but actively dislike Yui's stated goals and motivations in NGE & EoE, although I personally find the poeticism and the oddness compelling. The extent and yet limitations of these goals is worth some thought; the whole "encase oneself in perpetuity" goal is not only contrary to Gendo, it's both grand and banal. Anyway, perhaps we can look at NTE as a corrective, and perhaps NTE's plot (and Mari's instrumental role) makes the most sense if we look at it as a gotcha. We think Gendo, and Gendo thinks Gendo, is the one keikaku-ing it all ... and yet, perhaps it's Yui. Otherwise why mention she went as far as the anti-universe? Why have Mari, the one working at her behest, as implied by her being in cahoots with Fuyutsuki, not only be a surprise big-time string-puller, but basically the string-puller? Perhaps Yui's keikaku was to slay the gods and lead to the removal of all ills. She looked at all the fundamental principles of this tragic setting and then sought a very un-Gendo altruistic fix. This comes with the danger, though, of making her dramatically impotent; I'm supposed to buy the convolutions of such a plan? It would necessarily be even more omnipotent than Gendo's entire-plot-spanning plots. It's especially hard to digest when she's given less characterization than ever before, although I think the gamble was that her never speaking would be poignant in a mother-who-passed sorta way.
Maybe the opinion that's changed the least is my feeling that these plots are, in the end, autofiction on Anno's part and make the most sense with that in mind. It's a franchise about its own existence. I was actually kind of caught off-guard with how radically different I viewed the initial "get in the robot" scene in Jo. I couldn't help but read Shinji's hesitation as Anno's, the expression of a hesitance to put the glove of Eva back on for another go. All the corners one might find oneself written into, all the risks and rewards inherent, and maybe his feeling that this project was decided not by him but by inevitability. And I'm convinced that's not just a projection; the changes in dialogue and dramatic tone here shift the feeling of these scenes into a darker and more measured tone, or at least a more specific one, more adult in nature; adult in the sense of "been there, done that." The task at hand and the expectations realized to be recursive, not just theoretical, like a young man recognizing the obvious that age has its way with things, as compared to the true blue, day after day experience and knowing of exactly how time does, in fact, have its way with things that only an actual aged person can know. New dialogue is always orbiting that experience-gained angle; in a new scene in Jo, Misato and Ritsuko opine on finding a clarity of perspective with age, and one can't help but reflect on the fact that these characters have, in the realm of cultural significance, ripened with time. They don't know it, but they're speaking about age because of a real time-value behind the scenes.
It's these things that make me glad NTE exists.
In the end, I think my opinion on NTE is thus: there are a lot of moving parts to appreciate, but I can only do that insofar as I apply a caveat. Compared to all other narratives in existence, I think NGE & EoE stand on their own. Inversely, I find it impossible to find merits in NTE in that context and with that kind of competition. As something I can take and compare to NGE & EoE, though, I can appreciate more bombastic treatments of certain action scenes, and find replacement scenes enjoyable and impressive in how economic a solution one can find in trying to translate episodic composition to that of film. Perhaps in the genre of recaps you could say they're an interesting and unique quadriptych. I'd sooner rewatch them than a lot of other compilation films, for sure.
So I've ended up enjoying them on re-appraisal ... but I can't help but find them as "canonical" as the alternate take that is Sadamoto's manga, in that I really like it because I like Eva so much, but if I'm being honest, they're in a mightily overwhelming casted shadow, almost a pitch-black daytime night. I enjoy the technical feats in the vacuum of an NTE watch-through, but in terms of a new-fangled update, in terms of how a version with more budget and fancier technology would argue for its existence, on that most basic and fundamental of scales, well: I don't actually think it ended up looking better. I don't want to use the phrase "lightning in a bottle," so I'll come up with something ad-hoc. If we can quantify and qualify media by more nebulous qualities, those qualities that transcend "direction, writing, acting," etc., perhaps "charm" does the job. And the studio situation, not only including the individual situations of the staff but the current culture and world at large in which the studio finds itself nestled, those are elements that probably aren't taken into consideration in the planning stages of a remake project. I'm not sure those are things you plausibly could try to recapture by some kind of deliberate strategy. I don't mean to say magic can't be recaptured, or that art is inherently not up to its creators, or that this should have been the approach, even if in vain. I'm saying perhaps there's a disconnect between what actually makes something appealing and the mere presence of more recent animation techniques. Personally, I love many a roughly-animated cartoon or roughly-recorded song. I can't help but feel that the mess that was Eva's production is itself a palpable flavor. But I guess NTE wasn't a streamlined, trouble-free production, either, so maybe it's just chocolate vs. vanilla.
Eva is something I've always shown people I get close to, and I sit them down to NGE & EoE without hesitation, maybe even with manic desperation; life is short, and this needs to be seen!
Exposing someone to NTE, though, feels like it would need to begin with a heavily coached pre-amble that could only start with, "well..."
What I will say is that I previously felt these films would devalue over time, and I think I was wrong. My experience was the opposite.
So, as for my ranking...
Q's my favorite. That final battle has pathos!
I don't know how to rank the rest.
I disagree with many that Jo is merely redundant; it sets a specific foundation that's important for all that follows.
Ha is like a perfect encapsulation of what's appealing about Eva spinoffs. All the scenes of characters just hanging out are not only well done, but especially important given how severe the plot gets during the last third (and basically never lets up).
Shin is, well, it's complicated. But I can say now that I appreciate the audacity. And although I haven't mentioned the village scenes until this point, it's exactly because their charm is self-evident.
Après moi le déluge!
Dr. Nick wrote:Of course, since the original Evangelion goes all weird and therapy-sessiony at the end, a "straight remake" isn't really doable, and that in turn (if you think like an otaku) necessitates some form of in-universe justification for why this material is being revisited; hence the small Kaworu tease in the film. And those who know about Kaworu's extracanonical video game appearances immediately guessed what was going on: Anno was importing in his pre-made "Kaworu is a multiversal traveler just like Gilliam" conceit from the Super Robot Wars franchise. The Akashic Records are part of the games' deep lore, and the Book of Life seems to be referring to a similar concept, ie. fate and karma that can be altered with a bit of registry hacking. To be clear, I don't mind these story details being recycled, as it's just a cute easter egg for the mech heads. OG Evangelion wasn't built to be sequelized, so it doesn't matter what the in-universe justification for it is - any continuation was bound to feel jury-rigged regardless. A bigger issue is that these days time loop stories have been done to death, and even more importantly, Anno promising he's totally done with Eva, for realz this time, carries no weight whatsoever, diminishing the joy that the breaking of the chain moment is supposed to evoke. The man is incapable of going cold turkey. I'm happy that he's happy, I think 3.0 + 1.0 finished strong, heavily carried by the Gendo introspection (accepting that this is a different version of the character), but at the same time I'm also preparing myself for the inevitable next installment.
