Vulkurt wrote:[url]http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/[/url]
Look under essays. Second one. Haven't read it yet, but it may be interesting.
I've often thought that if I learned what words like "reappropriate," "voyeuristic," and "trope" meant, I could reach a whole new audience.
ROYAL SPACE FORCE is set in a retro-20th century setting rather than a retro-19th century one (perhaps the author is thinking of NADIA).
EVANGELION's animation *was* occasionally suberb (as one would expect when you have Anno, Masayuki and Tsurumaki around to draw key cels), but I wouldn't characterize it as having the best consistent animation, even of its time--ESCAFLOWNE was better animated on average.
I get the distinct impression that EVA was not an exceptionally high-budget show by industry standards; if Sunrise had done it, I doubt there would have ever been forty, fifty, and sixty-second long still sequences (of course, if Sunrise had done it, Gainax wouldn't own it). EVA did, however, have the best art direction of its time (and one of the best of all time); art direction, of course, being the area where anime has always visually trumped even American animation with its 1,743 drawings per second.
Also, I believe that EVA was not an "instant hit" when it first aired; it wasn't even seen everywhere in Japan--TV Tokyo at the time being the smallest of Japan's four national networks (and cable/digital didn't really take off until after EVA--I've wondered before if EVA hadn't been on broadcast TV but "niched" in cable, could it have as easily become the phenomenon it did?), and didn't even reach the entire country. 1997, the year of the movies, was probably the high tide of the EVA phenomenon, the series having already been re-broadcast in the run-up.