Hideaki Anno, JUNE Interview - August 1996

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Hideaki Anno, JUNE Interview - August 1996

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Postby Hyper Shinchan » Mon Aug 20, 2012 9:34 am

A guy called Morgan Bauman/moyaofthemist is posting on 17th Angel translated bits of a 1996 JUNE interview to Hideaki Anno.
A lot of the stuff mentioned in this interview has also been touched in other interviews, anyway some bits are still interesting; I'm going to quote what he's translated so far, I hope that it's fine to do so:
Interviewer: At that time, it felt like even among the manga artists and writers phone calls and faxes were suddenly flying around, saying, will they go that far for us? Director, you’ve written the script, but how was Kaworu-kun’s rather pleasing line born?

Anno: Hmm, how did I write that? It came out rather naturally.

Interviewer: It came out naturally? *laugh* What about whatever research you’d done?

Anno: There was none. I don’t read stuff like JUNE.

Interviewer: Well then, conversely, when you seduce someone, or when you are seduced, do you think that you’d like to be told something like that? Telling someone or being told by someone, “Your heart is like glass,”—did anything like that actually happen to you?

Anno: Nope, nothing like that.

Interviewer: You told Newtype, “It’s nice to take a bath, don’t you think?”

Satou: Hahaha!

Anno: Yeah, I think it’s great.

Interviewer: What a blunt answer. *laughs*


Anno: I’m thinking of adding a few scenes. I had the feeling that it’d be good to focus on Shinji and Kaworu-kun’s story. However, I also think that, if I have the extra time, I have to make Kaworu-kun with just Misato.

The truth is that Kaworu-kun just greeted Rei by chance and he’s only spoken with Shinji, hasn’t he? There’s no need for him to meet other people, but if the only one that I haven’t made him meet up with is Misato, I kind of wonder whether that’s awkward.

Although I can’t really think of what sort of scene it’d turn out to be.


Interviewer: You said previously that that sort of JUNE-like, or should I say the sort of production that goes beyond friendship, came out that way naturally, didn’t you?

Anno: As far as I know, it’s possible that I put in a few guys like that. Otherwise, I wonder whether it might be that I have parts of me like that, myself, things that are at about that degree.

Interviewer: That level is quite a thing. *laugh*

Anno: As expected, I was called odd by the staff. *laugh*


Interviewer: Did you plan that sort of thing from the beginning? With Kaworu-kun as the last Angel at that time.

Anno: Although even in the opening he only shows up for two frames.

Interviewer: At the point in time when you created the opening, did you only have that picture?

Anno: Well, only Sadamoto (Yoshiyuki)’s rough of the picture had come out yet. It’s changed a bit, though, from the original version.

Interviewer: But is it the same in terms of their roles?

Anno: Yes, well. I’d been thinking about having the last Angel be a young man who looked like a human.


Interviewer: But wouldn’t the name Nagisa Kaworu fit even a girl?

Anno: But that’s a young man! There’s no feminine sense whatsoever, right? Because it’s Shinji and another Shinji. Since it’s an ideal of Shinji’s* that’s appearing, it can’t be a girl.

Interviewer: Ah, I see.

*ideal Shinji/idealized version of Shinji (ie if Shinji could remake himself over into the perfect person, he would be exactly like Kaworu)


Anno: Since he’s [Kaworu-kun’s] the character who’s clearing up all of the complexes that Shinji has. Well, I sort of botched that portrayal, and it didn’t come out straightforward, though. A character that is liked by everyone.

In the initial stages, he was a pretty boy who carried around a cat. The very first plot title was “The cat and the transfer student.” It was a story about transfer student carrying a cat coming to the school and so forth.

As we went on with it, in episode 24, it had already moved away from the school, so. It would have still have been good if it had come between episodes 11 and 16, though.


Interviewer: Usually, Anno-san, you and one other person are credited with the screenplay, but what sort of a relationship do you two have?

Anno: I had him do the plot after we spoke together, and I fixed up what took the form of the script once more to get it ready for animation.

Well, at that point in time, we were writing the script to send out, and so you could also say that the stories, drama, characters, and so forth that we’d thought of during previous meetings were starting to lose consistency at the time that that script finished.

We have to fix those so that they line up, so. I’m unifying it, so it’s becoming uniform, though. I help with the drama parts and so forth.

Interviewer: Who worked on episode 24?

Anno: A person named Satsukawa (Akio)-san did that. Satsukawa-san is better at—this is bad to say, but—he’s right on the mark when it comes to homoeroticism. *laugh*


Interviewer: Did you stop Satsukawa-san when it looked like he was going to go berserk, Director Anno?

Anno: No, nothing like that. Satsukawa-san’s atmosphere remains in the script. Satsukawa-san’s original script had more of that sort of meaning and was JUNE-like.

Interviewer: For example?

Anno: I’m the one who went and set it in the bath, though. In the original script, the two of them were swimming naked in a river. *laugh*


Interviewer: Were there other scenes like that?

Satou: Hmm, he had a cello, right? Together…

“I’ll play the piano, so you play the cello!” he said.

At night, in a classroom, Kaworu went first, and he was playing; when Shinji softly peeked in on him, “Can you do something, too?”

“Next time, let’s do it together.” It had that sort of feeling.

“I’ll sing a little, so…”

Anno: That’s right, that’s right. There was a scene in a music room after an evacuation, when no one was there.


JUNE is Japan's oldest yaoi magazine in case you didn't know it.

EDIT:
I deleted this post because I thought that this stuff had been already translated by Lili and/or Numbers-kun but it looks like it's not the case.
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Postby gwern » Wed Sep 26, 2012 1:48 pm

Lots o' fresh new material there, but he's got it all split over like 30 different pages over a year >.<. And no indication of order either! I think I'm going to 'ask' him whether he has a sensible single page or at least plans to make one when he's done.

EDIT: as of 18 January 2013, he's said he'll send me the compiled interview and I can host it for him, but he hasn't done so yet.

EDITEDIT: I've reminded him in May 2013; still no dice.
Last edited by gwern on Sat May 18, 2013 2:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Postby ObsessiveMathsFreak » Fri May 17, 2013 6:47 am

This is solid gold second Tier canon. I'm interested in exactly when and where this interview took place, and why it's taken so long to some to light. There appear to be extensive interviews in this publication concerning Kaworu. Have more translations appeared since?
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Postby Literary Eagle » Fri May 17, 2013 8:08 am

View Original PostObsessiveMathsFreak wrote:This is solid gold second Tier canon. I'm interested in exactly when and where this interview took place, and why it's taken so long to some to light. There appear to be extensive interviews in this publication concerning Kaworu. Have more translations appeared since?


Anno's interviews with JUNE took place in August 1996 and November 1996. Both interviews can be found in the book JUNE Tokuhon: Zankoku-na Tenshi no These (ISBN4-906011-25-X). The two interviews combined come out to a total of 30 pages (according to this article by Carl Horn, it was one of Anno's longest interviews ever), which might explain why there hasn't been a complete translation. However, EvaGeeks member Ilari generously provided scans of the interview over here, if anyone wants to take a crack at fully translating it.

There's also this thread which mostly talks about the first and second drafts of episode 24, however some of the later pages in the thread discuss a few more details about what's in the interviews. Anno talks about several other topics aside from Kaworu, and it seems like quite a bit of interesting stuff.
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Postby Oenara » Sat May 18, 2013 8:50 pm

View Original Postgwern wrote:EDIT: as of 18 January 2013, he's said he'll send me the compiled interview and I can host it for him, but he hasn't done so yet.

EDITEDIT: I've reminded him in May 2013; still no dice.


Has she (I don't know their gender, just guessing) replied to you at all? It's odd if she hasn't, since her tumblr says she'll answer all Eva-related asks within two days.

Edit:
View Original PostObsessiveMathsFreak wrote:Have more translations appeared since?


Afaik Morgan Bauman is the only person translating it at the moment; you can find more excerpts in the link.
Last edited by Oenara on Sat May 18, 2013 9:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Postby Kendrix » Sat May 18, 2013 9:29 pm

So "homoeroticism" was clearly an intended effect XD
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Postby gwern » Sat May 18, 2013 10:15 pm

View Original PostOenara wrote:Has she (I don't know their gender, just guessing) replied to you at all? It's odd if she hasn't, since her tumblr says she'll answer all Eva-related asks within two days.


(I thought it was a he, although given the tumblr topic a she would make more sense.)

They did reply to my original request quickly, but haven't to my most recent subsequent comments except when I threw in a quasi-trolling aside about how 3.0 royally fucked over Kaworu but no one seems to have noticed it. You can see for yourself in http://17th-angel.tumblr.com/post/32385751091/im-very-pleased-that-youve-picked-up-lilis-baton-and

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Postby Hyper Shinchan » Sun May 19, 2013 12:09 pm

Talking about coincidences, someone from /cm/ just completed the translation of the first half of this JUNE interview:
http://avocado-slice.tumblr.com/post/50755437341/sato-we-made-a-special-collection-about-eva-then

The last part about "running away" is especially interesting, it offers some insights about a topic that, from my experience, is usually disregarded by people around here.
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Postby C.A.P. » Sun May 19, 2013 3:15 pm

That latter half has confirm so much of my own opinion on the show and Anno himself, it's frightening. I thank the lucky man who went out of his way to compile all of that.
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Postby Xard » Sun May 19, 2013 3:27 pm

View Original PostHyper Shinchan wrote:The last part about "running away" is especially interesting, it offers some insights about a topic that, from my experience, is usually disregarded by people around here.


What are you referring to?

Anyway, always good to have more of this shit translated but either formatting or translation itself is awkward as hell in places. For example

Anno: Since he can sympathize with me, then it is all right if I don’t kill him. The person who say that he can’t run away is the one who escape, you surely can blame him for this. But thinking that it is the right thing to not to escape is a fixed thinking pattern.


The bolded part in particular is eyesore and makes me wish I had the original Japanese text next to this translation.

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Postby Hyper Shinchan » Sun May 19, 2013 5:59 pm

View Original PostXard wrote:What are you referring to?

The positive connotations of running away, sometimes I have the impression that people around here is masochist.
View Original PostXard wrote:makes me wish I had the original Japanese text next to this translation.

The scans have been linked by Literary Eagle just some posts ago, 17th Angel just uploaded them on mediafire too.
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Postby Caliburn » Sun May 19, 2013 7:04 pm

This was interesting...

ANNO: I really want to make the half part a live action. The TV station refused.


If I understand this correctly, it seems Anno already was toying with the idea of incorporating some live action to "show the script of the story within story to people" and "[extend] the world beyond the TV fiction" in EoTV (Ep. 26), much as he would later do with the live-action sequences in EoE.

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Postby Dream » Tue May 28, 2013 8:39 pm

View Original PostC.A.P. wrote:That latter half has confirm so much of my own opinion on the show and Anno himself, it's frightening. I thank the lucky man who went out of his way to compile all of that.


Indeed. I know i already told you this before but... Damn. At least for me it was quite a surprise/shock when i got to that part. And yeah, whoever translated that deserves a crown.

What are you referring to?


You seem to have already found it but i'm going to put the two main paragraphs here if only for giving it more exposure to most of EGF (Whom i'm pretty sure didn't click the link because of the whole June thing):

Pre-EoE Anno wrote: (...)Anno: Yeah, I think they will feel dissatisfaction, but…… I don’t think the end of the show is the end of everything. I know it is innatism, it can’t be helped. Even the story is not finished, you just have to solve the character’s problems. Being enslaved by something and complain about it, I don’t think it is a good thing to do.

—— EVA ended without solving the problems, it is some kind of run away? People think that even though you talk about “I can’t run away,” in the end you still run.

Anno: Why would you think the theme is “you can’t run away”?

—— What? If you said so *laughs*, yeah, Shinji is not always right.

Anno: Why people think that the protagonist’s thoughts and actions are always right?

—— So it is. The protagonist did say “It is ok to run away.”

Anno: Yes, this is the theme. Running away is not bad.

—— Then he didn’t need to kill Kaworu, too.

Anno: Since he can sympathize with me, then it is all right if I don’t kill him. The person who say that he can’t run away is the one who escape, you surely can blame him for this. But thinking that it is the right thing to not to escape is a fixed thinking pattern. You can’t always do the right thing. In episodes 25 and 26, there are lines like “If you want to run away, then just do it.” Escape itself has good and bad consequences. People have to make the decision if they want to live. There is gain and loss in life. If you do nothing, there is noting to loss and nothing to gain. It is no different from the dead. But there are many people like this. You have to give to get. Humans can’t advance without hurting others. If you are afraid of hurting people, then you are just remain stagnant. Not escaping doesn’t mean there will be no problems, you can’t run away because sometimes bad things happen when you run away. But if it makes you feel good, then why not?
I often hear about Adult Children recently, the kind of person who have disqualification parents, whose parents is a burden when they are growing up. They cannot live without their parents or men, if they know that running away is good, if they run away from their parents, or leaving their parents behind, maybe they can be free. Some mothers are overprotective, they tell their child “My little child, there is demon in Tokyo, you can’t go there”, then lock the child up in his own walls and never let him go. These kind of mothers always exist. If the child himself don’t feel it is a problem, he wants to stay there, then it is Ok. But there are also people who feel oppressed, they hate this. For them, escaping from the place that bind them, going to Tokyo to become a free-lance writer and live on their own is way better than this. That kind of person should run away, away from the country.

—— But escaping and leaving gives you two completely different impression.

Anno: Escaping is the same. If escaping can free yourself, then there is no problem. I think it is better just to run away. But look at Episode 26, it seems Shinji is possessed by EVA. He never let EVA go, he use the Eva to make others approve him, he use it to gain his significance of existence. I think if he could free himself from the EVA, then at least there will be a next stage waiting for him.


Bolded emphasis mine. It might also be important to mention that apparently Anno did something awfully similar to "escaping from the place that bind them, going to Tokyo to become a free-lance writer and live on their own" after he got expelled from Osaka academy... Don't have any sources to back that claim up, though.

I know i'm repeating myself, but for me (and i think many others) it really was lighting/eureka moment. Granted i might have been leaning towards some of those realizations in a vague, non-verbal manner but hearing it from the master himself, and the way he says it... It really is something golden. The idea that most people might have been wrong about the "running away" thing (well, that really isn't a correct assertion, since while it might not have been directly connected to "running away" everyone knows that the value of life and the difficulties with the decision of living were always a central or evangelion) really get me quite... ecstatic. He never seemed to have been talking of running away just as an escape from pain, but also as a possibility of freedom and re-creation. It probably shouldn't be too surprising either, considering how the whole matter of attaining enlightement/power throught self-realization and discovering the possibility of creating your own world are pretty central elements of the anime's climax.

More than that, thought, this really made a lot of things that didn't quite fit (namely a few lines from Rei, Asuka and others in episode 26) with the already accepted theories or interpretations of NGE and EoTV fit perfectly. I don't know why these excerpts are such a shock because i never felt that NGE's core was ever about escapism or whatever but, again, hearing it from Anno himself really is quite something. Not only that but it seems to also give a completely new, multilayered meaning and value to EoTV (which now feels as having unique value separate from EoE), the general "Running away" motif (It might be important to mention that Misato and others were also described as running away, and in the "What were we trying to make here?" Anno describe as a man who "just ran away for four years, who did nothing for four years), and some of the lyrics of the opening. This certainly demands a re-watch of EoTV and, to a lesser extent, EoE.

Have to leave, might edit the post later.
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