Come here and tell what do you think could have been different.

I think OVAs would be perfect. Depending on the length of each chapter, there could be 6 to 12 chapters, but the risk that Anno has mental exhaustion increases considerably, which is why he left the project at the end. Maybe someone else will do it in the future, but it probably won't be as good.

Put in some of the draft ideas for Mari & Asuka/ give them more scenes, add the cut Misato content while we're at it (they didn't even give us a script for the "Misato scene" )


I'm not sure if they would ever have shown us the timeskip because having us be as confused as Shinji would be part of the point.
IF they were to show it, it wouldn't be in chronological order but as a flashback around the time that Shinji boards the Wunder.

It appears though that they actually talked through/planned out what was supposed to have happened.

Kendrix wrote:I'm not sure if they would ever have shown us the timeskip because having us be as confused as Shinji would be part of the point.
IF they were to show it, it wouldn't be in chronological order but as a flashback around the time that Shinji boards the Wunder.

I suspect there are aspects of the timeskip they don't want to give a direct answer and prefer people to theorize with the information they give.

For example: In Shin, they could explain how the Near Third Impact and the Third Impact were connected, but they prefer to mantain the mystery on that.


PS: It's isn't uncommon that Anno let the audience to theorize how events developed with the clues the story gives.

2.0 would have been narrated over 3+ hours instead of 1h50m almost surely.

Konja7 wrote:
I suspect there are aspects of the timeskip they don't want to give a direct answer and prefer people to theorize with the information they give.

PS: It's isn't uncommon that Anno let the audience to theorize how events developed with the clues the story gives.

Aside of keeping the mystery and leave it to the audience as a thrill factor, it also reduces their efforts, time & cost for sure

The films have almost the same runtime as the series, only shorter by a couple of hours. There's plenty that could stand to be resolved with a fifth movie, probably most notably the fourteen-year timeskip, but I'm going to put a potentially unpopular opinion out there: the most significant change to the story told in NTE would not stem from the addition of more time. That's one of the two charges I've seen levied at the films, the other being that they're so Shinji-centric they don't give anybody else any development. But I don't think a longer runtime would help either of these issues, even though I think being a TV or OVA series would, and here's why: television has an inherently different story structure than film.

It sounds obvious, but think about it a little bit: four films give us four big chunks of time to work a story. We get four introductions, four build-ups, four climaxes, four conclusions. That's a lot more narrative arc to play around with, compared to a single film. But then look at a television series, where you get a whopping twenty-six episodes to play with. Twenty-six introductions, twenty-six build-ups, twenty-six climaxes, twenty-six conclusions. Hell, the original Evangelion television series had two-parter episodes where you'd get double the story beats across a single angel. (Episodes one and two vs Sachiel and episodes five and six vs Ramiel come to mind.) Episodes seventeen through twenty ostensibly make up a single "story" as well, from the explosion of Unit 04 and subsequent export of Unit 03 to Shinji's successful extraction from Unit 01 post-Zeruel fight. Being able to tell the story of NTE in an episodic format could have given Khara the opportunity to heighten certain parts of the story by taking advantage of the 'form factor' (if you will) of a television episode.

To address the claim that the films are just "Shinji-centric" and that's why there's less time given to other characters, I don't think the films necessarily spend any more time with Shinji than the TV series did. It feels less like the films gave us more Shinji and more that they took away everyone else. There are entire episodes of NGE that focused on Misato, Ritsuko, and Kaji. There are episodes where the pilots were removed from play entirely, and we got to see how Nerv dealt with angels in the absence of their pilots. Asuka gets her own character arc from episode twenty-one to episode twenty-three. When the nature of your story is episodic, it is not disruptive to the story as a whole to spend some of your twenty-minute blocks focused on someone other than your main character and use them to advance the story forward.

By contrast, it feels strange in a film if you're spending too much time away from your main character and not focusing on their development. Asuka gets some great fights in Ha and Q, and Mari gets center stage in the beginning of Ha and in Shin. But overall, there's less time spent developing people who aren't Shinji outside of a few brief moments spent with the surrounding cast. There are definitely individual characters who get to enjoy their own scenes or who play nicely with the other ensemble cast, but nowhere to the same extent that NGE was able to-- the story of the film has to keep moving forward. You can't take a block of time in that same way and have a self-contained episode or series of episodes that focus more on someone who isn't the main protagonist while continuing to move the story forward, or at least not as much time as a more episodic format allows.

That's what I think would be different: not necessarily the amount of time we get get with the characters, but how we can spend that time and how we can take advantage of the storytelling structure which long-form television affords.

Nuclear Lunchbox wrote:The films have almost the same runtime as the series, only shorter by a couple of hours.

I actually made a visualization of much runtime NGE and Rebuild allocate to each macro arc of the story



The main difference is clearly 2.0 being ultra compressed

Nuclear Lunchbox wrote:That's what I think would be different: not necessarily the amount of time we get get with the characters, but how we can spend that time and how we can take advantage of the storytelling structure which long-form television affords.

I totally agree. It's the difference of media the main reason why these stories need to be developed in a different way.

Joseki wrote:The main difference is clearly 2.0 being ultra compressed

I think 2.0 works like a movie. The story flows quite well.

Also, considering the complete change of scenary due to the timeskip, even if 2.0 focus on the development of many characters, most of this would be lost for 3.0

They could've gotten a bit more in if Q and Shin were an OVA. It's an interesting idea.

I think if they were or a TV anime or OVA series you'd have people asking "What if this story was instead told through a series of movies" and if this had been five movies people would be asking "But what if they had made a sixth movie to fill in the gaps".

Naturally, it's as such with speculation. Doesn't mean discussing the format isn't potentially insightful.
I personally love observing how transmedia franchises adapt their narrative to each specific medium and love laughing at how bad instances such as Junji Ito Collection can be

In particular, the whole thing about NGE having had so many storytelling arcs and comparing it to the movies is so interesting. There's also, of course, the fact that there's a pause between each episode's airing, which gives time for the story to settle down in the viewer's head a bit. That being said, episodic formats also need to keep refreshing the viewer's memory, which is why the Madoka movies have a considerably smaller runtime even though they really are just straight adaptions with (i think) no cut content, it just cuts refreshers mostly. I wonder how much of the smaller runtime in the Rebuilds is just it not needing to refresh our memories as often.

I definitely think 1.0 and 2.0 would work better as OVA’s. Or to be more accurate, a miniseries, since OVA is a release method and not a medium.

2.0 especially cuts all over the place, and while the plot gels back together near the end the first half is kind of a mess and even the climax feels kind of weird because it’s literally two climaxes one after the other. The fact that they have roughly 20 episodes of content and progression squeezed into 3-ish hours of screen time REALLY shows. Perhaps if Anno & co. had gone into the project with a better idea of what it would eventually turn into, they would have chosen to play faster and looser with the adaptation instead of mostly sticking with the anime’s plot progression in 1.0 and 2.0, which might have yielded a plot that covers the same general themes as eps 1-20 but is specifically written to be movies.

3.0 and 3.0+1.0 on the other hand I’d keep as movies. They were written as such, and while there’s certain pacing things inside them that I would change, I think it’s how they work best.

If it were a TV series it would have been lower quality and partly rushed, and OVA's don't exist now in the same way they did in the 80s/90s and the only company getting away with it are Sunrise with some Gundam releases - and even those are released theatrically and later reconverted into a TV series. There isn't a realistic "better" alternative.