-Zusuchan
Don't know if this has been mentioned on here anywhere, but something I saw someone point out re: the scene where Mari/Shinji are at the shore (all credit to the anon who pointed this out):
Shinji is drawn in key frames, Mari is drawn as in betweens. In terms of the visual language of this, the idea is pretty clear. And it's also this kind of visual language we're largely missing going by camrip clips and the script.
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In terms of Mari working the way Anno used her in the end, I think that she does, but only in terms of what Eva means to Anno. If it doesn't work for you, sorry to say (and I say this as someone who spent all of yesterday reckoning with it) but you don't see Eva as what it was all along. It always was and still is Anno spilling his feelings onto the page and screen.
Back in NGE+EOE, it was his exploration of his avoidant nature, with all of its intense negativity, and an open window he was giving himself to be able to reach a certain healthier perspective.
Rebuild is the same thing except I think what he has to say is less universally meaningful. He found happiness and stability and he wanted to sever the symbolic baggage that he no longer jibed with, the anger of the original, and the thing Asuka always represented--unhealthy attachment to an idealised form of a person you have yet to fully realize you misunderstood in the first place. It's his reflection back on the basis of what he was expressing--his later self seeing that, whatever conclusions in NGE he came to which led to framing Rei as love, Kaworu as hope, Asuka as The Other he can't truly understand but must try to reconcile with, etc... that currently, his actual retrospective understanding of Asuka is that she was something more simple, just based on love that wasn't meant to be, especially since the intervening years of meeting Moyoco.
There has always been meta readings into Eva (Asuka=old flame, Nerv bridge crew=Gainax for example), and the Rebuilds have now, far more than any lore mysteries, hereafter confirmed that this is in fact the only sensible way to read it, and that it's how Anno reads it. Mari makes no sense in terms of being a human being on her own right, in terms of being a developed character, but her meaning if we draw parallels to Anno's life are clear as day.
Personally, this is how I've started to understand my own dissatisfaction with the meaning of Shin. The case is that I just don't relate to the Anno of today. Part of why he returned was self-stated as profit motivated, and he's since turbo-charged the merch machine that is Eva, and similar to Shinji and his friends getting stylish and moving on to metropolitan life, it appears that his form of personal growth is admitting his faults, localizing his baggage outside of himself to thus be able to walk away from it, and ending it there. Outside this kind of self-involved putting to rights, there's little in the film that truly reckons with the actual exterior world. Like, say, the fact we're in a global nosediving environmental crisis, part of which is worsened by the constant pumping out of squirted plastic into the shape of lewd 14 year olds. Not to say that everyone must make environmental works, but it's hard not to find a weird detached quality to the fact that Shinji's experience in the struggling village, the backdrop of which is a ruined world, leads him to pinpoint Eva itself as the problem and that his magically reimagined world is by all accounts just modern Japan, with all of its industry, environmental detriment, problems regarding work culture and workers' rights, etc. What has he improved (ie, erased) that isn't made-up in the first place?
One would think a compatriot of Miyazaki, Oshii and Tomino would have something more to say about modern life and society other than turning one's brain off and feeling good about everything, especially someone who's such a big fan of Char's Counterattack, which isn't shy to diagnose at length mankind's problems being tied in with egotism, tribalism and pollution. I watched Turn A Gundam recently and, in terms of being a worldly and unexpectedly positive take from a formerly depressed and somewhat cynical man, compared to Shin it felt like it had actual scriptwriting--the characters didn't merely vanish into what they personally represented to their creator. In other words, like actual communication...
I sympathize with Anno's feelings, and as someone in a long & loving marriage, I know firsthand love is salvational. But as a message, especially one from a wealthy man, and considering that finding the right person is a pure luck event not everyone is afforded, I find it to hold no meaning if one works under the belief that narrative isn't just declaration, but communal. In fact, given all of Eva's messaging historically (Rebuild included) of why one must strive to understand oneself and others and fit somehow into the world, I find it all in some way oddly and ironically juvenile.
Baka Shinji wrote:I think people give Anno too much credit for Evangelion, forgetting that Eva is first and foremost a Gainax anime and that the Staff that worked with him was excellent.
Not to mention Anno's personal crisis and the Economic depression after the Bubble burst were also a big factor in shaping Eva's identity.
Evangelion is the kind of anime where if any of it's components it's missing it's not "Eva" anymore so it's no wonder than the Rebuilds failed to capture the original's charm, although I never imagined that they'd turn into this trashfire.
A material perspective is a rare one, I find, but I think it's the healthiest and most accurate. Evangelion was good partly because of various scriptwriters who, many of which, never came back, and a lot of talent that did. I also believe creatives don't always have the full insider perspective on their own works, either, so trying to recapture magic is almost destined to fail.
It's why old Star Wars was what it was compared to every followup (even IV & V compared to ROTJ). Now, it doesn't mean Rebuild was destined to be bad or is bad for that reason, logically if it's taken as a completely different work with its own circumstances informing it, it can theoretically walk on its own legs as a separate thing and should be taken on its own merits. Personally I find myself dissatisfied, but not strictly because it isn't the old show.