Why I love Neon Genesis Evangelion: A Cruel Critic's Thesis

For the past month I have been attempting to review Hideaki Anno's anime classic Neon Genesis Evangelion, this though has proven to be futile. Now I'm not saying that Eva is above criticism, it has its flaws, the second half drags, there are some narrative issues and some characters aren't given completed arcs. However these issues are tiny to be as the complex writing, deeply flawed characters and balls to the walls mecha action make up for these issues.

So instead of reviewing this, I'm going to try and explain why I love Neon Genesis Evangelion.

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So lets start with the big reason, the characters. Eva has characters which look oddly out of place in anime, especially 90's anime, these traditional characters would have been the general, heroic archetype, going with any plan given to them. The main character in Eva, fourteen year old Shinji Ikari, is the opposite of that, when his estranged father Gendo summons him to Tokyo 3 to pilot a war machine known as the Evangelion, he point blank refuses. Its only until Gendo guilt trips him by making Rei Ayanami, a critically injured girl Shinji's age, pilot the Eva. When she is wheeled in on a stretcher, Shinji makes the snap decision to pilot the Eva. He is forced into battle against a giant creature known as an angel, which goes about as well as you might expect. He can't even walk without falling down. Now if this was a normal 90s anime the hero will have piloted the Eva correctly, defeated the angel and gone home. Shinji is quickly defeated and only defeats the angel when the Eva goes into a berserk mode.

Every character in Evangelion is in some way broken, Rei Ayanami is an unfeeling, emotionless girl with no past, Asuka Langley Sorhyu puts up an air of confidence to disguise the fact that her mother never loved her and committed suicide in front of her. Its not just the pilots, the staff of NERV are broken characters too, Misato Katsuragi can't form meaningful relationships without having a physical connection, and if she isn't needed emotionally she settles for being there physically.

The Evangelion's themselves are an interesting concept, they are believable, instead of being powered from nuclear power and space juice they need to be plugged in, and if their cord is severed then their internal batteries only last five minutes. The cost of running and maintaining Eva's is mentioned in some episodes as well as the disposal and clean up of the defeated angel corpses. This is a level of realism that I haven't seen before. And then we get to the action, while action scenes are lacking in this character driven piece most of what we get is unforgettable. The scene where Unit 02 activates on a battleship and jumps from ship to ship while defeating an aquatic angel is just as cool as it sounds. Shinji's battle with the 10th angel is also one of the highlights. Just about ever Eva gets a chance to shine, from Unit 01 tearing apart angels to Unit 00 guarding Unit 01 against the 6th angel.

The ending of the original series is a sticking point for many fans, according to legend Anno exhausted the budget in the last few episodes and when it came to producing episodes 25 and 26 they had little to no money left and were forced to slap together and ending using reused scenes from past episodes and still images. Even though this ending is hated by fans I still think the abstract ending works for the series, while the End Of Evangelion is the film version of the ending as is considered by most to be the true ending I think that the two endings go hand in in hand, EOE doesn't work without the series ending and the EOE doesn't work without the series ending.

In conclusion the series is well worth a watch if you are even remotely interested in anime and what inspired a lot of modern anime tropes then Evangelion is a necessary watch, in fact I'd even say it might be one of the greatest animes ever made.