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| Oh, yeah, here we go!!! |
Content Warning: Violence, blood, emotional damage, parental emotional neglect, brief female nudity, and the beginning of your obsession (you only hope I’m joking).
Ah, this is truly one of the classics of anime and is more than likely responsible for the downfall of the mecha genre. This is THE “modern” mecha anime. It is a total subversion of a genre that turned around and became the new definition of the genre, going forwards. As this such an influential work, I recommend seeing it for yourself.
As such, this goal of this series of reviews isn’t to provide you with a guide of wither or not you should see this anime, but to help provided some context, things to pay attention to, and my own thoughts on the series. You have to understand that this anime is one of the things that made me who I am. I first started watching this show during my teenage years and was one of the first things to make me think. One of the first things to make me watch something over and over again, looking for details that I had missed. I haven’t seen the show in several years, so this will be nice to review it without as much baggage. Let’s begin:
Episode One: Angel Attack
The series begins with telling us that we are in the far off year of 2015, that year far into the future… Anyway. We see that the city is flooded, buildings left to rot away in the sea, but people are still alive, with the sound of an announcement being repeated over loudspeaker. We also see that humanity hasn’t advanced too much, with weapons of war (marked with UN) prepared to open up on… Something. Eventually, we get a shot of the first (but really the third) enemy, the Angels. It looks a bit more “biblically accurate” if you get my meaning. Now, we begin cutting between the action against the Angel, and introducing our main character, Shinji Ikari. He’s stuck in the abandoned city, with the announcement continuing to play, as the Angel continues to advance. We also see the UN military in NERV headquarters, leading the attack against the Angel. The final thing they send against the Angel is an N2 mine, which is supposed to mean “Non-Nuclear” but still has an EMP effect. Whatever. While some of the animation shows its age in this fight, it does really shine with the explosion of the N2 Mine. It’s absolutely fantastic.
After this, we start getting into our characters, beginning with Misato Katsuragi. She’s picked up Shinji, saving him from dying out there during the battle, but we see that she isn’t some great hero, she’s just a normal woman with car payments. We also get some information about Shinji and his father Gendo, the head of NERV. NERV has been prepared to defeat the Angel, who was only slowed down, not defeated by the N2 Mine, and the UN generals are forced to turn the battle over to NERV. However, there appears to be a problem with whatever they’re going to use against the Angel, as it doesn’t have a pilot. Until Gendo points out that Misato just brought them a spare pilot.
After being brought to a room by Dr. Ritsuko Akagi, and having the lights turned out, Shinji is introduced to the weapon that will save us all, the Artificial Human Evangelion Unit 01. In a normal mecha show, the young boy would be shown this giant robot and being told that he was going to pilot it, and this would usually result in him begrudgingly accepting that he needs to pilot it. However, this scene plays out a little bit differently than you might expect. Shinji, as you might imagine, isn’t up for this. He doesn’t know what this thing is and he doesn’t know how to pilot it. Misato and Ritsuko, who have been friendly up until now, are much more serious and tell him to pilot it. Gendo, keep in mind that he’s Shinji’s father, tells him that he expects him to get inside of it. And confirms that he only sent for his son as he “had a use for” him. Yeah. Real picture of paternal love right here… Anyway, Shinji chickens out and they wheel in Rei Ayanami. She’s a pale girl with bright blue hair, wearing a strange skin tight outfit and lot of bandages. She’s clearly not going to survive going inside the Eva, much less fight in it, but she will obey. While Shinji looks at her, the Angel attacks, causing a bank of lights to come loose from the ceiling. Eva Unit 01 moves its arm (exactly as Shinji does) to protect him from the lights falling. It shouldn’t have done that, given how it doesn’t have an “entry plug” or a pilot, and yet it has. Shinji checks on Rei, who was knocked out of her rolling bed by the attack, and his hand comes back covered in blood. Shinji then agrees to pilot the Eva. We then start a sequence of Shinji being in the entry plug, and having to breathe LCL, which will oxygenate his body and smells like blood, and we see the Eva get loaded up and getting ready to launch, with some details about how it works and all that. And then it launches, ending the episode.
Episode Two: Unfamiliar Ceilings
This episode begins almost directly at where the last one left off, with the Eva launching up into the streets of New Tokyo 3, to face the Angel. The Eva stands in place as Shinji receives orders to just focus on walking and he takes a step forward (into terror, perhaps?). They give you a perfect sense of scale with this moment, as the phone booth next to where the Eva’s foot comes down cracks. (For those of you too young to know what I’m talking about, there used to be these glass and steel booths that held landline telephones, that you could use to call people when you were out and about, which had vanished from most of the world by the time we actually reached 2015.) When Shinji tries to have the Eva take another step, he trips and falls flat on his face. While everyone is screaming at him to make the Eva get up, as well as providing him with weapons and lines of retreat, the Angel walks over, picks the Eva up by its head, and then uses its melee attack to damage the Eva’s head. The Angel’s free arm grabs ahold of one of the Eva’s forearms and crushes it, and we see Shinji grabbing his own forearm, having to be told that it’s not actually his arm that was being crushed. The Angel continues its attack and the Eva is thrown back as the wound in its head sprays blood on the building it’s leaning against. Yeah, you read that right, blood. This episode is where they start laying the groundwork for all the weird shit that’s going to be coming as we go forward. Speaking of how this episode is laying foundations, the episode then cuts to Shinji waking up in the hospital, with no idea how he got there. For there, we get treated to how the animation is going to proceed, with use of coloring to wash out the colors of the characters, still scenes used to draw attention to the dialogue being said, and, let’s be honest, what is probably a good way to save money for the really flashy stuff we’re getting. But, I find that these silent, still scenes, with their meditative qualities, are showing just how different Evangelion is when compared to others in the genre that have come before. When most people thought about the Mecha genre back when this show was made, there was a tendency to think about noble heroes fighting flashy battles, but I think that this is a misconception. When I think about the Gundam and Macross series, I find that the heroes weren’t always noble boys going out to win the war. While I will get more into this when I get into these series (when that ever happens), but I don’t think that the more popular Mecha shows were as much like the perception we have, and that while Evangelion did go further than any before it, it was actually building upon what had already been done before, instead of tearing it down. Ahem, anyway. After a very uncomfortable scene with Shinji and Misato running to Commander Ikari when they’re going get on the elevator, we find out that Misato has invited Shinji to live with her. Once we arrive at her home, we discover that Misato is very much a Millennial, in that she can’t keep her home clean because she works too much and drinks too much. Seriously, we were all like this in 2015 and you can’t tell me otherwise. Moving on, there’s the comedic introduction to Pen Pen, the warm springs penguin that pops up here and there from this point on. Once Shinji is laying in bed (showing our first real scene of the SDAT playing good old tracks 25 and 26 on loop), we get a flashback to the rest of the battle with the Angel. To summarize very quickly, Unit 01 goes silent and then berserk, regrowing the damaged forearm (supposedly impossible), and then starting fighting the angel. I’d like to point out that Unit 01 opens its mouth and lets out some very animalistic roars after this, making for an interesting question, what does a giant robot need with a mouth and the ability make noise? The Eva wins pretty quickly, shattering the Angel’s arms (making it bleed blue, thus why we’ll see “blood type: Blue” on screens in the future), and then breaks off a rib to start beating on the big red gem thing in the Angel’s chest. This is the Angel’s Core, which is very important to its survival, so it’s interesting how this uncontrolled Eva, piloted by someone who knows nothing about the Angels or Evas, knows to target this important weak spot. The Angel chooses to end its own existence and tries to take out the Eva with it, but the giant cross shaped explosion doesn’t do too much to the Eva. Well, except the rest of the armor on the head falls off, as Shinji is coming back to reality, and then the eye regrows as Shinji watches in the reflection of a skyscraper.
NOTE: In case you’re wondering, I’m doing two episodes at a time, because that’s how I first watched it back on VHS.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Suggestion: Watch it.
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