Evangelion begins with a quiet spark of inspiration. The show opens to a series of establishing shots of an abandoned city. A creature looms over head, and suddenly the world lights up with missiles and bullets as humanity begins a futile fight against this creature, which they call an Angel. A boy named Shinji Ikari is picked up from the city by an organization called NERV in the middle of the fight and brought to an underground chamber. The leader, his estranged father, tells him to pilot a massive robot he has never seen before called Evangelion to defeat the Angel and save the city. Shinji balks at the idea of becoming his father’s tool, and like a tool he is promptly replaced by another pilot. He recants and goes out, slipping and falling and failing before passing out and waking up in a hospital, the angel defeated. From the start we see Shinji’s mind trying to resolve the different aspects of his being. He obeys others unquestioningly to get through the day, but stalls when he feels threatened or used. He seeks praise and affirmation while trying desperately to affirm his lack of worth.
The world of Angels, of Shinji and Evangelion and NERV, of the city of Tokyo III and the blood red sea is a desperate world completely stagnated in time. It has been 15 years since the last Angel attack, and yet having started in the middle of a battle it feels like this world would not exist without the threat of Angels looming over daily life. An ordinary routine is suddenly interrupted by air raid sirens and the city transforms into a fortress to combat their apocalyptic enemy, and yet people casually walk to the shelters as if this were part of the routine itself. It is a world so fraught with tension it goes completely unnoticed. Every time an Angel appears we know it must die so life can continue on as normal, so we can see how Shinji’s school week ends or which NERV character can feel a sense of relief, but as the Angel comes looming over Tokyo III we realize the whole world is balanced on a knife’s edge, and has been there for a long time and could be there for a long time to come. It is as stagnant as it is ephemeral.
And yet as quickly as this meticulously constructed world appears it seems to disappear under the surface for almost half the show. Shinji and the other NERV members take turns receiving standard development and exposition as they continue to deal with the Angels. They come one at a time, once per episode, bringing a unique flavor and sense of desperate struggle but ultimately not passing a “monster of the week” style of storytelling. Having recently rewatched the Rebuild of Evangelion movie series, I would admit that this time is useful in making us care about the wide cast of characters. Certainly it's an enjoyable experience to watch. Even so, hints and imagery from the early episodes go unmentioned, and for a moment it feels like Evangelion could go on forever in similar fashion.
If a spark of inspiration ushered the show in, then it is a spark of madness that opens the curtain on the second half. It starts off innocuous but disquieting: a recap episode ends with Shinji testing another Evangelion and seeing his mother as the robot goes insane and shuts down. Soon the imagery begins to darken. The religious iconography of crosses slowly creeps back into the forefront, as do dream sequences on abandoned subway lines, dolls hanging by nooses from the ceiling, words quickly flashing across the screen. Soon a major character is dead, punishment for his small acts of duplicity throughout the first half, and it happens with little pomp or recognition. The pace quickens as the Angels slow down to a trickle; it is the Angels who threaten to destroy the world, but their absence is the true disturbance to the world on the screen that Evangelion has created for us. For the last three Angels we no longer can be convinced that the world will survive. The children piloting the Evangelion are being crushed from within as well as from without.
This spark of madness is famously that of director Anno Hideaki’s own depression, and of his torturing of the series as a way of coping with his own demons. The show, while cutting edge in its imagery, had been plagued with animation problems and setbacks throughout, but towards the end it truly begins bursting at the seams. Still images dominate key scenes, while some shots are not even colored in. In parallel to this, every moment of character development in the former part of the show is juxtaposed against an irreconcilable setback in the latter part. In the first half we see a scientist come to terms with her mother, who created a computer to adjudicate over Tokyo III before passing on and becoming part of the computer itself, leaving her behind. In the second half we see the moment where her mother passes on; one of the pilots psychologically tortures the woman, which leads to a bizarre double suicide. One of the pilots, having strengthened her confidence and sense of being over the course of so many episodes, finds herself losing her mental concentration, her piloting abilities, and ultimately her place in NERV over a single episode. The next episode opens with her in a bathtub filled with what appears to be her own blood.
Shinji’s self-righteous self-hatred builds and builds at the forefront of it all, as he becomes less and less functional. He is the center of the show, and completely insufferable. He is whiny, petulant, indecisive, insubordinate, and self-centered. He is treated terribly by the adults around him, who purport to know what is best for him but who force him into terrible traumatizing circumstances with little or no empathy. The character of Shinji is a revolutionary insight into the world of Japan in the 90’s, right after an economic miracle of over forty years came crashing down into a depression still present today. Rampant suicides, unemployment, depression, and strained family situations dominated the years following 1991. A fourteen-year-old watching Evangelion as it aired in 1995 would have spent his formative years in the lap of luxury before experiencing puberty at the gates of hell. Only fourteen-year-olds can pilot the Evangelion, and so we experience the pilots thrust into this hell with no recognition of their outstanding sacrifice for humanity in parallel to the children of the 80’s learning how cruel the world can truly be. And yet Shinji is more than the child of the depression, as he is also Japan itself. The writer Takashi Murakami noted that post-war Japan simultaneously expressed inferiority in their defeat and superiority in their willingness to admit their inferiority. This climate created the arrogant humility of the late 20th century, and ultimately created the despicable human that is Shinji Ikari.
Now Japan has settled in to this stagnant economic atmosphere, and while the setting of Evangelion rings just as true as before, it may be that the tension and confusion it brought no longer has a place in the hearts of its viewers. Evangelion remains one of the few required shows for any true anime fan, but to watch it with no knowledge of its history or no intent to delve into its psychoanalytic meanings is to render the experience useless. It holds up today as a fairly strong mecha show that ultimately devolves into absurdism. But make no mistake: Evangelion defined anime in the 90’s, reviving it from the brink of being consigned to oblivion in the post-depression climate, and ushering in the third and arguably greatest generation of the anime medium. The writers, having already admitted to using gnostic symbolism as a flashy way to attract attention and create a sense of mystery, inadvertently captured the essence of Western religion in the post-war Japan. Everything is about the Other, the mysterious invading forces that come from without and within, the physically violent and the psychologically damaging, the sense of collective responsibility and the sense of personal discontent. There will inevitably come another time when Evangelion will capture the feelings of the Japanese—and possibly viewers from around the globe—like no other show will. I hope that time doesn't come soon.