Can’t believe I missed Eva discourse here. It’s a series I have a longstanding and unusually personal relationship with, having watched the original series at an especially vulnerable time in my life and finding myself transported back there with every revisitation - no matter how silly these new movies get (and boy do they ever). I’ve been spending three weeks pretty much nonstop thinking about the last movie and trying to organize the many, many thoughts I have about it into a coherent essay which my editor has agreed to publish. I rarely set out to try and take a fully comprehensive approach to talking about a film, but I’m pushing myself for this one because I really, really want to have something interesting and worthwhile to say, and expressing myself in an organized way (as opposed to letting thoughts burst out randomly, out of order and at great length in the context of conversations) is quite simply not easy for me. I now recognize the dilemma of people doing this kind of thing who find themselves stuck between, say, 15-minute reviews and sprawling feature-length video essays: once you decide to expand your focus past one particular angle of media analysis, you want to cover all the angles. And if you believe a piece of media is worth talking about at all, chances are it has many, many angles. It can be difficult to know when to convey a point through a shorthand, abstracted statement, and when to spend five paragraphs elaborating on it. This is why good editors are a big deal!
After tons of procrastination, notes, discussion, rewatches and rewrites, I’m almost done with a rough draft (looking at about 4,000 words) that I’m at least somewhat satisfied with. I’m going to show it to my editors, take a breath, and let it sit for a few days before polishing it up. This likely won’t be my last chance to write about this either, as my editor may let me do a feature for the original Eva movies’ Blu-Ray release in November.
That said - again - I really, really want to have something of value to say. I don’t want to just be another voice in a cacophony of Hot Takes. My rough draft is still quite rough, and my research has not been exhaustive. If anyone with experience in writing, publication or media criticism would like to help me polish this up, I would hugely appreciate any and all feedback - if you DM me, I can send a Google Docs link when I have the completed draft up.
As for the subject matter:
I won’t disagree that Eva is immature! But it’s “immature” in the sense that great pop music or comic books tend to be immature: it isolates a primal emotional reality of young people’s lives and crystallizes it in aestheticized form. Evangelion isolates feelings of loneliness, anxiety, sexual uncertainty, etc. that are very real for young people - particularly mentally ill and/or neurodivergent young people - and uses its genre trappings (powered by Anno’s undisputed genius as a crafter of stylized images) to elevate them to a literally mythic level of cosmic import, which is exactly the way they feel to those experiencing them - and lookd pretty ridiculous to everyone else. The esotericism of the Lore and borrowed Gnostic mythology are a smokescreen (not irrelevant, but a smokescreen) hiding a work that functions so heavily on primal, hyper-personal emotions it all but inevitably collapses into the surreal. It totally is Anno’s therapy session - and it totally is ridiculous! - but Anno’s capacity to channel something raw and bleeding within himself into his chosen medium of pop art, his inability to distinguish the personal from professional, his total convergence of art, product, audience and self - produces a result that I can really only describe as deeply uncanny. And that’s what grabs people.
People look at those cartoon characters suffering and saying intimate, uncomfortable things they themselves might have said - or only thought - and they’re naturally compelled. Like great pop music, people look at Evangelion and see their own individual emotional experiences reflected back in operatic scope and volume. In the realm of artful young adult fiction by true auteurs, I’d easily put Evangelion on par with Lord of the Rings, Star Wars (the good ones), Alan Moore’s Marvel/DC work, what have you. These new movies aren’t in the same league as the original series (and I definitely agree that they paradoxically do not function as stand-alone movies; they’re too deeply enmeshed in Evangelion’s own cultural footprint and place in Anno’s life), but they still retain more than enough auteur idiosyncracy to say that there really isn’t anything else like them coming out now, nor will there be in the foreseeable future. They can be as messy and jagged as they want; they’re still inimitable, even by themselves.