captain When I watched it years ago (i.e. when I was younger and foolish..er) all I had was the Manga DVD! Compressed, windowboxed image, washed out colors, oh la la… bad stuff.
You are in luck because the embargo just expired for me to say that the HD restoration of the original films is gonna be on various pay-to-own digital platforms in November (assuming you don’t care to watch it on Netflix) in addition to the full series Blu-Ray set coming out - though I’m not sure if it’ll have a sub/dub track by the guy who did the Netflix/Amazon translations or the original Manga tracks. (The premium disc sets will have both, meaning they know how much people hate the new ultra-literal “official” translations lmao.) I know I’ll sure as hell be rewatching it, and hopefully writing about it (and the wealth of new features in the disc set, including a drastically extended version of the live-action sequence glimpsed briefly in the film). That said, I have a lot of nostalgic fondness for the Manga DVDs: for ages I thought the washed-out, hazy look of the films was intentional, because of how well it accentuates their dreamlike atmosphere. And the menus, of all things, are absolute knockouts:
I do think you may be misremembering the film too, because there really is not all that much expository babble in it - it’s almost entirely action, with the occasional NERV technobabble layered on top of said action (but again, not nearly as much as in the show).
You’re also totally not wrong about the reasons why 2.0 does what it does thematically, I just think it hews too close to crude harem-like fanservice that warps all the characters around Shinji instead of giving them plausible inner lives of their own. It also just doesn’t cohere structurally as a film: it’s still, at heart, a condensed TV series! 3.0 is conspicuously not like this. 3+1 is… I don’t even know. It’s more like the second one I guess, but at 2.5 hours it has more time to at least try and cover the excessive number of bases it’s decided to try and attend to. It’s unusually segmented for a feature film - you can definitely tell that Anno broke the script and production work down into distinct chapters, which were allegedly produced in chronological order - with the final segment of the film not even being written until most of it was complete. I just watched the last half-hour or so (“Part D”) for the fourth time, and I do think at least that portion of the film is about as good as anything Anno’s done with animation in 24 years. The hour-and-change preceding that, on the other hand…
Also my piece is already ridiculously overdue, thankfully my editor is happy to play it fast and loose on this one. It started as a regular review, and then it… ballooned.
rejj I think you’re both right about Mari, lol. She epitomizes these films’ identity crisis. By the end of the last film there’s an evident symbolic purpose for her presence, but still no real dramatic purpose and the symbolism borders on “yes we wrote this character badly on purpose” territory in a way that merits serious side-eye - especially since she so clearly also serves that more cynical function.
It’s also interesting to note that despite being way more lurid about “fanservice”, the Rebuild series is way, way less about sex and sexual hangups, thematically speaking, than the original. That’s all I’ll say without spoilers, but depending on how charitable one chooses to be it could either be because Anno is happily married now, or because smacking discomforting sexual subtext and Cronenberg or HR Gigeresque imagery on your PG-13 blockbuster is not great for commercial viability.
Also, I rewatched a few episodes of the TV show this evening, and it definitely struck me how much having cowriters helped Anno manage pacing, structure, tone and interweaving plotlines compared to his free reign in the movies, lol
