I’ll just start out by saying I don’t think Neon Genesis Evangelion is a particularly good show overall. It’s a legendary series, and it deserves most of the credit it gets since its fingerprints are still being felt all over the anime landscape, and has constant merchandise and media being produced even 25 years after the anime’s original run. That run is also quite the complicated mess. Neon Genesis Evangelion is a show that has a lot of great ideas that gives up on its plot roughly half way through, with incredibly problematic issues. But despite all of that, the show also captures the despair, frustration and anger that defines depression in a powerful and sobering way.
The show has been out of print in North America for many years, but has returned via Netflix with a shiny new English dub (which some people have mixed feelings about). The anime’s return came with much publicity due to its reputation. If you’re not familiar with the plot, it’s a near post-apocalyptic story where an event called the Second Event has wiped out most of humanity and brought civilization as we know it to breaking point. The remains of humanity are under assault by beings called Angels and the only defense against them is the Evas, a series of mechs that can only be piloted by a certain group of teenagers. The Evas aren’t your typical giant robots and are as monstrous and terrifying as the enemies they face at times, leading to some gruesome and unexpected scenes.
The main character is Shinji Ikari, who is thrust into the conflict by his father, Gendo, who abandoned his son long ago. Through the 26 episodes of the show, Shinji and those around him have their lives turned into a living hell. Whether through physical pain, psychological torture or mental angst, no one ends up having much of a good time.
Neon Genesis Evangelion wasn’t the first mecha (giant robot) anime to explore themes of how war and combat affect youth, but it turns things up to such an intense degree it lingers in ways something like Gundam never has. It’s something I’m doubtful we’ll ever see again, at least in the mainstream, due to how raw and rough the show can get.
It also has a host of problems, some really big problems.
There’s a lot in Evangelion that’s a precursor to current anime, and one of the unfortunate ones is its sexualization of minors. While some scenes are well done, like an awkward first kiss between two of the teenage pilots, there’s a lot of camera leering on underage girls, panty shots and unnecessary nudity.
Its treatment of women, in general, gets pretty terrible. One of the best female characters the series introduces, Misato, goes from one of the more interesting and capable characters to a sex-addicted mess and maybe even a pedophile, depending on how far you want to stretch a certain scene in the ending film, End of Evangelion.
While, from a narrative standpoint, Evangelion falls apart about three fourths of the way through and never really recovers, what it becomes after is maybe why it’s remembered as well as it is. The latter half of the series, roughly episode 19 or so, becomes a guttural scream of raw, terrible depression.
It is well documented that the series creator and director, Hideaki Anno, fell into a deep depression during the series, which often led to very late scripts, missed deadlines and verbal fights between him and the rest of the staff. The show, in many ways, became a therapy session for the artist. Characters morph from individuals with defining traits to those traits themselves. Shinji goes from being a young man suffering from depression to depression itself. Asuka, another Eva pilot, goes from an abandoned girl suffering from anger issues to anger itself. A scene from End of Evangelion, where she fights off multiple enemies in a fit of raw rage, makes her seem like the emotion personified against some glorious animation.
That makes the back half of Eva incredibly frustrating from a plot perspective, because we must revisit character development as characters backslide constantly into their flaws, and things become so unclear it’s hard to tell what is and isn’t really happening. None more than Shinji, who gets to a point where any degree of development or happiness is wiped totally away. His despair is like a wheel; no matter how many times he faces his feelings of sadness, abandonment and shame, it comes back around. In the 26 episodes of the original show, we revisit that arc three or more times in roughly the same way, even if through increasingly vague and surreal terms.
Neon Genesis Evangelion perfectly captures that overwhelming feeling of frustrating depression. When those suffering from depression get in those states, it can feel like a pit that you can’t get out of. Issues you once thought you’d passed find their way back into your head, pulling you down. Pulling you back over and over until there seems to be no way out, no way forward, until you just want to scream and say to hell with it all.
That’s how End of Evangelion feels: like a nasty, self-hating piece of work that solely exists to destroy anything left of what had come before. There’s a theory that Anno created the film as a middle finger to fans who sent the studio death threats after disliking the show’s original ending, but there’s nothing to support that and there’s storyboarding that predates the film showing similar scenes suggesting it was always planned in some form (the show basically ran out of budget, leading to an experimental final two episodes that did not go over well with many).
It always felt like a natural end to the strange hybrid giant robot anime/therapy session the show became to me. Someone who tired of the struggle and had, for all intents, just given up. In that way, End of Evangelion is also startlingly beautiful in its animation, music and intensity that has to be seen to believed, despite its violent and, frankly, vile plot contents.
In the end, Neon Genesis Evangelion isn’t a good show. It has a lot of amazing ideas throughout, but is ultimately swallowed by its own themes and is muddied with a lot of problematic material. But because of that, it’s unique. It creates a world in which the end of civilization is slowly but surely creeping toward its inhabitants and, I believe unintentionally, its narrative is driven to a breaking point and is overwhelmed in a mishmash of robots, anger, sadness and hopelessness. It may not be a good show, but it’s worth watching if for no other reason that there’s nothing in the world out there like it, which may very well be for the best.