Anime Neon Genesis Evangelion

[Guest terraforce991]

no i have not

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But I watch the show.

[duoikari]

have you watched all the show cos you should only watch the moives after you have seen the series, oh and if you still don't get the series then read the manga :animeswea .After evangelion is pretty hard to follow and if you don't get the series then you won't get either one of the movies.

And also the moives spoil the series. :catgirl:

[Guest terraforce991]

I am going to get the manga soon

[Slade]

I ve seen both anime and movie of Evangelion and I have to say I love it. I really dont like the main character shingi(sp). I hate is inability to make up his mind or to actually put his foot down and voice his own opinion...which the anime actually targeted. I think I dont really like him because he is actually apart of us in some way. Meaning we all have that side of us who dont like making up our own mind and sometimes wish people could decide for us.Its our shy side or lonely side that I guess I dont like to show and thats probably why I sont like him too much because he expresses our weaker side of the human emotion or thoughts. ;)

The movie is totally different from the ending of the anime...so I would suggest watching the whole anime first then the movie....although the movie does show parts of the anime its not enough to graps the movies plot.

[Dagger]

[quote name='Hiko seijuro 14']I really dont like the main character shingi(sp). I hate is inability to make up his mind or to actually put his foot down and voice his own opinion...which the anime actually targeted. I think I dont really like him because he is actually apart of us in some way. Meaning we all have that side of us who dont like making up our own mind and sometimes wish people could decide for us.Its our shy side or lonely side that I guess I dont like to show and thats probably why I sont like him too much because he expresses our weaker side of the human emotion or thoughts. ;)[/quote]
Quoted for truth.

I think you're absolutely right. That's exactly what Shinji is supposed to represent, and that's why he makes people uncomfortable and--at least in some cases--provokes a visceral, almost irrationally strong dislike, something closer to revulsion than annoyance. I also find it impressive that you can admit that while still disliking him; there are fans who hate him so much that they could never ever make that kind of concession.

Anyway, I still haven't seen the movies, haha. But I'm hoping to rectify that, come Christmas. :p

~Dagger~

[EVA Unit 100]

[QUOTE=Dagger]Anyway, I still haven't seen the movies, haha. But I'm hoping to rectify that, come Christmas. :p

~Dagger~[/QUOTE]

Skip Death and Rebirth. Totally useless clipshow whose only gimmicks are now obsolete given the releases of the platinum director's cuts and The End of Evangelion.

The End of Evangelion is recommended viewing, if only for the fact it properly ends the plot of the series (unlike the last two episodes) while still allowing us to look into the character's minds (like the last two episodes, only better). However, it's quality other than that is highly debatable. If you can handle the gore and sexual content (including a very distrubing opening about... you don't wanna know), the first half of the movie is by far the best material that the series has put out, with an explaination of Instrumentality, an amazing battle between Asuka and the rest EVA units, and a well-written conversation between Shinji and Misato leading up to a very sad death. The second half of the movie, on the other hand, falls into the trap of the Matrix prequels and is nearly all symbolism. I actually know quite a bit about the material being refferenced, and yet I was still totally confused. We do get some development of Shinji, which is nice, and if you're into Rei fanservice and an immense pervert you might have some fun with the fate of that particular character, but overall the whole second act of the film plays as an R-rated version of FLCL as told by an extremely religious kid with an Edipus complex and severe depression. In other words, it can be somewhat interesting, but also downright painful to watch. The end of the film I found oddly satisfying, but it's done in such a vague manner that it can be interpretted in less positive ways. Watch the film any way you can, but be warned: it'll definately drive you totally insane if you aren't perpared.

[Kenshin DX]

Just finished the series and I have to say that was one of the sloppiest endings I have ever seen. Great sereis but it didnt resolve itself or answer any of your questions. Its a great series until you reach the last two. Im hoping End of Evangelion wraps the story up.

[Dagger]

Got my hands on the movie (thanks, Santa). I'm deeply irritated that even the latest edition isn't done in anamorphic widescreen, which meant that it was about the size of a postage stamp on my monitor, but whatever. The good thing is that I didn't love it quite enough to plunk down my money for the anamorphic R2J DVD--although that might happen sometime in the future. Meh.

Anyway, this came at a good time. I've been watching a lot of slice-of-life stuff lately, and seeing EoE really reinvigorated me. I liked it quite a bit, although it never gave me shivers or anything, the way that the end of the TV series did. I even felt that the live-action footage worked pretty well in the context of the film, which is something I thought I'd never say about any anime.

It would be tiresome to hash over the things I enjoyed, so I'll just mentioned stuff I didn't care for. I did want to say that I thought the vocal song choices were very good, though. I didn't find myself glancing at the clock, either, which is unusual for me. Anyway...

[spoiler]One thing that really frustrated me was the abruptness of Asuka's transformation/revelation. Everything that happened after it was unbelievably cool, but I just couldn't buy into how she reached that frame of mind. They could at least have spent another minute or two on it.

My second complaint is actually very similar. I didn't see any reason for Rei to reject Gendou, given how her character was built up in the TV series. That needed to receive more screen time--it should have been a monumental decision for her, even if she chose to communicate it in her usual calm way, and I would have preferred to have gotten a better sense of that.

The romantic language ("Let's just be friends" and so forth) used in one of the later sequences seemed a little off to me. I understand how it fits, but to me it just seemed off.

I was unpleasantly startled by the ending scene. In my opinion, it should have come slightly earlier. The shot of the moon, the sun and then Unit-01 would have worked better as a final image, along with the narration that accompanied it.[/spoiler]

All things considered, I prefer the TV ending, but EoE was obviously worth watching. Next time I might watch 1-24, then EoE, then 25 & 26, just to shake things up.

~Dagger~

[Guest Zieg666]

I got the new platinum series theres some commemtary that explains a little about the last two eps. for the series but its not much.and death and rebirth is a waste of time,all it is is a recape of all the episodes and the first half of end of evangelion its only worth it for the extras and to see the scene with shinji and asuka once in both movies,lol :D

[GUNmanZERO7]

Who loves Neon Genesis Evangelion? I think its an awesome an ime plus its an older anime. The music is good and so is the action. So its not all that great but its sweet nontheless.

[Judgement]

Yeah I think Neon Genisis Evangelion is awesome, music and all. I like the fact on how it is so serious at times but funny too. The best thing about it is the action. Mecha battles are so cool :animesmil

[the_sixth_child]

I got teh entire series and four directers cut ep. I love it! Thought I hate Shinji [spoiler]for killing Karowu[/spoiler] :animecry: ...I hate him! :mad:

[GUNmanZERO7]

people who hate the show must be nuts. The episode when Shinji is at the spring with the penguin, Asuka,and Misato is super funny.

[Guest AnimeRules15421]

I think RahXephon is way better and not a rip off of N.G.A. Also it has better music,artwork and character's.

[INDENT][COLOR=DarkRed][SIZE=1]AnimeRules15421, please try to stay on topic. If you would ike to talk about RahXephon, please use the RahXephon forum. It seems that nothing you are saying has anything to do with the conversation at hand. At best, this could be considered a troll, and trolls can not be permitted. -Arvi[/SIZE][/COLOR][/INDENT]

[GUNmanZERO7]

Who's karowu? [spoiler]THe Episode when Shinji quit but went back was both sweet and gruesome. The true Evangelion is cool. Hell, it eats angels for crying out loud. And I think the Evas are angels. EvANGELion.[/spoiler] RahXephon pales in comparison with Neon Genesis Evangelion. It is a good show but the classic Evangelion series is better.

[Kenshin DX]

^^Karowu is [spoiler] the last angel who is first Shinjis friend but betrays him and tries to activate Adam[/spoiler].

[Starwind]

[spoiler]The evas aren't angels exactly. They're close, but they're different. Karowu becomes close friends with Shinji, only to destroy his mind in a final brutal act that plunges poor Shinji into the deapths of despair.[/spoiler] True, RahXephon is entertaining, but it's also true tha it pales to the Eva series.

[Retribution]

[quote name='Starwind][spoiler']The evas aren't angels exactly.[/spoiler][/quote]
[size=1]Come on, folks. Let's try to use the spoiler tags more -- better to be overly cautions than to ruin it for someone.

Really? I thought that [spoiler]the EVAs were "tamed" Angels so to speak, and that's why they had the armor on. I even thought there was a whole episode devoted to equating the EVAs to the Angels, in that they're the same.[/spoiler][/size]

[Dagger]

[quote name='GUNmanZERO7]RahXephon pales in comparison with Neon Genesis Evangelion. It is a good show but the classic Evangelion series is better.[/QUOTE][QUOTE=Starwind']True, RahXephon is entertaining, but it's also true tha it pales to the Eva series.[/quote]
Your truth is not my truth. :p

Eva and Rah have different strengths. On an emotional level, I think the last six or so episodes of Soukyuu no Fafner outdoes both of them. If the series had stuck to that level of quality throughout, I would personally have ranked it far above them. The Fafner OVA is ridiculously good, for that matter.

But that's all beside the point. I imagine Evangelion would have left me cold had I not (bizarrely enough) fallen in love with the ending. RahXephon tells a different story and tells it well. Is Eva more of a mindtrip? Yes. Does RahXephon make more sense overall? Yes. Are the Aztec/Mayan references and symbolism better or more relevant than the Judeo-Christian references and symbolism? Pick your poison.

Don't mind me; I've been following an Eva vs. Rah thread at another forum, so I had it on the brain. Ah well. Honestly, though, it's ten years too early to call Eva a classic.

~Dagger~

[EVA Unit 100]

[QUOTE=Dagger]Don't mind me; I've been following an Eva vs. Rah thread at another forum, so I had it on the brain. Ah well. Honestly, though, it's ten years too early to call Eva a classic.

~Dagger~[/QUOTE]

I'd say that the fact that EVA is still causing controversy a decade after it originally aired means that it's a pretty safe bet to call it a classic. I associate classicness less with age and more with timelessness. For example, Spirited Away is only 5 years old, but all of the 50 or so times I've watched it, it feels just as fun and exciting as it did when it came out, so I consider it a classic. Something like, say, the Transformers movie, though 20 years old, was crap even when it first came out and certainly doesn't hold up today, so I wouldn't consider it a classic.

[Dagger]

[quote name='EVA Unit 100']I'd say that the fact that EVA is still causing controversy a decade after it originally aired means that it's a pretty safe bet to call it a classic.[/quote]
Is it a classic compared to Touch, Mobile Suit Gundam, Saint Seiya, Urusei Yatsura, Ashita no Joe, Rose of Versailles, Galaxy Express 999, all the Masterpiece Theater series, etc.? Even among Anno/Gainax anime, I think Gunbuster or Wings of Honneamise would be more qualified...

It's not that I mean to totally downplay Eva's importance; if any show were going to achieve classic-in-a-decade status, it would be something like Eva. Even so, I sort of feel that this makes people (myself included) overlook the "real" classics. There's a tendency among English-speaking fans to jump the gun when it comes to declaring a particular title to be one for the ages (I like FMA, but it's hardly a classic!). I've come to think that stuff from Eva's period--including fare like Utena and Escaflowne--is at best teetering on the edge.

That's veering off-topic, though. :)

~Dagger~

[Fasteriskhead]

Frankly, I have no idea whether Evangelion should be considered a "classic" or not. I have no idea what criteria would qualify it for that position. However, I do get the sense that calling it a classic is something similar to putting it at the head of our top ten lists or giving it an award (complete with embossed plaque!). It's just posturing, and tells us nothing about what the series means.

On the other hand, if we were to take "classicalness" in the sense of the historical impact on the history of anime (saying nothing about its quality), then there's not much that would qualify as [I]more [/I] classic than NGE. I may be speaking too generally here, but at the risk of overstating my case: Evangelion made it respectable to do televised anime again. If you're curious, you can take a look at the anime that was coming out in the early '90s: while there's a lot of good stuff there, most of it is in movies or OVAs. The TV series, in contrast, are nearly a wasteland - there's some excellent material there, but it's mostly relegated to either the remakes (e.g. Tekkaman Blade) or the shows that had already proven themselves as OVAs (e.g. Tenshi Universe). Only very rarely do you get something that can stand on its own (e.g. Nadia), and even the good shows are hampered by low budgets, throwaway episodes galore, and good ideas that simply go unrealized. And then, by '98, you've got Cowboy Bebop. What happened? While it's unfeasable to credit it all to NGE (certainly the advent of the American market had something to do with this as well), I'd say it was one of the most defining factors. Eva itself suffered under the same kinds of budget constraints as all the other shows, and it too was a throwback to the mecha shows of the '80s, but crucially it made it possible to take televised anime [I]seriously [/I] again. Without Evangelion, or at least something with a similar kind of impact in terms of the market situation, televised anime may well have remained a ghetto.

But who cares about any of that history stuff anyways. I won't go into the kind of artistic impact it had on the scene, but if you've been paying attention at all to the past decade or so the scope of that should also be pretty obvious.

All of this, of course, is to say nothing about what Evangelion actually means. In recent years (since about '00-'01, say) it's been fashionable to regard the series as something silly, as a mishmash of important-sounding words and ridiculous imagery that ultimately results in nothing more than a big whine-fest that falls apart by the end, where it tries to get "artistic." Thankfully, the tide seems to be turning against this kind of thinking (which is strange, because it's recognizably easier to laugh at something trying to be meaningful than it is to take it at all seriously, warts and all). Were Evangelion really reducible to just a collection of Christian imagery, psychoanalysis and Kierkegaard, it truly would be something silly no matter how well it was put together. It isn't, however, and any attempt to reduce it as such falls apart upon watching, say, the scene in episode 9 (the episode furthest removed from the mood of the later series!!) between Asuka and Shinji the night before the show's battle. Frankly, we don't have anything more than an inkling of what this scene means. We assume it's about "loneliness" or whatever and move on, maybe assuming it's just "pretentious," and that scene is by no means alone in this. If there's any reason to say that NGE isn't a classic, it's that we haven't even started to think about it; at best we've dissected it into a Freud reference here, a Kabbalah reference there, and that's not even getting out of the gate.

None of this is to say that NGE's a perfect show by any means (go watch Lilliputian Hitcher is you don't believe me). But it does have something to say, and it's something we're not listening to if we're trying to figure out whether it or Rahxephon has the better mech design, etc..

[EVA Unit 100]

[quote name='Dagger']Is it a classic compared to Touch, Mobile Suit Gundam, Saint Seiya, Urusei Yatsura, Ashita no Joe, Rose of Versailles, Galaxy Express 999, all the Masterpiece Theater series, etc.?[/quote]

Well, yes, given that EVA holds up just as well, if not better than those series. Something like FMA I wouldn't classify as a classic but that's because I still haven't finished the series and in order for something to be "classic" in my opinion it has to have repeat value. It's a gripping storyline, but once I've seen the whole thing I don't know how much I'd enjoy rewatching it outside of long marathons of big chunks of the series and/or certain outstanding episodes (then again, I feel the same way about Mobile Suit Gundam, but MSG gets classic status due to it's positive historical significance). It's great entertainment, but I just don't get the feeling it would gain anything beyond simple praise if it hasn't already gotten that level of greatness (being a few years older in Japan, I can make a pretty good estimate of what the general thoughts on the show are). EVA is possibly better on second viewing and was already making huge waves in the industry while it was still airing and has been making waves for years after that so I'd consider it to be a "true classic" just as much as I'd consider Urusei Yatsura one.

[Dagger]

[quote name='EVA Unit 100']...in order for something to be "classic" in my opinion it has to have repeat value. It's a gripping storyline, but once I've seen the whole thing I don't know how much I'd enjoy rewatching it outside of long marathons of big chunks of the series and/or certain outstanding episodes...[/quote]
That's more or less where we disagree (although this is all a matter of semantics anyway). The idea of something being a "classic" is, to me, necessarily objective (insofar as it's possible for identifying particular shows as such to even be objective). Replay value, on the other hand, varies hugely from person to person.

That's why the passage of time is key. The fan backlash that Fasteriskhead referred to is actually part of the process; the sheer vitriol that can be found in some quarters indicates that it's too early for members of the fandom to regard Eva without eyes clouded by either the emotional/intellectual impact it had on them when they first watched it, or, conversely, the bitterness and resentment they felt when they first thought it didn't live up to the hype. The unfortunate thing is that Eva does get overhyped to an almost silly degree, even now, and that in itself makes people want to dismiss it.

No one, even if they think it's ridiculous and obsolete, can deny the significance of Mobile Suit Gundam. I would be the last person to argue that Eva isn't a seminal work, but it hasn't quite reached that point yet--which is the main thrust of what I was saying. Of course, I'm not exactly a scholar of this kind of thing; I can only argue it so far before I get way out of my depth.

I suppose what it gets down to is that I have a problem with people declaring "RahXephon blah blah blah, but Eva is better [i]because it's a classic[/i]." It just strikes me as being lazy. "Fine," I want to answer, "But even if we just assume it's a classic in every sense of the word and leave it be, that says absolutely nothing about why you personally prefer it." Can't they come up with better evidence with which to argue that point? Say--the rawness of the character development, the uncompromising realism of Shinji's portrayal, the music, the unsettling directing choices, whatever. Those are the kinds of things that make for a far more interesting discussion than all this talk about classics that I've been guilty of prolonging.

~Dagger~

[GUNmanZERO7]

[quote name='Ramen_Mido]^^Karowu is [spoiler] the last angel who is first Shinjis friend but betrays him and tries to activate Adam[/spoiler'].[/quote]

Is he the one with the glasses and camera who drasticly wants to pilot an Eva?
Who is adam?

------

I dont care but tell me what happens after unit 01's awaerning Just the next episode or to. I might not be able to watch it.

[INDENT][COLOR=DarkRed][INDENT]GUNmanZERO7, please do not double post. There is an edit button at the bottom of each of your posts. Use this button if you have something more you wish to say. -r2[/INDENT][/COLOR][/INDENT]