Neon Genesis Evangelion Rewatch is a series of essays where Willow Maclay will be covering the streaming release of Hideaki Anno’s landmark anime show.
Clip shows are not synonymous with greatness. They’re the sort of episodes that television shows used to run when they were behind schedule, or over-budget or looking for an easy way to do the bare-minimum. Episode fourteen of Hideaki Anno’s anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion is a clip show, but it subverts expectations by pulling the rug out from underneath viewers in a shocking second-half that marks an entirely new direction for the television show. The first half of this episode is presented as a military report to SEELE, a secret organization controlling the military installation of NERV, who are fighting the monsters known as Angels that are ravaging the city of Tokyo-3. Most television shows would merely take the footage that already exists and replay it without any additional context or modification. It’s what viewers have come to expect of clip episodes, but animation studio GAINAX does something unique by presenting the images differently than they were initially broadcast. The military report covers all of the Angel attacks, but with a matter-of-fact presentation which strips the previously seen action sequences of all bombast. The music that usually accompanies these battles is gone, replaced with long stretches of silence over title cards that show the information of the military report. In-between there are quick cuts that show viewers all they need to see of the battle. Images of lead pilot Shinji Ikari’s torment in the aftermath of battle is excised, now only showing the end result: a job-well done and a mission completed. A clip is shown of the giant, robotic EVA unit that Shinji pilots roars and kills the Angel in the second episode. The clip show begins to work like montage, with a specific rhythm of the Eva delivering the final blow of each Angel, followed by more information in title cards, until all the Angels up to this point have been defeated. Throughout this clip portion there are little additions to give outsider context of those who aren’t fighting the battles, but living through the incident as citizens. These scenes are structured as interviews, but startling sentences like “no one was afraid, not even the youngest girls” paints a portrait of normalized terror. Something becomes less stressful if you experience it often enough, even life and death.
After these clips play, the officials at SEELE state that their plan to unleash the Human Instrumentality Project, about which we still don’t know much, is happening too fast. In addition to this, the officials worry that the Angel that attacked in episode thirteen, by trying to manifest itself in their computer defence systems, nearly disrupted their plans. The entire project could have ended in disaster. Gendo Ikari, Shinji’s father, the lead research scientist on the Eva units for NERV and the man spearheading the Human Instrumentality Project, is mostly quiet during this meeting. When pressed, he states that everything is going according to plan as it is read in the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is the first mention of this artifact playing a key role in SEELE’s intentions to unleash the Human Instrumentality Project. In previous episodes some information on what this project is about has been delivered. It is their intention to force an evolution upon the human race, in order to both become something greater than human, perhaps God, and to finally defeat the angels. No one knows of this project except SEELE and those that work for them. Even during this scene it is confusing to truly clarify what SEELE want to bring about the world, and the Angels, the creation of the Eva units, and the adolescent pilots somehow all play a part.
Up to this point you could argue that there’s nothing especially out of the ordinary about this episode in terms of plotting. Even with the re-contextualization of previous images around the basis of a clip show and the meeting at SEELE, Evangelion still looks and feels like itself. That changes directly after the SEELE meeting closes and the show cuts to the mysterious young pilot Rei Ayanami. In previous episodes about Rei her life and journey was always handled with a third-person perspective. She was always being seen or talked about from the vantage point of other characters. The show never shifted to the world as she sees it. That changes here, and we finally begin to grapple with Rei’s thought process. In voiceover she recites a poem on nature, existence, and having a body. The accompanying images are not animated. They’re still drawings of landscapes, flowers, and skies. Rei states that she “hates the color red,” and the image finally moves again with a hard cut away from the still frames and into an image of blood cells in a human body. Rei’s poem becomes more abstract and the images follow suit. She says she “is a woman who never bleeds,” implying that she isn’t biologically capable of having children, and a statement that doubles as a theory that she may not be human at all, but something created by the scientists at NERV. She reads that, “a city is a human creation...an Eva is a human creation… What is a human? A creation of God?”, but her poem breaks when she gets to next the stanza. She asks, “who am I?”, and there’s an image of her foregrounded in a celestial space, but then she asks, “what am I?”, shifting herself away from humanity, and that image of her in space repeats out into infinity like a mirror. All the while she repeats the phrase “what am I?” over and over again. We don’t know who Rei Ayanami is, and she doesn’t either.
Before this scene, Rei had always been framed as someone who exists in a supernatural space. Her first appearance in the television show, all the way back in episode one, treated her almost like a ghost. Shinji Ikari saw her briefly on an abandoned highway, before she disappeared in the blink of an eye. She’s always been quiet and withdrawn, seeming like a body without soul, and after this startling peek into her mental state it becomes obvious that there’s something wrong with her. In the following scene the show emphasizes this even further. It’s business as usual at NERV. Dr. Ritsuko Akagi and lead military operations officer Major Misato Katsuragi might even call it a quiet day, because they haven’t had to deal with an Angel attack. They’re running mental sync testing again on Shinji, Rei, and Asuka, the child pilots of the Eva units, but with the added twist of seeing if Shinji and Rei could pilot different Evas. The sync testing for Rei is normal and she meshes well with Shinji’s Eva, but the same can’t be said for Shinji while being in Ayanami’s robot. Shinji panics, screaming that “something is trying to get into my brain.” There’s a cut to a black void where Rei’s ghostly body floats closer and closer to the screen, until she tilts her head up and reveals her face. It isn’t the normal monotone expression of Ayanami, but something twisted, demonic even, with bright red eyes and a giant smile pushing the borders of the mouth to its breaking point. The image is just a flash, but afterward the Eva unit goes berserk with Shinji inside. This image of Rei that is living inside the Eva unit is haunted. The robot fights back as much as it can, punching the wall and mirror where the Rei we are familiar with is visible. It’s easy to argue that the Eva unit was trying to destroy Rei, but Ritsuko thinks it was trying to kill her. Ritsuko knows something that the others do not and in the following episode even asks Gendo Ikari if “Rei and Shinji would hate them forever if they knew how the Eva units were created?”
Even after these destabilizing scenes, one of which relies upon abstract montage, the episode isn’t without a final twist. Gendo sits in his office, overlooking Tokyo-3, and his second in command, Kouzou Fuyutsuki, asks him how the “Adam Project” is commencing. He asks if they’ve found the “Spear of Longinus.”.They have. The next time we see Rei she is back in her Eva unit. A time jump perhaps, because it’s disorienting to place these scenes beside one another. The visual language of this scene is ominous, and compounded by the two scenes involving Rei that take place directly before this one. The deepest levels of NERV as a headquarters are completely abandoned, lit by only the faintest of light sources. It obviously was not overseen by the same people who built the flashing lights and super computers of their battle stations. This area is hidden, and only Gendo, the rest of SEELE and Rei know about it. In her arms Rei is carrying a weapon: the Spear of Longinus. A trump card. It’s something to fear later: An item of great importance.
Neon Genesis Evangelion had a troubled production history, which only engendered a stronger sense of fable around the television show. Hideaki Anno’s previous television show for GAINAX, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990-1991),was a financial loser and the stress of working on that series sent Anno into a deep depression.1 Anno was attached at one point to direct a film adaptation of the series, but nothing ever came of it and GAINAX wasn’t able to recoup the losses of this television property until Neon Genesis Evangelion proved to be a worldwide phenomenon among anime fans. In 1995, During pre-production of Evangelion, Japan also saw a great tragedy befall their nation when a doomsday cult attacked a Japanese railway station with sarin gas with hopes of ushering in an apocalypse. The attacks hewed too closely to a plot that Evangelion was covering. Creator Hidaki Anno feared censorship from the Japanese government and had to scrap initial plans for the back half of the television show.2 In addition to this unforeseen tragedy, the production team at GAINAX were frequently behind schedule or pushing deadlines to their absolute limit, which forced the show to redevelop on the fly numerous times. Anno also became obsessed with a book on psychology during the making of the television series and decided to change direction around episode sixteen to a more philosophical interrogation of the human psyche.3 This is all to say that Evangelion was in a state of flux while making the clip show episode. Previous circumstances, some of Hidaki Anno’s own making and others the production staff at GAINAX had no control over, would dictate where the show would go next and how it would look. The new chapter of Evangelion begins when Rei asks herself, “what am I?”
Before the next stage of the show could take off there was another episode which gave viewers much needed context for a main character on the show. In episode thirteen chief scientist at NERV, and Eva expert,Dr. Ritsuko Akagi is given the spotlight, and we learn a lot about what drives her as a scientist. The theme of having parental issues extends to a character once again. Anno’s interest in psychology, specifically Jungian and Freudian ideas, is draped in the imagery of Evangelion. In this episode it is melded into a computer. NERV’s computer defence systems were created by Ritsuko’s mother, and she dubbed this operation the MAGI. During the process of creating this system Ritsuko’s mother donated her brain to the computer so that it may have all the contradictions of human thought. Her brain was split into three sections, each controlling a different operating system. This is the first clear indication that the technology that NERV are operating is a melding of human and machine, which sheds some light on why the Eva units seem to be made of flesh and metal. Her mother’s decision to give her entire life creation of the MAGI defence system is something Ritsuko respects deeply as a scientist. She can understand her mother’s decision in those terms, but she cannot comprehend why she would give up her motherhood to do so or why she would make this decision as a woman. Ritsuko tries to understand, but she seems haunted by her mother’s decision. This is something she has to think about constantly, as Ritsuko oversees the MAGI, essentially working with her mother on a daily basis.
When the newest Angel makes itself known as a computer operations system virus it throws all of this conflict into light. This episode is special, having the distinction of being the only one where an Angel is defeated by a human person, in this case Ritsuko, and not an Eva unit. What plays out is a cyber-thriller/hacker plot and Ritsuko eventually saves the day with quick thinking and a deep understanding of how the MAGI unit functions due to it containing the brain of her mother. This isn’t the most thrilling encounter with an Angel because it doesn’t contain any semblance of action beyond a keyboard battle and a last second insertion of a virus into the beast which forces it to delete itself, but it does give you a window into Ritsuko and why she fights. She does so to be closer to her mother.
All the way back in the earliest episodes of Evangelion there’s a curious reveal that underneath the purple chrome of Shinji Ikari’s Eva unit was flesh. A little later there was a startling moment of sequential editing where Shinji is staring into the eye of the robot. The image cuts three times until there is an extreme close-up of the eye. When the Eva unit blinks the color contrast is reversed and Shinji screams. His Eva unit 01 was always a mystery, and its biological realities have been slowly revealed. At this point in the series there’s no clarification on how these creatures were made. They were a last defence to fend off the Angels, and the show has gestured toward their origins being horrifying. Beyond the clarification of what these Eva units are actually made of there’s this intensifying metaphor that to be in the Eva unit is akin to being inside a “womb.” The cockpit of the Eva’s is made up of LCL fluid, an invention of NERV which helps the pilot’s mentally sync up with the robots. The pilot is submerged into the cockpit and the fluid smells like “blood”. Asuka makes anoff-hand remark during sync-testing that Shinji is “back in the womb” when he entered Rei’s Eva Unit. It was a joke, meant to humiliate Shinji, but there’s something more to it than hazing, and with each successive reveal the idea of these pilots being inside the womb of the Eva unit becomes a stronger one. This becomes more than just metaphor in episode sixteen.
I’ve extensively covered Shinji Ikari’s problems with his father Gendo in previous entries of this series on Neon Genesis Evangelion, but never once has the question of Shinji’s mother come up. That changes in this batch of episodes. There’s a wedding between NERV employees happening in episode fifteen and it gives Misato and Asuka a chance to talk about things like dresses and romantic partners with a casualness that Shinji overhears from his bedroom. He envies the loose conversation between girls. He’s too coarse and jagged and inside of himself to truly break free and join in, so he lays in his bedroom with a pillow placed over his face. Shinji can’t go to the wedding because it’s on the anniversary of his mother’s death. There’s no information given about how she died, but when Shinji visits her the following day it says on the tombstone that Yui Ikari passed away in 2004, which was comfortably after the Second Impact happened in the year 2000. The graveyard is strange looking, with the appearance of monoliths popping up out of the ground in an abandoned desert in images that feel positively Jodorowsky-ian. Shinji is nervous about visiting his mother’s grave because that’s where his tendencies to run away from conflict began. When his mother died Shinji was barely old enough to comprehend what was happening, but in 2012, Shinji ran away from his father when he couldn’t face visiting the grave again. This fractured their relationship, and has been something of a burden between them going forward. In episode twelve Shinji was given praise from his father for doing a good job and as such he feels decent about his relationship right now, but like always, he overthinks everything the night before. When Shinji and Gendo visit the grave they have a casual conversation, but Gendo lets something slip that’s startling. Yuri’s body isn’t buried where the monument lay. No one’s really sure what happened to her. Gendo says the grave is just a decoration. For Shinji, getting his father to say this much was a massive success, and he thanks him for the conversation. In Shinji’s mind he is growing. He’s getting better at piloting the Eva unit. He’s a little more outspoken in front of his father, and most importantly he didn’t run away when he had to confront his mother’s tombstone like last time.
In the following episode Shinji is thrilled to hear that his sync rates have surpassed Asuka and Rei. For wunderkind Asuka, whose entire identity is tied up in piloting, this is a tragedy. She can be seen later in a desolate state with an obvious fist mark in the center of her locker at NERV headquarters. With his sync rates higher, Shinji Ikari will receive even more praise from his father and he will be validated for doing things expected of him. With this news Shinji Ikari has the potential to be loved, but when the next Angel attacks Shinji’s success proves to be a double-edged sword. Now over-confident and willing to do anything to be praised, Shinji roars into battle. Asuka sarcastically urges him on forward because his sync rate was higher. He’s the best now, she replies with venom. But Shinji makes a massive mistake. They don’t know anything about this spherical black Angel and when he goes to throttle the beast it evolves, turning itself into a black void that Shinji slowly sinks within. As his Eva unit disappears beneath the expanding black shadow Shinji screams. A death-rattle, and there’s a cut back to Misato, Shinji’s military commander/roommate, at NERV who is witnessing someone she is supposed to take care of slowly die. Shinji’s Eva disappears completely. He’s lost within the Angel. The others escape. Ritsuko informs everyone that the life signs of the Eva unit are online, but Shinji is trapped somewhere in this abstract sphere. The life support systems will hold up for sixteen hours, but if they can’t find a way to free him before time is up then the young boy will join his mother in death.
When I mentioned earlier about Neon Genesis Evangelion shifting with episode fourteen the most prominent aspect of that change is felt in this episode. The animation looks noticeably rougher, cheaper and less expansive. Background characters move less, and battles between Eva Units and Angels become theoretical instead of violent. It is easier to animate a black void swallowing the frame than it is to create something like the dance/timer montage from episode nine. With the choice to fall into the black hole this series manages to accomplish two very separate, but equally important goals. It is a short-cut to save on production time to animate more sparsely and by turning much of this episode into an internal monologue with abstract images to follow it accomplishes Hideaki Anno’s newer direction of cataloguing each character’s mental decline. Anno’s tendency to let characters mirror his own emotional thought process becomes prominent as Shinji experiences his own personal highs and lows in this batch of episodes. He’s becoming great at piloting this weapon, his father was proud of him, but now, trapped inside of this Angel, everything falls apart for the young boy.
A white line on a black background dances wildly as Shinji Ikari announces in voiceover that he wonders if he’ll live to see anyone ever again. This is an honest concern that anyone could have, but the series morphs into flashback of Shinji’s childhood and becomes more specific. A dream-like image of c Shinji resting in an abandoned train-car, with a toddler version of himself sitting across comes next. He wonders aloud if there are multiple “true” Shinji Ikari’s. The one he knows as himself, and many others that people have created in their own minds of how they think about him. He worries about other people hurting him, and there’s a flash cut of moments previously seen in the series of others treating him poorly. There’s Asuka making fun of his masculinity. His father looking on with disapproval. Toji, a schoolmate of his, punching Shinji. All of these memories flash across the screen in seconds. The toddler version of Shinji Ikari asks, “Father, am I unwanted?” and then there are flashes of newspaper headlines, too many to interpret, but one is visible among all the other text that reads “accused of killing his wife.” That sentence breaks through the abstraction to give depth and meaning to Shinji’s relationship with his father and cast a shadow over the potential evil within Gendo Ikari. At the close of this sequence Shinji is seen back in the cockpit of his Eva unit with his life support systems running out. He pulls himself into the fetal position to feel a sense of safety, but by doing so also gives more weight to the idea of the Eva Unit being a womb metaphor. The image dims for a moment, but then a figure appears, his mother. She’s just a rough line drawing, without a face, smudged out, unfinished, maybe this is how Shinji remembers her, and she pulls Shinji through the void.
The shadow Angel begins to break apart, turning a brick red shade and something bursts forth. The Eva unit’s hand pierces the shadow, spilling blood with it. An image of birth. The Eva howls. There’s a cut to Asuka, looking startled, muttering to herself, “it’s alive. What are these things?” The shadow Angel explodes and Shinji is free. It’s raining blood. Misato and Ritsuko are troubled by what they have seen. Misato especially. She knows that the Evangelion units are made from the same DNA as the first Angel, but there’s more to them. They have a soul. When Shinji is seen in the hospital later he says to himself, “the smell of blood won’t come off.” Does it for any of us?
1. Lamarre, Thomas (2009). The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. University of Minnesota Press p. 180
2. Krystian Woznicki (September 1991). "Towards a cartography of Japanese anime – Anno Hideaki's Evangelion Interview with Azuma Hiroki". BLIMP Film Magazine.
3. Lawrence Eng. "In the Eyes of Hideaki Anno, Writer and Director of Evangelion". CJas.org. Retrieved September 7, 2013.