DRAWN & QUARTERED
Graphic Arts as Literature
‘End of Eva’ brings no It's an ending that has been long awaited by anime fans in the United States. Ever since the final chapters of the 26-episode "Neon Genesis Evangelion" TV series arrived in translated form stateside, fans have struggled to figure out exactly what happened at the end.
end to series’ muddle
By Jason S. Yadao
jyadao@starbulletin.comThe first 24 episodes focused on epic battles between the Evangelions, robots built to protect the earth, and the Angels, weird-looking structures seemingly spawned out of nowhere to destroy it. The last two episodes, by contrast, focused on characters' psychological states and the results of a cryptic "Instrumentality Project." All this was presented in frenetic cuts between crude sketches, recycled animation from prior episodes and screens with only words on them.
And viewers debated. Was this a look into the deteriorating mind of main character and Eva pilot Shinji Ikari? Did the animation studio run out of money and/or time to finish the series? Or was the production staff simply high on hallucinogenic drugs?
Now comes "End of Evangelion," a film just released stateside on DVD that offers the final word on the events in episodes 25 and 26. Think of "EoE" as a kind of replacement for those two episodes, and you'll start to understand how it relates to the rest of the series.
"EoE" is ... pretty. Really, really pretty, with lots of glowing sparkly things. The end of the world, which is what this movie depicts, has never looked more elegant.
And it still makes no sense whatsoever.
To begin to grasp the events in "EoE," it's necessary to look at what came before. In the TV series, teenager Shinji was drafted along with two other teens into the service of NERV, a shadowy agency headed by his estranged father, Gendo Ikari.
Their task as Eva pilots: prevent a repeat of the Second Impact, a cataclysmic event that killed off much of humanity 15 years ago.
The action picks up soon after the end of episode 24, where Shinji, after much internal anguish over the morality of his mission, killed the 17th Angel in the form of a boy named Kaoru.
From here, we shift to "EoE." Shinji's killing of the 17th Angel transforms the teen at the film's beginning. Instead of the boy who was whiny and mopey for some parts of the series and likable in others, it's now all whining, all moping, all the time.
If the fate of the planet indeed rests on his shoulders, as the movie implies, then perhaps the planet would be better off calling it quits instead. Shinji is so irritating here, it's difficult to resist the urge to slap him a few times and yell, "Get over yourself and GROW UP!"
With all the Eva pilots incapacitated in some way, the even more shadowy agency SEELE decides it's had enough of the Evas and orders NERV's destruction. This sacrifice, they reason, will trigger the Third Impact, which they believe will mean humanity's salvation.
With that the fun begins. Almost all the characters that viewers grew to love in the series die gruesome deaths -- crushed, shot, blown up, even touched by weird-looking ghosts that cause their heads to implode into gelatinous goop. There's enough blood spilled in NERV's destruction to stock a blood bank for months.
It's after this large-scale carnage that things get weird ... again. The film's second half consists of more of the same philosophical musings that the TV series had, along with new and improved crude sketches, recycled animation from prior episodes and text-only screens.
With so much ambiguity, it's only natural to believe that different people will take different experiences away from this movie. Some people will enjoy it, some will hate it and some will be totally confused.
Considering this has happened twice now, that's probably just the way the production staff wanted it.
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