I’ve relented: rather than the near-complete separation of this blog from anime-related subjects that I had originally planned, I’ve given in to my past tradition and am going to post the complete results of my con experience this year on my main blog after all.

This is something brand new: a multipart video diary of my experiences! It also has lots of interviews with fans and some candid footage of a con in disarray and disorganization. Things were not so well-run this year and the complaints are surfacing all over the Net right now. This is a small addition to that cloud of witnesses.

I will be writing a written account of my thoughts and feelings within the week as well. Stay tuned.

Longtime readers may recall that I have a tradition of reporting on the anime conventions I attend every year. (Examples from 2004, 2005, and 2006.) This year is no different–except, this time, I happen to have an entire anime blog and podcast all geared up for Anime Expo 2007, which starts tomorrow! This year, there will not just be written reports and pictures, but also live video and audio reporting if I have time to splice everything together.

The action is happening on my anime blog, Anime Diet. So come check it out!

Parts 1, 2, and 3
Flickr Photoset
Youtube Videos

The Events

Anime Expo seems to get the most high-profile guests in the industry, especially from Japan. They staged a coup this year by getting the notoriously reclusive female manga artists, CLAMP. The directors of Fullmetal Alchemist, Mushishi, and RahXephon–all shows I love–also came. It was a shame that the CLAMP event, the most hyped, also ran the most late, and it was the most scripted; they asked CLAMP a set of 10 pre-chosen questions and showed some photos of their surprisingly neat, undecorated offices. The main surprising thing was discovering how fast their output was–they write and draw with assembly-line like efficiency, completing 12-20 pages every day. That’s pretty amazing–I wish I could write that fast! Perhaps the most memorable thing, though, was during the opening ceremony as the titles of CLAMP’s various works were read out by the announcer. Most of the titles only invited girlish squeals from the fangirls, until Chobits was read–whereupon the cheer became much, much louder and throatier.

I missed many of the panels I really wanted to attend, either because of transportation issues (it usually took 90 minutes to drive to the convention center in Anaheim every day) or because I needed to wait in line for tickets for main events. I did manage to see the director of Fullmetal Alchemist answer some questions about the storytelling choices he made and some of the ideology/philosophy behind the show. Unfortunately, I was unable to ask the question I wanted to ask–the way alchemy seemed to be a way to talk about technology and its problem–because I failed to get in line early enough.

Perhaps the greatest surprise, though, was the Masquerade. Having seen the Otakon masquerades, I can tell you that the cringe factor is much lower at Anime Expo. The skits seemed to be much better produced and acted overall, and some of the costumes were convincing. (Especially the young lady whose dress was entirely made of duct tpe. No, it’s not what you think. Get that out of your mind! Look below.)

My guess is because this is LA, the city of media dreams, filled to the brim with aspiring actors and “Industry” wannabes looking for their break. There was an interminable Taiko drum performance at halftime, though, which made half the audience impatient. By the time the winners of the competitions were announced, half the main events hall was empty.

The Dealer Room

For many, this was the real reason for the con–especially if one has commercial interests. One of our club members is a writer for Play magazine, which does reviews of games, anime, and manga, and he had to man a booth in the dealer room for all 4 days (and thus missed most of the events, except for the Masquerade). That didn’t sound like too much fun, to be honest. Nonetheless, if the Masquerade is the con’s heart, the Dealer Room is like the lungs: where money, the oxygen of the anime and manga industry, gets exchanged and where all must pass through some time or another, entering with empty hands and leaving with bags and bags of merchandise.

AX’s dealer room didn’t seem too different from the dealer rooms at Otakon. The big companies like Geneon, Viz, and ADV had their own big booths, as usual, and like every year, ADV was doing various stunts to get people’s attention. One year it was handing out free panties. This year it was the relatively subdued banging of a drum and throwing out swag from a balcony. It was something like this:

I was unlucky and late this year. Unlike past years, I didn’t get almost any free swag at all, especially not the free canvas tote bags that Viz was giving out every couple of hours. I always ended up getting in line too late. I’d look at all the people who had one slung on their shoulder enviously as I carried my deterioating plastic bag, which was given to me at registration.

I was also quite surprised to see the J-pop band The Indigo in concert once again; the first time I saw them was at Otakon 2005, where they had a full concert as well as smaller shows at the Geneon booth. Their music is catchier than most J-pop (to my ears) and I had always wished I’d bought their album a year back, and so this year, I rectified that mistake. Too bad I left the CD in the car during the autograph session…

Wrapping Up

I started this series with a reflection on what it’s like still being a fan, all these years later, given the vocation I’m called to. I have to admit that I’ve been watching a lot more anime for the past month since the con, almost as much as the height of my college fandom, and this time (for the first time in year), I’m keeping up with the very newest shows: Welcome to the NHK!, Le Chevalier d’Eon, Haruhi Suzumiya, and the like. I’m not sure why it’s happening now. It could be the renewed sense of being with lots of people who are into the same things. It could be because I have more free time than usual this quarter, though last month was one of the most intense in my academic career. It could be because there has been a surprisingly good crop of shows this season and because I’ve discovered some shows that match my taste so well (Mushishi and Monster in particular).

Coming as it did at the end of a class, the con felt more like a vacation than almost anything I’ve had in a long time. Maybe that’s the best these kinds of experiences can hope for, the inducing of a temporary sense of willful forgetfulness that we all need as human beings to get through the day. I hope I never forget that thinking and talking about soteriology is vitally important and should occupy more time than thinking about the latest fansubbed series. I also hope that those anime creators in Japan keep pumping out great new material. They too perform a service, at best more than just fan service.

Cons as Collective Experiences: or, it’s Lonely By Yourself

As I’ve mentioned before, I am now a member of an anime club called Anime Souffle. When I first got into anime in college, almost seven years ago, I was all alone in most of my interests–writing, SF/fantasy, and progressive rock. Being an anime has been crucial to my social life in ways I never imagined; I met many of my closest friends through our common love of anime and manga. This is perhaps the opposite of the otaku stereotype, though shows like Genshiken capture pretty accurately what might happen if a bunch of Japanese otaku got together.

With the exception of my brief foray into Katsucon, I have always gone to cons with others, and I’d argue there is no other way to go. Cons are no fun by yourself, large cons especially; with all the queueing up, ease of getting lost, crowd-surfing, and strange costumed folk milling about, unless you’re going just to go to a particular workshop or see a particular guest, I just see no reason to get loss in the numberless mass. I found myself quickly bored if I didn’t have anyone to talk to while I was waiting in line, especially since my only source of entertainment was a book on Luther’s soteriology. (There it goes again, that strange juxtaposition.)

Small cons may be completely different, I admit, since my experience is only of the two biggest conventions in the country. I’m told San Diego Comic Con, which just concluded, is several magnitudes larger, and has become a major Hollywood industry hangout as of late. I’m sure, with 100,000 people, it’s many times worse (though my other friends tell me it’s better organized than Anime Expo).

That said, trying to organize meetups throughout the various days was difficult. Our leader designated various times for group meetups, but because events were frequently late, many of those times never materialized. The times I got to meet up with club members, though–especially just to hang out and eat meals together–was pretty much the highlight of the con. A lot of them cosplayed themself, with our leader doing a particularly good one from Bleach:

That leads me to the subject of cosplay in general.

It really does seem that together with the merchandise in the dealer room, cosplay is the heart and soul of an anime convention. There were plenty of rooms in the adjoining hotel showing anime, of course, but one could just as easily watch anime at home, on DVD or by downloading fansubs. Costumes, on the other hand, are meant to be seen in public, and photographed. There’s a reason why at every con I’ve been to, the most popular and central main event is the Masquerade. Over the past few years, I’ve seen both the proportion and quality of costumes at cons rise; I guesstimated that at Otakon 2003 1/4 of the attendants were costumed, and at AX 06, roughly 40-50% were. There were many stunningly well-made ones at this con in particular.

The popular fortunes of various series can be easily gauged by the number of people dressed in costumes, though ease of making them also plays an important role. Naruto and Bleach costumes dominated this year as well as last year, and while I think I saw more Fullmetal Alchemist costumes last year at Otakon ’05 than I did at AX ’06, there were still quite a lot of them anyway. You can be sure if it’s popular and/or easy to make, someone will wear it: hence the ongoing popularity of Cowboy Bebop and Final Fantasy VII and VIII costumes, which look more like real clothes.

While AX certainly had the lion’s share of the Anaheim Convention Center, we were actually not the only group there. Two other groups shared our space: a gay square dancing convention (I am not making this up, see Dom’s report, though he’s wrong that there wasn’t an evangelical group this time–they just came later during the con), as well as some Pentecostal Christians from Kenneth Copeland Ministries. Dom says that some of the gay square dancers remarked that it was strange to meet people who were odder than they were. I just kept wondering about the folks from the Copeland Ministries group and what they might have been thinking, seeing so many strange costumes, many of them very revealing, and so many of the shoujo material being overtly homoerotic (I suspect girls carrying yaoi paddles are going to be a permanent fixture at cons forever, and with the presence of CLAMP at this on, well…). Maybe they thought the whole lot of us were lost souls. Nobody, oddly enough, handed us any tracts or tried to evangelize to us (or at least not that I saw). The only material I saw was a tract left on a table written by one of those fringe apocalyptic prophets proclaiming that soon the world was going to commit MASS SUICIDE.

But there’s that odd juxtaposition again. Tomorrow I’ll wrap up with a report on the main events and thigns going on in the dealer room.

The Downsides Before the Upsides

First impressions are sometimes misleading. The past three Otakons I have attended have always begun with a long wait in line to collect entry badges–3 hours the first time, 90 minutes the following two times. The wait for the badge at Anine Expo was a glorious five minutes, because there was no line, not on the pre-registration day before the con. I heard later that people seeking to register on the con day had to wait for hours, though. So I could have been lucky. But it gave me the feeling that this con was extremely well-run and organized and could handle the 40,000+ plus people that were expected to attend.

But as I said, first impressions can sometimes be misleading. The registration line, alas, was the only thing that was well-run. Many other things were a mess.

First off were the late events. Almost every major event started significantly late, and thus screwed up the meet-up times for our club. By “significant” I mean anywhere from 30 minutes to more than an hour late. Seating for main events also did not often correspond to starting times. I got in line at my designated seating time for the Masquerade, and by the time we were seated, the Masquerade had already been going on for 30 minutes.

Then there’s the seating itself. With 40,000+ people, you are not going to be able to accomodate everyone who wants to attend a main event, such as the Anime Music Video (AMV) contest, the CLAMP panel (guests of honor this year, a real coup for Anime Expo), or the Masquerade (Cosplay competition). I can understand this. At Otakon, what they would do is have satellite rooms with live broadcasts on the screen, and get all the overflow capacity in those rooms. At AX, they gave out tickets with different seating times for the events instead. They didn’t cost extra, and they were distributed in the afternoons on the day of the events–starting at 3 PM, supposedly, but people would begin lining up in the morning–so if you arrived at 3 PM, you probably would end up in a backup line at best, or not be able to get tickets at all. And even if you got a ticket, if you arrived late, it was highly likely that you would be turned away at the door altogether. I know this, because I was turned away for the Anime Music Video competition on the first night, though I held a ticket. If the point of handing out tickets is to have an exact count of the number of people you’ll be able to fit in a room, shouldn’t bearing a ticket guarantee a spot? I admit I came quite a bit later than the designated seating time for the AMV contest (a mistake I did not repeat again), though the show hadn’t started yet. So they’re not entirely to blame, but, well, I suppose the solidity of a paper ticket in most people’s minds is a representation of a promise of entry.

I also heard stories from some of my fellow club members about how they were unfairly shut out of raffle drawings that they were entitled to participate in.

T-shirts were $25 apiece, too, which is why I didn’t buy one, breaking an earlier tradition of mine (I have Otakon T-shirts from 2003-5 as well as an extra one from 2000, which was given to me free with my 2004 T-shirt purchase).

I can sympathize, really. In 2000, I actually worked as a volunteer at a big conference called Amsterdam 2000, a conference for tens of thousands of pastors and missionaries from all over the globe. Even then, crowd control was taxing and stressful, and crowds sometimes unruly–and these are pastors and missionaries, clergymen and women mostly. Anime fans, of course, are also very well-behaved compared to other large crowds too–they were about as well behaved on the whole as the pastors–but, from the gruff and sometimes confused attitude many con-goers received from the staff, one gets the feeling that the staff have seen and been subjected to some trouble before. Still, there is definite room for improvement on the logistical front, particularly for main events. I sorely missed missing the AMVs.

But enough about the negative stuff. What about teh fun? See tomorrow’s entry!

Anime Expo Flickr Photoset
Expo Youtube Videos, which were surprisingly popular

Self-Indulgent Prelude: On Being a Fan at this Point in Time

When does habit become a tradition? Anime Expo 2006 marked the fifth time I have been to an anime convention since my first, Otakon 2003. Certainly, it was a first in several ways, too–the first time I’ve been to a con on the West Coast, the first time I’ve ever gone with an organized club, Anime Souffle–but, on the whole, the experience was not all that different from my previous ones at Otakons 2003-5. (Katsucon was unique in many ways, and all-too-brief.) But as I signed up online for the con and got ready to go on the July 4th weekend–mere hours after my two week intensive Systematic Theology II class had concluded–I pondered the habitual, almost inevitable nature of what I was doing. Why was I still going to anime conventions?

Part of the issue was the odd juxtaposition the next-to-last sentence in the previous paragraph suggestted: the prospect of jumping from sitting in class and hearing about “Christology in the pluralistic world,” to standing in line for hours to see people in costumes of giant robots, samurai, and sailor-unifomed schoolgirls. I always feel strange introducing myself to new people in the club, though many (the founder included) are memebers of my church. Isn’t my ongoing fandom, well, a trivial use of God-given time, a holdover from my lonely delayed adolescence in college and a desperate attempt to cling to one’s former identity as a card-carrying geek? What does Jerusalem have to do with Neo-Tokyo-3?

I can’t give a wholly satisfactory answer to that question, and on some days I often wonder if it’s due to my laxity. Unlike some Christians, I have never gone through a phase where I tried to stay away from all “secular” entertainment, and in fact grew up with almost an allergy to what passed for the evangelical Christian substitutes for pop culture. The first anime that captivated my attention completely–Neon Genesis Evangelion–was the polar opposite of all the stuff I loathed in (I thought) the sappy, false certitudes of American evangelicaldom. It rendered accurately the state of mind of the isolated, alienated introvert better than anything I’d seen up to that point, and my nineteen year old psuedo-intellectual brain, which was just entering the stage of “theological puberty,” was quite tickled by all the Gnostic and pseudo-Christian references in the show. Reference hunting, I think, is a peculiar sport of the adolescent nerd, and it gave me a sense of legitimacy when I was watching Eva as a believing, non-gnostic, orthodox Christian. Sure, I’d carefully delineate the parts that I couldn’t agree with, and admit that if we were to take the theology of such shows like Eva (or Fullmetal Alchemist, or Serial Experiments: Lain, or The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, or whatever), it wouldn’t pass muster. It formed something of the modus operandi I’d take with entertainment in general, and anime in particular though–I always made sure that whenever I introduced myself as an anime fan, I’d always start with my love of shows like Eva or Lain or Boogiepop Phantom, the serious stuf, and neglect to mention that other formative shows that tickled my fancy early on in my fandom were Video Girl Ai and Love Hina.

What I described above, of course, is a pretty good picture of snobbery. It all boils down to a disconnect in self-image, I suppose; though I think I’ve relaxed considerably over the years, a rather large part of my self-esteem is built upon being a Serious Person with a Serious Purpose. There’s always that nagging feeling that being an anime/manga lover is a hinderence to that, but since I’ve been at it now for seven years running, it’s too big a part of my life to simply deny. So I dress it up a bit, make it coterminal with my love for foreign film in general and use shows like Lain or Eva (and, in a review to be posted next week, Haruhi) as a launching pad to talk about Serious Issues. If there is a saving grace, it’s that this is not, on the whole, a put-on; it’s something I genuinely enjoy doing. It’s genetically related to what I want to do in the future, to look at the theological dimensions of literature and film.

Luther once said that the devil flees with laughter. sometimes it’s good to, after spending five hours a day taking notes on Karl Barth’s defense of the doctrine of filioque and despairing over whether Eastern and Western Christians can ever settle their differences, to kick back and laugh as Chiyo-chan gets hit by a volleyball in Azumanga Daioh.

So OK, now the actual con report begins–tomorrow. Don’t worry, the whole entry is actually finished, so there will be no procrastination on the next entry. I’m just posting it in bits and pieces so you, my dear readers, can digest it in blog-sized morsels. (There will be 4 parts.) Sometime recently I figured out that my natural writing habits are not very conducive to blog posts.

I know I initially said “live blogging,” but the internet access at the convention center is not free–it’s very expensive, actually. So nothing “live,” alas, but here are some pictures to whet your appetite. The con is half over, and I will return with a full report as soon as it ends on Tuesday.

I’ve annotated the pictures whenever possible, though in many cases, since I haven’t watched everything, I don’t know who the characters are. Please leave comments if you know who they are, or if I made any mistakes in identifying people. Thanks!

Complete Flickr Photoset (keep checking back here over the next couple of days, more pictures will be added)

Some Spoilers: Be Warned

What It’s All For

I came across a useful taxonomy to critique different kinds of art on an internet forum debate. The poster made the point that we can crudely divide all works of art (the specific context was film) into three categories:

1.) Entertainment–a work of art that is designed to please the desires of the audience for excitement and gratification at the expense of quality storytelling.
2.) Propaganda–a work of art that is designed to please the desire of the artist to express a feeling or a moral at the expense of quality storytelling.
3.) Good art–a work that successfully fulfills both the desires of the audience and the artist by making an engaging and meaningful work.

This taxonomy doesn’t work for everything, but I find it helpful in talking about Evangelion. The problem with Eva is that it shifts modes constantly, as if it can’t decide what it wants to be. The dichotomy is starkest in the End of Evangelion, in which the first half, directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki, is a straightforward, action-packed, and horrifically violent battle for the survival of NERV. (It’s not quite “entertaining” in that some characters suffer truly gruesome fates, but it satisfies the audience’s need for clarity and action.) The second half, directed by Anno, is an almost willfully artsy denouement that mixes up Kabbalistic imagery, the end of the world, a jaunty song with suicidal lyrics sung in English, Freudian/Oedipal complexes, and even random live action footage. Through murky monologues, he preaches his message about accepting real life and the pain of being with others. It is visually intriguing and even inspiring at some points, but it’s no longer really telling a story; it fits better under the “propaganda” category. Do these halves somehow combine to form the balance that our definition of “good art” requires?

It’s possible to meaningfully analyze the ending on a “meta” level. Much postmodern literary analysis and experimentation emphasizes the constructed nature of fiction, and it seems that whenever Anno is trying to do something abstract or weird–like showing us spotlights and a stage in the TV ending, or live action footage in the movie–he is trying to get the audience to acknowledge the fictionality of Eva (and, by extension, all anime). The breakdown of the show’s characters is matched by the breakdown in the plot and production, giving the narrative another level in a sense. The chaos on screen is a reflection of the chaos happening in the heart of Shinji and in the world. Thus, the obtuseness of the ending serves a purpose. Its vagueness is a reflection of the ambiguity of reality; its lack of neat conclusions and answered questions a reminder of life’s many irresolvable mysteries. This is the line that most of Eva’s die-hard defenders take: that it encourages the viewer to actively think about what’s going on by not spoonfeeding answers, and that the structure of the ending is not only deliberate, but meaningful.

But when one thinks about it, this sounds like an excuse to hide what many critics simply see as poor planning and storytelling. The most frequent charge leveled against Eva is that it is nothing more than Anno’s self-indulgence writ large, and at first glance, this seems believable. There comes a point in both endings where there is no longer any character dialogue or interaction, but simply a series of monologues that serve as either pure emotional venting or psychological preaching. The psychological portions worked well in the context of dramatic storytelling–as in some of the later episodes–but divorced from the happenings of the outside world, they lacked weight and simply became the means for the director to deliver his point to the captive audience. It allowed Anno to shoot some meditative footage of Tokyo, run a Bach piece, and put on a voiceover asking plaintively, “What is a dream?” He did this instead of explaining just what the heck was going on with the, oh, stigmata on Shinji’s palms, the Giant Mother Goddess Lilith/Rei floating in space and collecting everyone’s souls, and where Shinji was to even say those voiceovers over live action footage in an anime film.

Saving What Matters

There’s only one problem with the “bullshit” theory–a close look of what’s going on reveals that it actually does make sense. And not just on the “meta” postmodern level, either. Genuine bull always reveals how shallow it is on close inspection, and while one level of the show–namely, the religious symbolism–does not pass muster, the psychological narrative of the story–namely, Shinji’s journey from isolation to the acceptance of others–is not only consistent, but is told powerfully. This narrative is the keystone that holds all the artsy experimentation and intense emotion together, and allows the viewer to understand intuitively what is happening, even if a million plot-oriented questions continue to linger. It overcomes the lack of balance and lurching tonal shifts to unify everything and somehow conjure, albeit imperfectly, the creative tension that characterizes “good art.”

To be further explained (and concluded) on Wednesday . . .

What do you do when your roots have dissolved and broken down
And the soil that you grew in when you were small
Has become nothing more than dirt in some dirty town
When you list all the qualities that you despise
And you realize
You’re describing yourself?
–Marillion, “The Rake’s Progress”

A Personal Story

When we talk about deeply personal works of art like Evangelion, it is hard to avoid judging not only the work but its creator as well. This is often a bad idea–in literary criticism circles, the assumption that a work is always driven by the events of an author’s life and character is called the “biographical fallacy”. A sad story is not always a sign of a sad writer. But few animes–perhaps no anime before or since–have been as psychologically naked as Evangelion. In its second half, particularly in the concluding episodes and the End of Evangelion movie, we are given more than just a glimpse of director Hideaki Anno’s soul. We are positively inundated with its pain and self-loathing, seeing a broken world not only through physical sight but also through the mind’s eye in the abstracted, psychological sequences. And through interviews not only with himself but also with his associates, we learn that Evangelion is Anno’s allegorized personal history. Shinji and Gendou Ikari’s flaws are mostly those of the director’s, making Evangelion not only a brutal coming-of-age tale, cautionary sci-fi epic, and Gnostic apocalypse, but also a roman a clef–that is, as much as a show featuring giant robots can be.

And so to talk about Evangelion is to talk about, to some extent, its director. It is no accident that Anno briefly became a Japanese household name, even outside anime circles, around the time of the TV show’s controversial conclusion and the release of the films. He stamped his name in far bigger than normal kanji characters in the opening credits of the TV show, and in all the TV spots for the movie, the words “DIRECTOR: ANNO HIDEAKI” appear prominently before the title of the film. People recognized Evangelion by recognizing that it is done by Anno. This is his work, and he made sure everyone knew it. Egotistical, perhaps, but fitting.

Among current directors, only Hayao Miyazaki (Anno’s mentor), Mamoru Oshii, Satoshi Kon, and Katsuhiro Otomo boast similar name recognition. In the world of anime film, they are all auteurs of the highest caliber, and their works showcase their unmistakably individual concerns and styles. But none, save Anno, created their works to talk about themselves. Miyazaki may be an aviation buff and environmentalist, and Oshii a metaphysician, but Anno is the therapist, coming to diagnose not only his fanbase’s isolation and low self-esteem, but also his own. Like a therapist, he had to delve deeply into his brokenhearted characters to understand their motivations. This relentless focus on the interior worlds of the characters, especially Shinji’s, is the show’s greatest strength and weakness. Anno dared to expose himself by creating a visual vocabulary for inner feelings, thoughts, and ideas that had never been shown in mainstream animated form. It was the only way he, a creator of anime, could give form to the vagaries of his heart. And in that heart lies Evangelion‘s frustrating power: its honesty and humanity compel us, but its narcissism and incoherence repel us.

Is There Beauty in the Breakdown?

Despite its title, Neon Genesis Evangelion offers anything but good news. It is about an Advent of sorts, but more like the Second Coming described by William Butler Yeats: a story about rough beasts called Evas, slouching toward Tokyo to be born, where by the end things do fall apart and a blood-dimmed tide is loosed upon the world in the most literal way. Not merely for the characters, but for the show and production itself. And frankly, once one understands the most important parts of the story, there was no logical end but breakdown and destruction. No other ending would fit. The question is whether the resulting chaos shows us anything worthwhile. I believe it ultimately does, but at a price.

To be continued…

A Personal Note
It is a strange but fitting juncture in my life to be watching Evangelion once more. The first time I saw it was a time of transition. At the end of 1999, I had just entered college, and was about to leave for a church retreat. I was not yet an anime fan–the fuzzy bootlegs of the show had been given to me by a friend who promised I would appreciate its religious symbolism and deep characterizations–and had no idea what to expect, either from the show, from the coming century, or my life ahead. After I finished watching Evangelion, which felt like a mirror held up to my faults and interior rumblings, long left unsaid in the great mad rush that was my high school life, my perspective had changed.

Now it is five years later, and I am in another time of transition. I am about to move away from home again, to go to seminary, in this case. The last anime convention I went to, Otakon 2005, was my fourth. I have lost count of how many series, OAVs, and movies, I have watched since Evangelion turned me into a fan. The angst that fueled my initial love of Eva has largely dissipated. Like the director, Hideaki Anno, I have moved on, and I am only picking it up again to watch along with my friend, who has not seen the series’ second half or the movies. It is the first time I have watched the series in at least two years. it is even longer since I once planned, and never wrote, the essay about my relationship with Eva, Anno, and anime.

How oddly appropriate, then, in my final week in the house that I have lived in for 15 years, to write about another man’s apocalypse.

Episode Review
This entry constitutes a reformation of a long dormant topic in my blog, the anime journal. See the other entries in the topic here.

The strangest thing about Evangelion and Japanese anime is that it led me to European art film. Anno’s Evangelion was the first “artsy foreign” media product that I truly appreciated on not just an aesthetic but personal level. It was not the mecha action that drew me in, and the Kabbalah, Gnostic, and Christian references ultimately led nowhere; and while the accurate depiction of (and solution to) emotional paralysis was what fueled my devotion, there was another element that stuck out to me, and tickled my intellect. It was the startling avant garde techniques used throughout the serie’s second half, and in the End of Evangelion movie. The flashing text titles, the split second cuts, the psychodramatic sequences with abstract imagery: that stuff was not only cool, it worked and it moved me.

Where did the heck did Anno get those ideas? The answers were Kubrick, Eisenstein, Truffaut, Godard, Ozu, and Bresson, and in unwittingly leading to me to those cinematic masters, Anno may yet provide a great service to some watchers of his anime. He may not just get them out of their otaku ways, as he intended. He may turn them into snobby cinephiles! (It certainly helped that many of these directors are among the few to directly deal with theological and philosophical issues in complex and fulfilling ways, sometimes even from a Christian perspective. That just sealed the deal for me.)

Those stylistic elements–in muted form, of course, in this section of the show–stand out to me as I rewatch the series. The flashing text titles is a Godardian trick. The use of offscreen sound, like radio announcers, cicadas, and background conversation to convey information–one of Anno’s trademarks and one of the most subtle aspects of Evangelion–is a technique Robert Bresson mastered first. The quick montage of shots was pioneered by Eisenstein. Ozu pioneered the ‘pillow shots’ which Anno loves, the static, random shots of scenery cut in the action. I used to think those were Anno’s invention. (I even called them “Annoisms.” Certainly he may have been the among the first to do it so blatently in mainstream anime, though Mamoru Oshii probably gets dibs as “first artsy anime director.”) Watching Evangelion as a budding cinephile is like seeing a gallery of art film techniques and influences. What’s novel is seeing them used subtly and effectively in the service of a giant robot, monster-of-the-week anime.

More personallly: while I can still compassionately identify with Shinji’s plight (you will never get me to think he is just a mere whiner), it is now at a much greater distance. Some of the old emotion wells up at end of the sixth episode, when Shinji rescues Rei in the way Gendo had rescued her earlier. But now I think: how clever, Anno tying the thread of father and son together, using the visual motif of the glasses, and the same shot compositions. Sometimes I fear that my soul is growing frigid with analysis. Or maybe I’ve seen this series too many times.

The first arc of the series (episodes 1-6) is one of the strongest starts to any series, in that it takes a standard giant robot plot and subverts most of its archetypes. I only realized later how generic and recycled most of the plot and character elements this show were–and how much Anno was doing a full scale deconstruction of them. The focus, from the very beginning, is what lies underneath the archetypes: the reluctant hero, the bouncy older woman mentor, the distant father, the giant robot. The first battle is shown not directly, but in retrospect, as if reminding us that “this isn’t what the show is about, kids.” The underrated fourth episode, which I find very hard to believe that Anno had no direct involvement with, is a fine depiction of isolation and loneliness, not to mention a terribly risky episode to do so early in a series. It, and the sixth episode, convinced me that there was something different about this show. Not to mention the utterly piercing screams that Shinji utters, full of genuine despair or terror, and the raw brutality of the Angel fights. There is an immediacy to this series that grips you from the start. That, I think, is another thing that sets this series apart from even other mysterious giant robot shows, its lack of detachment.

Not until the seventh episode does it begin to lurch into much more conventional territory, and only after it has already told us to expect something much stranger in the future. (And even in the cheesy comedy episodes, I still laugh, though not as hard as I once did. This is anime comedy for me now.)

So what stands out most to me is how well this show stacks up after all these years, on an objective level. Even in the wake of arguably better shows of its ilk, there is still a subtlety of characterization and detail that surprises me, because the characters are otherwise still broadly drawn, sometimes verging on the stereotypical. It is the little things–the often deft exposition of the backstory (at least in this section), the background noises, small gestures made with the hands, a tilt of the head, single evocative shots . . . at least in this part of the anime, Anno gives the great impression that he knew what he was doing.

We will examine later whether that impression holds.

(I should also add that I am watching the Platinum Edition DVDs of this. They are astonishing in their video quality–it looks almost like a brand new show now. The colors are much richer and darker than previous American DVD releases, the frames are free of the infamous “Gainax jitter,” and the sound punchy and sharp. The original Kanji title cards and subtitles have been restored, which I consider essential, as the font was highly stylized and often shown in unique ways. This version makes the show look fresh to me.)