Isn’t this part of the Insrumentality Project

Whoa do we have to bring up a Westernized Evangelion movie adaptation again...



It’s great because it’s a desperate psychic cry for help exploring depression & psychosexual torment through Jungian archetypes & Japanese pop culture tropes, as its creator intended.





Evangelion is seriously fucked up, in the best way. Landmark work of 20th century pop culture still being copied 20 years later.



Forgive me but here’s a primer of how intrinsically it’s linked to depression & how it became legendary... By failure.

The creator of Evangelion is Hideaki Anno, who animated sequences like the God Warrior in Nausicaa. Supposedly Miyazaki used to make fun of him at Ghibli for being such a workaholic mega-nerd.





Anno jokingly talks a lot of shit about Miyazaki on a Japanese commentary track for Nausicaa (while praising the creature I named my cat for)... https://soranews24.com/2018/05/10/evangelion-director-calls-hayao-miyazaki-geezer-in-anime-commentary-says-he-broke-his-walkman/amp/ …

Anno ends up at the studio Gainax working on the masterpieces Wings of Honnemaise & the supremely underrated Gunbuster, which nearly imploded due to budget issues but manages to finish with one of the greatest, poignant endings in anime.





Around then Anno realizes he’s been battling intense depression for years. Perhaps owing to a cultural stigma of confronting depression, he finally turns to psychology and reads Jung in an effort to cope and understand.

He’s also given the greenlight to make a new series, set up to sell music merchandising. Anno wants to explore a theme of ‘not running away’.





And so Neon Genesis Evangelion is born, a mashup of the entire seabed of Japanese pop culture: sentai shows, kaiju movies, mecha, shoujo soap operatics, child pilots, disaster scenarios, & pop songs.





About halfway through making the Evangelion series, having ‘poured my life into it’ Anno is given a book about psychoanalysis & finally finds a glimmer of hope in understanding his own depression. The story changes & starts to reflect this, but time & money are running out...





The final two episodes of Evangelion, made on verge of failure, are a desperate artistic cry, with unfinished animation & rough pencil storyboards. Robot action & mythology is abandoned for an abstract internal battle begging the audience to not succumb to loneliness & isolation.





Reportedly, response to the hopeful finale of the hit Evangelion series is: some find it a life changing experience that makes them question being an otaku.



While many are enraged and see it as a failure, even sending - seriously - death threats to the creators.

Anno supposedly shaves his head, a sign of contrition. Evangelion has, despite the reaction, made too much money. Movies are green lit.



Anno is like, okay you didn’t like my hopeful ending? Lemme give you the ending you fans deserve, the ‘canon’ you demand...

The movie End of Evangelion is one of the most brutal psychic assaults on an audience I’ve ever seen.



It opens with the audience surrogate character masturbating to a comatose friend while saying ‘I’m fucked up’. Then turns into an apocalyptic slaughter...





End of Evangelion is one of the most incredible critiques of fandom and all the nastiness we’re still caught up in 20 years later.



At one point it even shows the actual death threats fans sent to the creators & an image of the audience watching their own movie.

And yet End of Evangelion still ends with the faintest trace of hope, one in which teenagers becoming adults might have the slightest mercy for our psychoses & neuroses.





Anno goes off to make some beautiful rarely seen radical avant garde live action films like Love & Pop, about teenage sex workers, and Shiki-Jitsu, an existential mood piece based on Ayako Fujitani’s novel about creating while depressed. Plus, the fucking awesome Shin Godzilla.

Evangelion, meanwhile, lives on. It’s now part of the collective unconscious. Anno was given resources to remake as a series of movies, with budget he never had. He’s still making them, still struggling with depression, with the final one coming soon. https://soranews24.com/2015/04/02/evangelion-creator-hideaki-anno-opens-up-about-his-latest-bout-with-depression-movie-delays/ …

When Evangelion first came out so many fans spent years trying to decipher its meaning. Its mythology & narrative had become inseparable from its creation, & its indecipherable symbols had become nearly religious. https://www.gwern.net/otaku

The legacy of Evangelion is pop culture where meaning has become both paradoxically consumerist & quasi religious. Fandom has become stanning, and Anno is still trying to make a singular work of art to break us free of those constrictions. Fandom as looking outside the artifact.





So that’s a very short version of the story about Evangelion, and if you think any of that would still be present at the core of a Hollywood adaptation, what’s even the point?

PS here is a picture of my Teto, who is cute. Thanks for letting me go off.

Evangelion is now on Netflix worldwide, and as this thread is getting out there again, here’s a much more detailed article I wrote about Hideaki Anno & his personal struggles to bring the series to life. Congratulations! https://www.polygon.com/2019/6/19/18683634/neon-genesis-evangelion-hideaki-anno-depression-shinji-anime-characters-movies …

You can follow @somebadideas.

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