Anime Review: Evangelion (Collectors Edition)

Now I'll admit this, there's always been part of me that has been a bit irked by the way Evangelion ended. While the plot is very adult for a series which is peppered considerably with fan service and action I still contend that the ending is abstracted to such a degree as to distance itself from most of the viewing public.

That out of the way, I do realize that after slightly more thoughtful viewing and reading up on the creators circumstances for creating Eva, that the series was extremely bold for its time and a departure from some of the more vanilla anime that was being doled out at the time.

With psychological images, concepts such as the id, ego and super ego playing prominent roles and a sense of sexuality and depression, Eva is much deeper than the early 20 episodes let on. Hideaki Anno, the troubled creator of Evangelion (Or Neon Genesis Evangelion if you'd rather) put a lot of his own experiences with psychoanalysis into the series. My first run through, not having been armed with this bit of knowledge I found a lot of the images oddly placed. With this second go-around I found it much easier to examine the parallels of the characters to aspect of psychology (wow, College Psych finally has a use).

Unfortunately my attempts to rent End of Evangelion have hit a roadblock, but I tend to think of that as an alternate, albeit wayyy more visual ending to the series. The introspective montages used in the last two episodes to me, made slightly more sense (assuming you understand the background of Anno). While this retake on my views of Evangelion afforded me more experience I still conclude that for most viewers the series will seem visually amazing but without the background data, the last two episodes will just be a gut-wrenching topsy turvey journey.