Well, you see, I hate it. I hate it for many reasons. I hate it because I despise its story, and its characters, and its refusal to conform to the strictures of storytelling. I hate it because I would, if I could, remove the experience from my memory. I hate it because it is a poorly paced, poorly realized, psychotic, sadistic, and masochistic parade of happenstances that fundamentally fail to tell a story, but succeed at telling us just how deep into depression and almost certainly more its guiding figurehead was at the time of its creation. And more fundamentally than any of this, I hate it because Hideaki Anno is, well, wrong. Escapism is not the reason why anyone is unhappy. Burying oneself in escapism is a symptom, not a cause, but Anno seemed convinced, without evidence, that striving to live in the “real world” without delusion is enough to overcome one’s own demons. It isn’t though. We are frail creatures, and all of us deluded. We believe ourselves rational when we are not. We believe ourselves kind when we are cruel. And we believe ourselves deep when we are pathetically shallow. Evangelion’s message is that it is infinitely better to participate in the so called “real world” than to escape into fantasy, but this ignores the fundamental fact that our own perception of reality is a fantasy formed by an interplay of our psyches and experiences. Our entire lives are an escape. No one has ever truly known another person, be they friend, foe, or lover. Each exists solely as constructs in our own heads. This is eventually brought home, intentionally or not, in “Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time”, but its solution, its “solving” of and “resolution” for Shinji/Anno is just another form of escape. And for all of his railing against it, Anno, the strange, anti-otaku otaku, has also found his refuge in a form that he finds acceptable. And that’s fine. In fact, I am happy for him. We all deserve a pleasant delusion. The very luckiest of us die swimming in the sea of a happy fantasy. What I am less receptive to is the notion that his own haven is somehow more acceptable than those of either others or of his own past self. It is not, it is merely different.
Anno Hidaeki is a friend and in some ways protégé of one of my favorite anime directors, Miyazaki Hayao. And like Miyazaki, perhaps because of Miyazaki, he thinks himself above anime itself. He is not the first or only director of cartoon drivel to think so, and like everyone who shares his opinion, he is somehow stuck in the mire of a genre which he seemingly dislikes, filled with fans whom he actively ridicules, despite being cut from the same cloth as them. Men in their sixties and eighties respectively who can’t stop working in anime are 1000% otaku, whatever their protestations might indicate. The hypocrisy of both Miyazaki and Anno is bizarre, when judged critically. Here are two men, old enough to be the average otaku’s father and grandfather, disapprovingly casting judgement on a medium that they should have, by their own standard, stopped caring about or participating in years if not decades ago. Yet here they are, razzing the culture upon which they have prospered in the name of god knows what.
Evangelion is not nearly as deep as its proponents claim, nor as shallow as its detractors would have you believe. It is the flawed product of a flawed man over decades of his life. Each iteration is a portrait of his own state at the time. It is to me a curio, but it is not a masterpiece. It is one of the most visually striking shows I’ve ever seen, but it is less an exploration of its themes than the result of a man opening his veins on celluloid. However beautiful the spray and splatter may be, I never asked to see it, and I resent having been subjected to it. I am, at least, glad that Hidaeki has seemingly found happiness now, but Evangelion should have ended with “The End of Evangelion”. Somehow, the image of the impotent, miserable, sexually dysfunctional Shinji trying to choke the object of his desire and hatred to death while his mother’s still smiling corpse looms large in the background is perfect. The two most miserable humans alive, seemingly the only two unwilling to join in the eternal, blissfully conjoined soup of human consciousness, stuck together, hating each other, for the rest of their miserable lives, seems to fit the series far better than anything that has followed it. But herein lies my dislike. For a series so hell bent on optimistic platitudes, it misses the mark of hope by not only miles, but parsecs.
