The world did not need more Evangelion. The original series and its capstone film still exist, and are still phenomenal; the Rebuild series could not recapture that lightning in a bottle, nor could it meaningfully improve on the artistry with which Gainax and their collaborators first brought their ideas to life. The original Evangelion was a masterpiece that permanently altered its medium, for better and for worse. The Rebuilds can only hope to echo or augment their predecessor, whatever power they might possess existing largely because they are positioned on the shoulders of a colossus.
This does not make them unusual within modern anime, a fact even Evangelion itself is eager to admit. Evangelion is a story about rising out of depression and anxiety, about facing the world earnestly, about attempting the impossible task of reaching out to others, even if you know your mutual understanding will always be partial and imperfect. Intrinsic within this aim is a censure of insularity and isolated self-satisfaction, of contenting yourself with the familiar because it doesn’t challenge you, of never braving the foreign, complex, or new. Even if Anno and his associates had not openly declared their intent to broaden anime and its audience’s psychological and artistic horizons, the work speaks for itself – not only or even primarily saying that, but saying it nonetheless.
Of course, as all we know, Evangelion failed entirely in that objective. Anime and popular media at large have become increasingly self-reflective and insular over the last several decades, more concerned with their own genres and related expectations than propping up unique voices, advancing aesthetic form, or simply experimenting with what is possible. Hiroki Azuma famously described otaku as “database animals,” consumers who were more preoccupied with cataloging specific fragments of works that appealed to their existing sensibilities than engaging with grand narratives on their own terms. The rise of global fandom and preeminence of traditionally niche media like superheroes echoes this trend, offering a vast proliferation of art that lends itself more to cataloging and indexing than emotional or thematic engagement.
I feel like even Azuma would blush at the extremes to which his proposed philosophy has been taken, how completely his conception of anti-narrative art appreciation has consumed the market. Anime are now adapted from light novels that list the favored tropes they’ll be prioritizing right in their titles, or from phone games that are explicitly designed around gambling to collect favorite familiar archetypes. And though anime is now frequently bolstered by foreign capital, it is rare that this trend results in any genuinely new art. More remakes, more Star Wars, more superheroes; there is now more content than ever, but it is primarily just echoes of everything that’s already passed any point of artistic individuality or novelty, saturation beyond the saturation point.
I’m certainly not immune to the appeal of the familiar, or to the complimentary pleasures of the media mix ecosystem. I like One Piece a great deal, and am happy I get to read One Piece and watch One Piece and play One Piece videogames. The complimentary yet distinct intentions and effects of a multimedia franchise can undoubtedly create a greater combined whole, or allow audiences a degree of agency in isolating what elements of a narrative speak to them. The Rebuilds themselves offer a fine articulation of this truth; they clearly cannot echo the original’s intrinsic, cohesive power, but they can complicate its perspective, or perhaps append an epilogue to its thematic intentions. If we are doomed to repeat increasingly insular artistic cycles, then I at least take comfort in the Rebuilds’ awareness of what is happening here; and from its looping title of “3.0+1.0” on down, this final Rebuild fundamentally embodies a hope that repetition might breed new understanding, that even if we are trapped within looping cycles, we can at least hope do things better the next time.
Furthermore, learning that these Rebuilds were primarily intended to repay the animators who were shortchanged during the original Eva production casts this entire project in a new light. We can talk all day about how great art expands our consciousness and leads us towards enacting positive material changes, but here that positive material change is built into the very production of the work itself. Like many art forms historical and contemporary, the allegedly “superfluous” nature of great art, and the fact that artists are often driven to create even at the expense of their personal lives, leads to rampant exploitation within the anime industry. Animators are paid in pennies to bring our dreams to life, suffering and even dying for the sake of a world that sees what is most beautiful in life as the most expendable.
What can a work of slavish recreation hope to accomplish? Probably not a wholescale transcendence of personal or aesthetic consciousness, but when was that ever on the table? Human consciousness and aesthetic sophistication aren’t boulders we can consistently push up hills, while financial deprivation is something real and inescapable, a concrete cruelty that must be addressed before anything beautiful can be born. In this age of ruthless exploitation within animation, striving for artistic transcendence while ignoring the conditions of its creation seems antithetical to any theme such transcendent art could propose. Hideaki Anno created Evangelion because he wanted to connect with others; Studio Khara created the Rebuilds because Anno had connected with others, and realized what they required to live happy, fulfilling lives.
Given that context, the insular concerns of the original Evangelion could seem as somewhat myopic, or perhaps even privileged. Most people won’t watch Evangelion, or will watch it and won’t be touched in the same precise way by it. Most people will continue to not truly understand each other. The hope of art facilitating personal awakening and transcendence will always be an aspirational one; most people have enough day-to-day concerns not to worry themselves with whether the art they consume is enriching them, cultivating their empathy and broadening their perspective. Caring this much about art is the domain of a lucky few, and obsessing so much over what others think of us is an idle pastime of those with no greater immediate concerns. All these years after first having my anxious, depressed soul laid bare by the original series, I can appreciate the mental health inherent in simply not getting what Shinji’s problem is.
It is fitting, then, that this turning away from self-involvement towards engagement with the world and communal responsibility is not just the context of this film, but its overt text as well. The actual productive heroes of 3.0+1.0 are not the Eva pilots, trapped as they are in cycles of cataclysmic adolescent awakening. It is the ordinary people like Toji, Hikari, and Kensuke, who have spent the intervening years not obsessing over questions of human connection, but actually toiling and connecting in the real world, planting seeds and working within their community. While Shinji and Asuka remain trapped in both body and mind, Toji and his peers have cast their gaze outwards, and seen how much work there is to be done in tilling the soil and caring for their neighbors. By not obsessing over prior glories and failures, they were able to grow far beyond them.
“I kinda heard what happened to you, but it was too confusing for me,” admits Toji to Shinji. What a healthy attitude towards life! Not getting obsessed over the minutiae of psychology and identity and how that is transposed to giant robots and angels, but simply living, and making earnest connections with others through doing so. The light of this community is almost blinding to Shinji, who has spent so much time asking himself if he can merely be allowed to grow close to others. In the context of this hardscrabble, tight-knit community, the answer seems obvious. Just as Gainax birthed Khara, so did Misato’s WILLE birth Kredit, a support organization designed to feed and protect the survivors of NERV’s apocalypse. The important work of life isn’t fighting alien invaders – it is managing and supporting communities, making sure people have what they need not just to survive, but to truly live.
Granted, these lessons aren’t exactly foreign to Evangelion. But their substance is offered more gently this time around, in its most pure and actionable form, through the words offered to Ayanami and the space afforded to Shinji as he recuperates. “What is ‘good morning,’” Ayanami asks, to which Hikari replies “It’s what you say when wishing each other a good day.” “What does this gesture mean,” she asks of an offered handshake. “It is what we do to bond.”
These small practices are actually the essence of life – everyday prayers we send to each other, formalized into familiar shapes so we can aspire to common understanding. True, full understanding of another is as impossible now as it was back when Shinji reached for Asuka’s throat. But we can always announce our commitment to caring for each other, even through such simple rituals as this. Whereas a more youthfully jaded artist might find such trivialities insincere or insufficient, Anno now understands these acts as the fundamentals of human connection – as the realization of the hope embodied in Misato’s “welcome home,” back when she first invited Shinji into her apartment.
“Life is a continuous cycle of tough times and good times,” Hikari tells Rei. “There’s nothing wrong if everything feels the same as today. That’s how it is.” Time has softened the intractability of Evangelion’s perspective, textured it with an understanding that tomorrow will inevitably follow today, and you won’t necessarily feel quite the same then. And through coming to find joy in these cycles and in each other, Evangelion’s lonely souls have even come to appreciate their own relative insignificance, as embodied through Kaji’s lingering wishes.
Kaji was always the most mature of the original Evangelion’s characters, always the one who seemed to have everything figured out. His hobby of growing watermelons was essentially the healthiest thing anyone in the original Eva ever did; here, that instinct is expanded to the entire Village 3 farming project, and also embodied through their “battleship’s” primary function as an arc of biodiversity. “For Kaji, the survival of mankind wasn’t that important,” Misato admits. “He held the highest priority on preserving all the diverse lifeforms that the Human Instrumentality Project would obliterate.” An odd contradiction in that; in our efforts to ensure full communal understanding through instrumentality, we would have destroyed all the attendant life forms that Kaji’s broader humanism, his authentic understanding of our collective responsibility, held so dear.
Of course, this is the final Eva film, and thus it must include some Eva battles. The actual combat and psychedelia that consumes 3.0+1.0’s final act is largely just noise, echoing familiar touchstones ranging from End of Evangelion to even Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water’s battle over Paris. It feels abrasive and tired, with even the characters themselves acknowledging they are trapped within repeating cycles of fantastical self-satisfaction. “The imaginary and reality blend together, and everything becomes homogenized information,” Gendo admits, even as he conducts a wild cacophony of misplaced and ill-remembered hopes. Fuyutsuki frames Evangelion’s self-reflective oblivion more sharply: “the ray of light called hope eternally shines on humanity. But humans also drown, clinging on to the disease known as hope. I believe both Ikari and I have clung onto that disease for far too long.”
Hope can lead us to marvelous heights, but “hope” for return to an idealized past is actually a cancer, a craving for familiarity that leaves no room for new insight or artistry. We must always be diligent in ensuring we pursue hopes that might truly enrich us, and expand our connections with the world around us. The actual beat-to-beat conflict of 3.0+1.0’s last battle is inscrutable word salad, working only as reflections of familiar touchstones from other renditions of this conflict. The film itself is trapped by the Curse of Eva, doomed to repeat itself, desperate for new life to be born. What is fresh and vital is not found on the battlefield – it resides back in Village 3, the only part of this film that is unfamiliar, featuring the only characters who are looking towards the future.
As is the way of all artistry within our modern cycles of repetition, what was once a story about human attempts at connection has now inevitably become a story about this franchise itself, its internal assumptions and the desperate hope of transcending them. It is fitting then, that Shinji’s final choice here is not simply “to keep living,” as he chose in End of Evangelion, but “to live in a world without Evangelions,” to embrace a mundane future and support the people around him. We must escape from narratives as cages, as diagnoses, as destinies. We must live in the real world, grappling directly with its challenges, and savoring the fruit of our labors. Could the answer have always been so simple? One hand reaches towards another. “This is what we do to bond.”
But then, we still need art like the original Neon Genesis Evangelion. I’m too old now to assume my fixation is universal; I know many people who can get by just fine in the real world, absent a reliance on art’s fickle inspiration. But I am not many people, and if you’ve found your way to this document, it seems likely you are not many people either. Stories are my faith, and though I rail against the myopia and denial of self that is slavish fandom, I must admit that Evangelion has to me been a shelter, a temple. Not because it offers a categorizable pocket world, or because it tells me everything I need to know. I love Eva because it assures me that no one knows everything, that in my striving for understanding and compassion and transcendence through shared aesthetic experience, I will never be alone.
In that, am I any less myopic or fanatical than the people to whom Evangelion is allegedly addressed? Any less needful of its final lessons? And who can blame any of us? Modern society has isolated and automized us, turned us into solitary vessels of wealth creation, and the fatalism engendered by that society naturally seeps into the art we produce. We seek control and understanding in art because we cannot find it in reality, seek validation and familiarity because the future looks so bleak. And Gainax’s heyday was as exceptional as the New Hollywood era; we cannot talk about a fatigue of artistry without talking about a medium’s economic incentive structures, how original or auteur-driven media within capitalism will in every case be the exception to the rule.
I suppose that only makes it all the more essential to actually get up and do something, rather than simply marinate in either aesthetic validation or a directive to escape it. However perfect the vessel, transcendence is not found in admiring the messenger, but in heeding the message – in stepping outside and smiling, cupping the earth and letting fingers brush the soil. A raised aesthetic consciousness is as much of a fantasy as absolute mutual understanding – the path forward is not found in pursuing these ends, but in coming to understand what we can and cannot change. Evangelion’s final moments thus reframe its fundamental question, as Shinji rises to greet the world, and a song gently whispers that “I love you more than you’ll ever know.” The reality of imperfect understanding, now fitted to greet the day with warmth and compassion. What we cannot express is not just the dark contours of our hearts; it is also the infinite scale of our mutual love.
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