#Anno history edition series#
The last images that flash onscreen in the TV series are a written message: “Thank you, Father. I fell into what’s called a depressive state, the natural result of having spent six years grinding down my soul making Eva again.” He has also discussed having had suicidal ideation in the ’90s after reading online threads from trolls who suggested ways to end his life.Īscribing too much autobiography to Anno’s work would be reductive, but his artistic choices routinely break the fourth wall to reveal a closeness to his family of characters. As early as 1995, Anno, known for sleeping in his office, wrote that he “tried to include everything of myself in Neon Genesis Evangelion.” Twenty years later, he would remark in interviews that, after the lukewarm 2012 reception to his third Evangelion Rebuild film, “I was broken. It was during the production on Neon Genesis that Anno first confronted his own psyche and history of depression, a self-discovery that clearly informed how he drilled into his animated characters’ minds. They were created by production staff to resemble the kinds of mail Anno received, some of which included death threats.) So when Thrice Upon a Time slides into rough pencils - or stages a scene with its characters in a dark room, watching old clips from Neon Genesis on a projector - Anno is plugging back into familiar territory, excavating his character’s emotions by deconstructing the animation around them. (The “fan” letters that flash across the screen in The End of Evangelion are not all death threats, as some have come to believe in fact, they’re not even fan letters. Without the company of others, the show tells us, Shinji feels literally empty.Īnno equally famously included a trippy live-action sequence at the end of the 1997 follow-up film The End of Evangelion, complete with footage of an audience watching Evangelion in a theater and “fan” reactions to the divisive project. At one point, protagonist Shinji dwells on his loneliness amid a deliriously edited rush of live-action stills, distorted frames of his own face, and other character frames from the show, which eventually get inscribed inside a monochrome illustration of Shinji himself. Anno famously went over budget on his ’90s TV show, which included a pair of avant-garde final episodes that narrate the characters’ thoughts in clip-show-style, first-person vignettes, rather than depict a straightforward (and more expensive) giant-robot battle. The shifting of animation styles to convey climactic moments in a story is a tale as old as time, but in the Evangelion saga, it has a specific history. When Shinji speaks to him, the animation returns to normal, then it cuts back to sketches and shifting backgrounds, as we dive through Gendo’s memories again.įrom top: Photo: Amazon Prime Video Photo: Amazon Prime Video The choppy editing matches Gendo’s mania and sadness as he recalls his doomed romance, the images gradually overlaid with black-and-white shots of Rei, the girl Gendo created as a replacement for Yui. The second he utters the line, the crisp, color-saturated, 2-D animation (aided by CGI, of course) that we’ve been watching for two hours cuts to sketchy, rough-hewn line work, closer to storyboards or manga than to finished animation. This is the moment director Hideaki Anno chooses to dramatically shift the visual storytelling: “It is a very restful world, where I can be with Yui again,” Gendo says, explaining to his son why he attempted to create a cataclysm where billions of people’s minds would meld into one. But even if you’re unfamiliar with the original mecha show Neon Genesis Evangelion, its follow-up films, or the Rebuild tetralogy that Thrice Upon a Time ties off - all of which remake and remix the same essential story - the monologue arrives with heft. To longtime Eva fans, Gendo explaining himself feels monumental. Unlike his past comeuppances in the expansive Evangelion franchise, here, the man both physically fights his teenage son Shinji and monologues, unleashing heartache over his dead wife, Yui, and taking responsibility for his failures as a dad - failures that have led to a psychosexual apocalypse by which all of humanity liquefies into homogeneous goo. Anime director Hideaki Anno excavates his characters’ emotions by deconstructing the world around them.Ī little over two hours into Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, we finally hear Gendo Ikari, father to our protagonist and the anime series’ final boss, speak at length.
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