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School Days is sometimes praised for being a takedown of the harem genre, and for its parallels to Shakespeare. Yet Puella Magi Madoka Magica is a Shakespeare-esque deconstruction of magical girls, and it's no good. What makes School Days great is not its relationship to other art but its precise depiction of teenage neuroses. If director Keitaro Motonaga wanted merely to skewer harem tropes and punish his characters for their immorality, they would not have been portrayed so compassionately.

School Days portrays the unique tragedy of early high school, where children barely more mature than they were a few years earlier are suddenly acting like ... adults. Sekai initially seems friendly but flirtatious, even slightly suspicious. The reality of the situation is revealed by her lifelong best friend who says "Sekai is the type of person who cries for hours when she's sad". One realizes that Sekai's sexual forwardness is an attempt by a sweet, outgoing girl to channel her natural extroversion into something "cooler", less "embarrassing". It's affecting because it's believable; who didn't know a girl in middle school who cried over everything? Each character is revealed for the middle schooler they are beneath their high school clothing. The ED shows the smiling faces of the cast at their best, a frequently heart-wrenching contrast to the shadows of their former selves seen just moments prior. Even Makoto, the sex-fiend protagonist, becomes sympathetic in moments when the show reminds that not so long ago he was a normal, kind boy. The ensemble cast allows the series to tackle many of the different ways people fall into hurting themselves and others sexually. Motonaga manages to save devil-may-care nihilism, one of the most obvious causes of sexual irresponsibility, for a brief conversation between three nameless side characters. Our named characters have thornier motivations.

Despite the sympathetic perspective, no character is alleviated of responsibility for their mistakes. School Days achieves some of Robert Bresson's aim to make the audience feel the omnipresence of God. Each decision feels moral, even apocalyptic, with every wrong move being physically painful to watch. The series is constantly gripping and substantial because one is made to remember that every action has consequences. One female character sees a play after committing a secret, devastating, emotional crime. "Do you believe that if no one was to hear your words, you could get away with anything?" one of the masked actors says. The girl, in response, disappears. It is a frightening moment, but it also inspires self reflection. An especially painful juxtaposition occurs when Makoto breaks a girl's heart, and is visibly about to apologize and comfort her, but instead, for no clear reason, chooses to walk away. His neglect of his natural, human inclination towards goodness is excruciatingly true to life.

School Days is not a well animated series, and even sadly contains two episodes full of Ecchi through the use of unfortunate angles. Despite all the sex in the series, however, none of it is lingered on or portrayed in a titillating manner. Motonaga is a sneakily poetic filmmaker. A kiss timed to the wonderful ending song of the second episode is a primer for gasps to come. A POV shot of Sekai guiltily glancing down at her feet is damning; raindrops falling on Kotonoha's phone is crushing; a fireside dance intended to begin a relationship takes on a bittersweet fondness when it is revealed it is actually the end of one. One particular act of violence spills black blood, a chilling counterpoint to the glowing ketchup present in the Kara no Kyoukai films. The show is full of montages, and don't be surprised when emotions well up while watching them. In School Days, they are far from a way to easily condense information.

None of the series reads like build-up because every episode is climactic, but the characters still feel far more than they say, and those feelings have to come out at some point. School Days is very dramatic, yet crucially no one sheds tears until they absolutely cannot help it. When the tears finally fall, one gasps both for the believability of the performances and the candor of their confessions. The final episode is famous for obvious reasons, but pay attention to the final dialogue scene, in which Sekai admits her rationale for kicking off the entire plot. Her explanation is catharsis for all the shattered hearts in the series, and ours too.

The special begins on a recap of the Marineford War arc that moves too quickly. The sequence would be easier to process if it had been one continuous take moving horizontally. A later scene returns to the war at a slower pace but is blobby, not bloody. Outside of the level of consistency, nothing in the animation goes beyond what Masaaki Yuasa had done by 2014. After Ryuu Nakayama brought empathy to Chainsaw Man through nonstop naturalistic animation, and in the year where Midori Yoshizawa cut to a live action, all red POV shot of a mad dash down the street, it is hard to ... be impressed by the cutesy, endearing but not profound idiosyncrasies of one sweet Nami fangirl. Compositionally, the girl zooming through town on a vehicular bubble is a dynamic delight, while other shots seem literally flat. The art style itself is affectation for its own sake. It doesn't express anything about the One Piece world that Oda's art style has not already.

Ishitani indulges in the brilliant premise, but not enough. The depth of fandom is how celebrities appear liberated from the mundanities and cruelties of one's particular life. Easy references are insufficient to engage this deep, human subject. A rowdy bar argument about who may be the world's strongest swordsman seems too detached, as if we are watching from the vantage point of someone who does not share their excitement. A shopkeep in love with Brook's music sports deep black makeup under her eyes, a Goth touch implying an inner life that is otherwise unexplored. The protagonist's love of Nami, bluntly exposited as being predicated on Nami not having big muscles or a devil fruit, is not overpowering because Ishitani does not show us the suffocation of living in a world where only the strong are celebrated.

The special's best scene, which is moving as opposed to pleasant, depicts the violent backstory of a Marine in love with Straw Hat Luffy. The Marine's leg is shredded by a falling boat, a harrowing, tactile detail that makes up for the film's other depictions of war. Though it contains the film's best expression of the awe a distant role model can inspire, the heart of the flashback lies in the relationship between the Marine and his younger brother. A reverse chronological montage conveys the older brother's understandable irritation and the younger brother's heart melting sweetness. The rest of the sequence uses a star of light as a primal symbol for Love. The best images are all contained in these few minutes: blood gushing from a screaming mouth, an admiring yet bitter gaze at the back of a hero running ahead, a coward turning from what is obviously right.

The ending is saccharine, built around the lazy device of a vague speech set to music. The climax would be more affecting if the flurry of images shown were new, and not shots that were already shown earlier. The protagonist bravely chooses to focus on the moon instead of the finger, but the depth of that choice is under-emphasized. A post-credits sequence would have been unnecessary if the final scene had properly expressed the gravity of the situation. The film as is could use a beautiful epilogue, but the one we got expresses nothing that is not already in the story proper.

We can use all the auteurs we can get, and as few show-boats as possible. One Piece Fan Letter toes the line. Ishitani would do right to sacrifice the noticeable for the substantive.

The first Japanese film I've seen that criticizes Japan in a World War II context. Kayoko's mother mentions that her abundantly lovable daughter freely offered up her baby doll to the government when she heard it would help win the war. Her mother's specific mention that donated kewpie dolls are used to build plastic explosives twinges the heart with pain. The utter excitement that Kayoko's brothers have when they say that Japan will defeat even America because they're teamed up with Germany and Italy reminds of children debating which of their favorite superheroes is stronger. Yet the film is not hateful. Kayoko's father's comment that ... they'll definitely win the war because "Japan is God's country" is sincere, which induces understanding in the audience for what misguided nationalism feels like on the ground. This moment expresses a warm "hate the sin, not the sinner" mentality that allows for vicious clarity without partisan rage.

The majority of the film does not touch on the war, despite my opening paragraph, but rather is made up of a series of episodes from Kayoko's childhood from 1940-1945. These episodes are charged with the vividness and affection that Terrence Davies put into Distant Voices, Still Lives. I was not shocked when I discovered that this film is based on an autobiography. These are not vague images of domestic bliss to heighten the dread of inevitable tragedy. Each episode is tangibly specific, evinced by the rich backgrounds, the unique toys that the children play with, and the multifaceted dynamics at home. The variant title "Kayoko's Diary" is frustratingly incorrect but nonetheless profound: the film has the idiosyncrasy and love for small details of a child's diary. Not just any child, but the big-hearted Kayoko. The film would not work if her cheerfulness were not credible, but thankfully that is not the case.

Not treacly, "Who's Left Behind" inspires holy tears. It is a catharsis for Kayoko and Japan that sets both free from the extremes of wallowing and stoicism and trudges on with hope, faith and love. Witnessing this healthy wellspring of emotion should do the same for us.

Okiura makes naturalistic animation seamless in a way never seen before or since. He breaks through the potential uncanny valley of total animated realism and finds empathy and pleasure. It almost distracts us from the film's utter hopelessness. The script has no belief in good cheer or hope. It seems a fairy tale written by the wolf. The film ends with a whimper, fitting of its passive view of fascism as a dry, logistical, inevitability. Okiura, one of the world's greatest animators, is also unable to bring the piercing close ups and hefty perspective shots that a realist animated film like this would need to ... make up for its lack of splendor. The movement of the characters stuns, but the compositions, color choices and editing are too subdued to leave the same impact. The political premise of in-fighting between different military arms of the government is thrilling on paper, but is bogged down by complexity in practice. Most scenes in the film are enjoyable on the grounds of the animation and atmosphere alone, but when the characters start expressing emotions, the emptiness of the film's perspective and characters becomes too heavy for it to bear.

Kenshin sees his guilt in a separated pool of water and blood. The sign of the cross that marks his forgiveness, redemption and decades long suffering is made (consciously) by the combination of a slain man’s forgiveness and his dying fiancée’s desire to express that forgiveness. Through these moments Furuhashi actualizes what was subliminal in the manga and original TV series (Kenshin emerges, in a boat, from under a metaphorical Torii gate in the television series’ first opening).

Though not as rich as the great anime films, this OVA is nonetheless beautiful. Furuhashi’s occasional use of live action footage, like the brief POV shot of ... Tomoe running through the trees, or the real life water in the background of a scene that is otherwise animated, is electrifying. A scene of marital consummation has the sentimentality and romance of shoujo manga. The sword battles are rendered with a frightening snappiness and grotesquerie. The abstraction of the final episode, culminating in an associative montage, is the aesthetic peak (it even has the best fight).

In the opening scenes, Kenshin’s mentor speaks of a world doomed to destruction, a species of people who cannot avoid sin, and the dangers of following the rules of men (including oneself) above… an alternative that goes unmentioned. The answer is implicit. Kenshin finds salvation (victory) in a doomed world.

This was a decent episode, I quite liked some of the star-studded images in the final battle. I think with the hype of Enkidu and Gilgamesh meeting again after so long, the battle could have been even better. Nonetheless, it was unique and conveyed the majesty of their powers. The set up for Jack the Ripper's existential dilemma was compelling as well.

However the portrayal of Alexandre Dumas as a lecherous, annoying idiot (complete with hip hop music in the background, in case you didn't get it), was the most racist thing I have ever seen in an anime. I could not believe what I ... was seeing. Whoever's decision it was to present the famous Black author in such a hateful, inaccurate and flagrantly racist manner should be ashamed. We should not keep quiet about such things.

Gege Akutami's manga Jujutsu Kaisen is deranged, taking after Attack on Titan's grotesquerie and Hunter x Hunter's horror movie aesthetics. Thankfully, Gege was inspired by Togashi's creativity for supernatural abilities as well, leading to Jujutsu Kaisen being the most ambitious and engaging shonen action series of its decade. This season renders these fights exhilaratingly, with greater clarity and intensity than the manga. Director Shota Goshozono and his staff do the complete opposite of merely animating the panels (during one fight there are regular cuts to a moving POV shot) while also, even more impressively, avoiding the share-ready showboating that plagues many big anime productions. These ... battles are thrilling episodes of danger and kinetics, not fourth wall breaking animation showcases to be appreciated out of context. They are tense, violent and frightening; one gasps at the characters' feats of impossible strength as if seeing them in real life. That immersive spirit is precious, now as ever.

Equally importantly, someone on the staff for this second season has a bigger heart than Gege, which shows most in the first few episodes that depict the backstory of Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto. A montage of a beach time hangout, a strikingly grounded moral argument over a game of basketball, and an infectiously innocent, sweet portrayal of Riko Amanai handily elevate the flashback above the manga's depiction, but the killer is the opening and ending for this stretch of episodes both being rendered as though Geto and Gojo are the two best-friend main characters of a 50 episode adventure series. It's a stunning, sentimental gesture. The series does eventually drown in its own nonstop combat, but even that brings more poignancy to a lovely early episode where Kugisaki and Fushiguro plot to get Itadori a date with an old classmate who crushes on him (Itadori and Kugisaki even bicker at length about a new horror movie!). Beauty is all the more beautiful when it seems so far away.

Throughout Kaiji, Fukumoto submerges the audience in the subjective experiences of individuals going through extreme suffering. He does this not for the sake of a detached notion of "psychology", but rather to induce an edifying empathic response. These are mythical stories, tapestries of human life, suffering and the inextricability of the two from each other. The famed, repetitive sequences in which we enter into someone's (usually Kaiji's) thoughts and are barraged by wavy lines, screaming, neurotic thinking and visual metaphors involving death, not only dramatize our (contemporary) suffering but link it to eternity. Fukumoto relates all to all: we see Job in the characters and ... we see ourselves in them too.

However, Fukumoto tends to spin such a yarn out of the intellectual battles that Kaiji ends up in that readers are left conflicted. Half sharing in the agony of Kaiji's psychosis, half delighted by Fukumoto's witty plot twists. Part 4 of Kaiji makes the solemnity and universality of the story more apparent and inescapable (even oppressive) than in past arcs. This is apparent in the gruesomeness of its main "game". The meat of the story is nail biting but it is too obviously disturbing to be entertaining. A life or death mahjong game does not force you to consider its lethal consequences at every moment, but the "Salvation Game" of Part 4 is disturbing in its very visual construction. It is not only this factor that makes Kaiji Part 4 so grave, however.

Part 3 is mostly magnificent and jubilant, but undercuts itself more often as it goes on, and Kaiji begins to truly panic. Most potently, the victory that Kaiji eventually achieves becomes slightly underwhelming because Fukumoto highlights the randomness of it all. Kaiji didn't "deserve to win", and he barely escaped being cut into pieces. When the psychopathic villain Muraoka is defeated and Kaiji is not only spared but given millions of dollars, Kaiji expresses ambivalence rather than joy. It isn't just that he doesn't seem that happy about the money. He also begins to feel sympathy for Muraoka, who, while writhing around on the floor out of madness and agony after losing, has wet his underwear.

Part 4, then, picks up right where Part 3 left off both narratively and thematically. Fukumoto shifts Kaiji into the background for the entire Part and dramatizes the inner lives of the chillingly cruel villain Kazuya, and three new characters, Mario, Chang, and Mitsuyama. The former is a revelation: through Kazuya's deranged, vulnerable speeches detailing his sympathetic but evil ideology, Fukumoto makes the Dostoevsky influence present in his depiction of inner monologues extend also to long, emotionally charged discussions of what is essentially theology. While Kazuya talks about his belief that human nature is unchangeably completely evil, like a great Dostoevsky speech, revulsion at his hatefulness and incorrectness take a back seat to compassion and partial understanding. Fukumoto gives him the floor, and Kazuya expresses his thoughts so vulnerably and fully that the reluctant Kaiji feels it; he is unable to completely refute Kazuya, not only because Kazuya is a better rhetorician, but also because Kaiji knows he's onto something. He does not merely see a twisted logic in Kazuya's explanation. Kaiji empathizes with the suffering, and ultimately the cynicism, that Kazuya expresses. To see yourself in someone you despise is true connection, and to depict that as an artist, particularly in a genre that thrives on treating opponents as less than human, is true boldness. That Kaiji continues to disagree with Kazuya despite feeling the sincerity of his longing for understanding and mutual honesty is what makes it work. It's the difference between a work that evokes the universality of human experience and a nihilist polemic.

One may imagine that the time spent with the new characters, three incredibly poor and incredibly close friends, must be less moving than that time spent with Kazuya. After all, Kazuya's perspective as someone born into immense wealth is one we have not seen before in the series, whereas Kaiji himself is, like these three friends, poor, caring and sentimental. But expanding the focus beyond Kaiji and people he knows makes it clear that the mythical aspects of the manga serve its empathic purpose, rather than the other way around. If this had been a manga about immortalizing the struggles of Kaiji alone, then the empathy shown towards Kaiji (or even his "equals" like Kazuya, who he gambles against) would be tools that aide the depiction of some sort of battle of the gods. Fukumoto, thankfully not a tedious writer, does the opposite, and places the audience so totally in the experience of Mario that it is as though he was the main character. As he once related the reader, Kaiji and the history of man's suffering, Fukumoto now links Mario to Kaiji, and Kaiji to Kazuya. The particulars of life and suffering are not limited to rich or poor, Japanese or foreigner nor to major characters or minor. It's immensely rewarding because Mario's life is not only so similar to Kaiji's but also so different from Kaiji's, as revealed through numerous evocative details of backstory and inner monologue. His childhood of working long hours in the heat, scavenging through garbage to make the equivalent of one US dollar a day is too moving to be reducible to a thematic purpose. As is his love/hate relationship with his spirited, generous, happy Christian brother, whom Mario describes as "the weird one" when compared to the countless men in their environment who, under such cruel conditions, simply gave up. In one mind blowing moment, Kaiji even seems less virtuous than Mario! Had the notion of universal experience been (over)emphasized to the point that the specifics of individuals' selves and lives were overlooked, the manga would be no less tedious than those aforementioned stories which seem to assert most people as backgrounds for the all important duel between protagonist and antagonist.

Though it is in many ways a tangibly sickening, cynical work, Kaiji Part 4 is not unsettling. We all know we suffer unbearably. Fukumoto responds by pointing out that everyone else suffers just as much. It's as much a comfort as it is a challenge.

This review contains spoilers.

After the disparaging, somewhat despicable TV series wasted Anno's talents on telling millions of viewers to give up on life and embrace their deepest pain as being their entire entity, the wishywashy auteur returned to make an actual work of art and clarify his message. He succeeded! End of Evangelion respectably reshapes the narrative and message of the original series into something that at the very least attempts to give meaning to the suffering that got us here. The film not only validates the premise of the original series, it is also a shockingly powerful work of art in its own ... right. Anno's originality and bravery pays off, with more actually great images and restraint than is present in the entirety of the TV series. He even finally lands the dissonant music aesthetic, in one particularly concentrated hit of cinematic horror that I won't soon be forgetting. And yet, End of Evangelion is still far from a great film. There are two main reasons for this: its nature as a sequel to the original Evangelion, and Tsurumaki's involvement with the first half.

The connection to Neon Genesis Evangelion is an unfortunate albatross that End of Eva is unable to shake. Since the characters and build up are all contained in the original series, this film cannot be watched without having seen that series. This is a chore in and of itself, since I would never endeavor to tell anyone to watch that show ever again. Additionally, because it is part of the same artistic project, the tone and main themes have already been established. Since Neon Genesis was the least inspired, least creative and compassionate thing Anno had ever made, a work whose environment and cast of characters is hostile towards even glimpses of tenderness, End of Evangelion was set from the beginning to be similarly sterile and just as unnerving.

These characters, in my opinion, are simply not human or 3 dimensional in any way at all. Seeing as this film was made relatively quickly after the end of the original series, it makes sense that Anno was not able to reconstruct these aestheticized dolls into humans quite yet (though eventually he does do that) Because of this, he doesn't even try to have them connect to one another. For the entire section of the film Anno directed, there is hardly what I would call a vulnerable moment, with one debatable exception. This is a solid strategy, as having uncomfortably fake scenes that intend to be sensitive and emotional is far worse than just not having them at all. Instead, Anno chooses to express ideas and feelings through the synthesis of image and sound, as well as through language. In this way, the film is triumph. Existential dread, lust, death, mercy, psychological confusion and loneliness are at the very least memorably captured in impressionistic sequences of pure cinema. While I am impressed by these sequences, the film is so fractured in its structure that some of them, including the legendary ending, come off as equal parts brilliant and random. Anno's best work (and great art in general), reaches the heart and soul deeper than the senses and the brain.

This coldness is emphasized massively in the first half of the film, which was directed by Tsurumaki Kazuya. Tsurumaki is a disciple of Anno and one that was not at all ready to handle a project of this size. His section of the film is no better than the TV series on which it is based, filled with nonsensical character beats that lack any weight or tone, as it speeds through all the relevant plot information as fast as possible so it can get to the part that actually has something to say as soon as possible. But because this is a sequel to a "mecha show", it needs to have a "mech fight", so they throw in a gratuitous, violent fight scene where Asuka fights nameless, faceless monsters and has a nervous breakdown of sorts disguised as an epiphany in the process. This scene is terrible not only because it serves as filler, condecending the audience with flashy action like a mobile in a baby's crib, but also because of how it tosses the character of Asuka around like a ragdoll, showing her no compassion as it plays with her feelings mercilessly. The iconic opening scene in which she is objectified and sexualized by both the protagonist and the film for the sake of mindless self indulgence makes her treatment later in the film even more objectionable. That the animators attempt to make this disturbed, pointless action scene look "badass", while making sure to overanimate as many details as possible for extra brownie points on their resume, is the cherry on top.

The other cast members fare no better in this misguided first half. Ritsuko, Rei, Gendo and Misato are treated just as poorly as they were in the original series, but because this is an ending they are also now allowed to be unceremoniously killed off. Whether this was to tie off loose ends or just because the staff is sick in the head is up to interpretation, either way it isn't art and more importantly it isn't good. The transparency in regards to how little this film cares about these characters places great emphasis on Shinji as the one and only character who matters. This makes sense considering the content of Anno's flawed but brilliant second half but is still disheartening. Making Shinji the focal point of the entire film and essentially the universe is not only creepily inhumane towards his peers and loved ones, but also trivializes his experiences and feelings by turning him into an all important monomyth character. For all the talk about Shinji's cowardice, End of Evangelion reveals what Shinji always was: a superhero, no more complex than Naruto and no less idealized than Zeus and Poseidon.

End of Evangelion is a valiant effort to salvage a terrible situation that reaps some moderate results. The film's lows are low, simultaneously banal, creepy and disturbing. Even its best scenes retain a certain shiver, which is ultimately part of the overall work's charm but serves as a detriment when nothing actively jaw dropping is happening. Had Anno directed the entire thing with no restrictions and no Tsurumaki, I don't think it'd ever be anything close to a personal favorite. Still, there are pieces of a great film here and I could not take away from Anno his endless creativity when it comes to endings.

A decade ago, Jacob Chapman made the case that the fatal flaw of Neon Genesis Evangelion was its existentialist thesis, one that assumed the sustainability of "creating one's own personal universe" within its premise. To me, this critique got to the heart of the show better than any other that I had heard, and I retain that it is true. Now, however, I see so much more to dislike that the existential angle seems like just the outer shell of what is a truly rotten core.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is a classic example of a common fallacy, the projection of "humanism" at the expense of having ... any compassion for the individual. For all the series' musings about how you need to live, laugh and love, nothing here seems to suggest that the actual characters at the center of the story matter to the creators. "Emotional moments" seem jerry rigged to endear the audience to the characters and series by appealing to relatable struggles and classical melodrama (orphans, unrequited love, the betrayal of a friend), in the end all this does is prove that the characters themselves are nothing more than dolls for the series to play with. Shinji can do and say whatever the narrative of the show demands because he's not unlike Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter at heart, a faceless cypher for the audience that can be thrown into the depths of despair, bravery, rage, insecurity or compassion for the sake of a point. This is no less true of its objectified bunch of young women, who play as whatever their anime stereotype is combined with objectifying sexualization and a couple of one note clandestine desires that make the series appear "psychological" without it having to actually care about any of the characters.

It would be glib to suggest that a work can't preach a message of love and compassion while also having what I perceive to be flat characters, and I can't deny that evaluating the sincerity, believability and humanity by which a character is portrayed in a story is far from an exact science, but when this same work is also built around romanticizing the idea of all humanity returning to an amorphous collective consciousness, those flat characters begin to appear more suspicious in their intentions. Are Shinji, Asuka, Rei, Misato and Gendo husks because Anno and his team are bad writers, or because the message of the show, from the beginning, was to downplay individuality and act as an ode to giving up? Since I am a fan of Anno's, I would hope he would never intend the latter, and yet as a fan of his I also know for certain that its not the former. The show's belief in, nay, insistence on conformity and the death of the self (not for the sake of spreading love and kindness at the expense of one's own comfort but rather to serve a nebulous idea of "the greater good", which in this show's eyes is something like everyone in the world dying) contrasted with its disingenuous appearance as a "compassionate character study" is the essential problem in my eyes.

To even discuss the individual elements of form at play here may seem fruitless when considering the ideological mischief at the heart of the work, but understanding those component parts is a step towards understanding the how, what and why of the final product. Hideaki Anno is, relatively, a master of composition, texture and color. It would be hard, even, to find a television anime from this time period that equals the wealth of creative and detailed designs, appealing colors and fluid animation that is contained in Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's not as if these memorable images contain any pathos or expression of worth, mind you. Form isn't inherently artistic, and that is vividly expressed here in violent, precisely composed action scenes that serve no actual purpose in the narrative and suffer from a complete lack of humanity or kineticism. Some moments could be seen as tense, which I suppose is a compliment but exaggerated tension in a vacuum is a brief, insubstantial "pleasure", not unlike a cigarette except duller and more uncomfortable. The Hideaki Anno that crafted the wonderful, restrained mech battle at the end of Gunbuster episode 5 is nowhere to be seen here, a show where nearly every episode has a fight and not a single one is pleasant. "Horrific" could certainly describe a few of them, I won't deny the memorable terror of seeing a 14 year old boy stab a monster with a knife and scream bloody murder while doing it, but since that doesn't build to anything it isn't worth much. My point is not to undermine every aesthetic accomplishment Anno and his team managed with Evangelion, but rather to explain why I believe even those aspects are ultimately footnotes in what becomes the lingering memory and impact of the overall series. From my point of view, these action scenes serve to unnerve the audience, emphasize certain imagery, occasionally continue the characterization and pad out the episodes so they don't feel completely empty. Adept technique in service of insidious ends is only worth as much as those ends, and if there's a hint of showboating or glamor in that (as I very much suspect is present with the opulent, masturbatory action sequences in Evangelion), then it is even worse.

The music in Evangelion is far less superficially impressive than the way the show looks, though it has somehow maintained a hypnotic grip on the culture regardless. Atypically for Gainax, Neon Genesis Evangelion's score is made up of entirely forgettable tunes that do a decent job of convincing the viewer that what they're watching is anything other than a thin veil of color, geometry and sexualization intended to distract them from the real message lying just beneath. The show's opening and ending theme songs pretend to be worthy of note but are only so because of a few mysterious properties. The show's opening, A Cruel Angel's Thesis, is a generic, somewhat tonedeaf popsong played over some undeniably interesting rapid cut images that explain quite a bit of the show if you pay enough attention. As you likely already know, this song has managed to become incredibly popular despite not sounding that unique, and to be frank, this spell is not lost on me. I know every single word sung over the course of the 90 second sequence played at the beginning of each episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and I honestly don't know why that is. I've never particularly liked this show, nor the opening, even during times where I had a lot more respect for its construction. There are quite literally hundreds of anime openings I like more, from shows I like more, that I've listened to more times and more recently. Thus, I will give credit where it is due. It's a catchy song. As is "Fly Me To The Moon", the iconic ending theme which sticks out far more than the opening and yet is also a magic trick. It's a slow song, it's a famous song, it's in English, it's set to a somewhat striking, odd visual, and the lyrics are vaguely dramatic sounding. All of these surface level elements distract from it not really being a good ED at all. It's not particularly emotional, nor fitting for the series, nor are the lyrics or visuals meaningful or profound in really any way. Just like the opening and the fight scenes, it's memorable and shows clear competence of form, but in service of nothing.

"Memorable and competent but fundamentally illusory" is an apt descriptor for everything about Neon Genesis Evangelion that doesn't involve mankind's collective, unconscious return to the original ancestor. If there is any meaning to the inherent strange artifice of this series, of action scenes that look cool and frightening but evoke nothing, of characters who cry and hurt but have no souls, of music that affects importance but carries no weight, it is that it serves to disconnect the audience from their humanity enough to make the "medicine" of the show's ultimate theme go down easier. If the uncomfortability caused by the contrast between ostensible quality and internal darkness was intentional on the part of the staff, they would certainly be malevolent geniuses of some kind, yet I think its more realistic to say that goodness cannot be truly faked in the pursuit of ill begotten gains.

To say that a team of artists and their production committee decided to create what was, at the time, a completely one of a kind TV anime, only for the purpose of manipulating their audience into caring enough about the show that it can tenderly encourage them to give up on life at the end, would be a bit grim and unrealistic. Yet it would certainly be no more unrealistic than saying that the same effort (and capital) was put into sincerely helping an artist realize his selfless, sensitive vision of a new kind of mecha anime. The truth is most likely somewhere in between, as the series' messiness and uneven writing speaks to some kind of honest production cycle, while Anno's references to Godzilla and Mobile Suit Gundam reflect what we know to be his interests. I am aware as well that Anno has struggled with depression in his life, and that those struggles are very likely an inspiration on the characters and themes explored in the show. I am also aware that what I perceive to be callous and impersonal characterization is very common in anime (and art in general), even in other works by Anno, so it is just as fair to say that the depiction of characters in Evangelion was simply an aspect of the show that I feel does not work and was made with not particularly out of the ordinary warped intentions. On the contrary, however, studio Gainax seems to consistently advocate for the themes I find to be particularly heinous in Evangelion, those being conformity and misanthropy. It is also a bit unbelievable to me that so much money and marketing would be put into something that is actually bleedingly loving, heartfelt art, as many fans may see this series. Based on this information, I would conclude that the final product is a blend of the actual interests of its creators, the subconscious desires and biases of those creators, formal showboating, attempts to appeal to a popular audience, and fully self aware propaganda.

The core issue here, of emptiness disguised as understanding, is typified in the series' contrast to Mobile Suit Gundam. Tomino's original treatise against war made powerful use of its mechanical imagery. On the inside of cold, unfeeling husks called "mobile suits" were fragile, precious human beings. Amuro's virtues, flaws, pain and triumph were contrasted against one another to create a holistic portrait of a life, which then emphasized the anti-warmth shell which he inhabited. The whole environment was made to be unfit to sustain the sensitivity of what we see, and Tomino makes that clear immediately and constantly. There is no reason that Anno should make the same series that Tomino did, in fact that would be bad in its own right, but the choice to make the mechs biomechanical and the environment so nondescript reveals the intentions of this project. The humanity of the characters isn't contrasted with the inhumanity of the machines or the violence because, in the eyes of this show, they are one and the same.