Diskotek Media recently released the six episode OVA series Gunbuster on Blu-ray.
Stay with me here.
I had long ago purchased a copy of the movie versions of both Gunbuster and its successor series, Diebuster. And while I couldn’t remember exactly what it was that interested me about them I remembered enjoying them. So with its release forthcoming, I ordered a copy of the series. All of these were blind purchases made based solely on a name. Looking for some background noise to occupy a portion of my ADHD riddled brain while at my straight job, aka the one I get paid to do, I began pulling up information about Gunbuster, whatever would come up on YouTube, just to keep myself from going insane while endlessly copying serial numbers and sending emails. As it is want to do the all knowing YouTube algorithm shoveled me up a rabbit hole, taking me all over various anime and Tokusatsu series. I landed on some Kamen Rider videos which got me thinking about a franchise I’ve dipped in and out of going back as far as I can remember, Ultraman. In 2022 a new Ultraman film, Shin Ultraman, was released, coincidentally written by the same person who directed Gunbuster, which reminded me of why I was interested in it in the first place. That writer, the name that binds all these disparate wanderings, is Hideaki Anno. And if you know that name from anywhere its most likely because they are the sad, mad genius behind one of the most influential pieces of animated storytelling in the last 30 years.
The monster that is Shin Seiki Evangelion, or Neon Genesis Evangelion, was released upon the world in October of 1995, making its way to the United States via VHS distribution in 1996 before finally exploding in 2003 when it was broadcast as part of Cartoon Networks Toonami block. Resting on the always reliable backdrop of giant robots fighting giant monsters, in just its initial 26 half hour episodes Evangelion managed to capture the passions of a generation of anime fans literally all over the world with its layered mythology and complex character relationships rested firmly within a mountain of good old fashioned daddy issues the likes of which has inspired poets and prostitutes almost in equal measure. With its sexy mecha designs, gorgeous animation and slow twist from emotionally mundane mecha vs kaiju content into something that at least appeared much deeper, the initial 13 hours of storytelling has gone on to be expanded in manga, a duology of theatrical release that both recapped the show and presented and entirely new ending before finally – finally – concluding with a tetralogy of films that all but completely transform the series that themselves took almost 20 years to release.
If you were to look across the vast plateau of all the work that adds something to the mythology of Evangelion you would think synopsizing the show to be a nightmare for any writer, much less one with the limited education, credentials and – lets face it – talent that I have under me. And it’s likely the only reason you might think that is because its probably true. But this is the gig so let me give those of you who don’t know the briefest, easiest to digest synopsis that my meager faculties can manage to form:
15 years ago Earth was attacked by a race of aliens called Angels whose arrival triggered what is called The Second Impact, a cataclysmic event that wiped out a good chunk of the human race. Humanity fights back using giant robots called Eva’s which can only be piloted by a certain select group of children – a fairly typical device for these kinds of shows. The goal is to defeat the Angels and prevent Third Impact, an event which will presumably wipe out the last vestiges of humanity. Into this flurry of furies arrives young Shinji Ikari, the son of the Eva projects director and head of NERVE, the organization tasked with defending the world from the Angels. Shinji, one of the special kids who can pilot an Eva, is called to do so when one of the active pilots is critically injured. Shinji and his father have been estranged following the death of Shinji’s mother and the troubled young man is reluctant to be drawn into the fight for a world in which he feels he is not wanted. Eventually it’s revealed that NERVE is being used by the secret organization SEELE to enact The Human Instrumentality Project in order to actually bring about Third Impact in an attempt to control a forced evolution of the human race. As the two sides of the conflict clash it comes down to poor, beleaguered Shinji to ultimately decide the fate of humanity. It does not exactly go as one might expect.
If you’ve watched enough anime or even science fiction in general this might all sound pretty mundane but Evangelion is elevated by the quality of its presentation and what appears to be layers upon layers of mythology and symbolism, much of it drawn from Christian religious mythology. However, the actual value of this material can be debated seeing as members of the production have been quoted saying it’s mostly bullshit they used because Christianity is not well understood in Japan and it gave the show a foreign feel. Even if you can’t resolve the symbolism or references with any actual Christian mythology the value this brings to the show is in how it creates an illusion of richness, making it appear somehow heavier and more important, as if it has something broader and more grand to say. And you know what? It worked. Yes, it’s all a bit of a bait and switch with the names and terms slapped on top of pseudo-intellectual ideas to form an internal logical structure for the storytelling but, to its credit, that is often how storytelling works.
I was in my early 20’s when the show first began releasing and I remember watching it with, and more through, my brother who is a number of years my junior. I know for a fact that I’ve seen every episode and all the films at least once, though I have partaken in none of the extended works. I remember enjoying it as a piece of animation and really trying to understand it as a piece of storytelling. I also remember failing to do so and Evangelion being one of the few shows that, frankly, made me feel stupid because it always seemed like I was missing something. It felt as if there were blank spots in my memory concerning important elements of the story that, without them, I couldn’t follow what was meant to be happening and, more importantly, why any of it was happening. It’s all complicated by the fact that just about everything that has been released under the Evangelion banner – from the manga to video games and novels – almost all of it contains some piece of information that expands on or explains something within the primary narrative and almost all of it is considered, “canon”. This includes the later ‘Rebuild’ series of films that, under the initial guise of a big screen retelling of the series, take the tale someplace very different. My brother was much deeper into the material than I and always seemed to have a better grasp on it while I just honestly didn’t feel I could be bothered to do the work to figure it all out. If I couldn’t get it from the show, and the show alone wasn’t alluring enough to draw me back to run it all through again, then what was the point?
Well it turns out I’m not as stupid as I often deride my reflected image as being. The production of the show was a mess as time, budget and a shift in vision from the shows creator changed the nature of how the story was being told, shifting it from focusing on its visceral, physical threats to indulging more existential ones. In short, the show transformed from be a work that was merely creative to one that could be considered genuinely artistic. Being able to peel back the layers of mythology and understand what the show means when it references the Spear of Longinus or the Dead Sea Scrolls or Adam and Lillith has no effect on whether or not you can get what the story is attempting to communicate, though it might be fair to say that the pomposity with which these things are presented doesn’t make it any easier. It also doesn’t help that the mounting production snafus resulted in the grand ending of the series being scrapped, that material becoming the appropriately (at the time) titled film The End of Evangelion, while the show was given a more contemplative ending built from a collection of monologues provided by the main cast as they work to resolve their individual internal struggles. The series concluded its broadcast in 1996 and while Japanese audiences would only wait a year to see what is considered the true ending of that version of the story, US audiences wouldn’t see an official English language release until 2003.
Like any anime fan who’d been even passingly interested in the Evangelion series I waited many years for the theatrical ‘Rebuild’ releases to begin making their way to screens and, like many fans who had only been passingly interested in the Evangelion series, I found myself feeling disconnected from the series as it went on. After genuinely anticipating the movies for years, even the seemingly always just over the horizon release of the fourth and final film, I began to seriously question both if I ever really understood the point behind the series and, more pointedly, if I ever really enjoyed it for any reason other than it was a good looking show. After spending time and hard earned money on the series over a period of years was I, in the end, one of those people who didn’t really like it because, in the end, I didn’t really get it?
Fans of the series like to make a point to mention Evangelion creator Anno’s battles with chronic depression and stultifying insecurity, seeing its apparent reflection in the narrative as evidence of its status as a deeply meaningful work. But the things that inspire a work are only really meaningful if you A, know of them and B, can connect them to the work while experiencing it. Statements from members of the production suggest that whatever the show might mean was left up to interpretation by the audience, but I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate to say. The show definitely has something specific to say about how we all desperately need to connect with others but live in fear of the possible rejection and loss of a sense of our individual self, and the most important thing to remember is to love yourself first because your are valuable and you do matter. The film that serves as a conclusion to the original series expands on this, in my opinion, as a sort of loose anti-suicide metaphor that suggetss while being alive means opening yourself up to pain the choice is either that or to be nothing at all.
This is great messaging that has only gotten more meaningful in the years following the shows release. But the issue for many isn’t the shows message but how it goes about conveying it. Among the criticisms held by those not as enamored of the material is the feeling that the characters are unlikable and do little more than treat each other like shit, especially main character Shinji who gets the boot from both sides. And while the animated action is often engaging the storytelling is dripping with technobabble and references to a mythology the study of which beyond the boundaries of the narrative will get you absolutely nowhere, making it just more meaningless gibberish. For what the show is trying to say it can all seem very heavy, alienating and pretentious. Now being heavy and alienating is part of the experience. It puts you in the emotional space of the character, which is absolutely necessary for the proper communication of that experience. But the show doesn’t feel, at least from what little I can remember, as if it has much of an arc to it where the characters have epiphanies, grow and come to realizations and conclusions based on the experiences they have.
Instead, if you take End of Evangelion as gospel, the despair the characters feel and their elation at having their existential pains relieved actually does lead to the end of the human race as we know it. At least until two of the characters, essentially, change their minds. The sequence leading up to the very end is affirming in its look at humanity but it comes across as a lecture more than a moment of character realization based on the previous storytelling. And in a way it was, as the director was really looking at the audience and telling them, “Go touch grass, nerds”. I mean you don’t get much more direct than the text of the film telling people that trying to escape the harshness of living in the real world by isolating yourself from others and getting lost in fiction and fantasy isn’t going to do you any good and if you want to find happiness, love and acceptance you’re going to have to risk getting hurt. It’s a strong message, but it’s difficult to say whether or not it really speaks to the shows storytelling as much as the less viscerally satisfying, more intellectual approach of the broadcast conclusion.
Anime, as in the particular approach to animated storytelling nurtured in Japan, has an interesting reputation in the West, particularly in America. The productions are often technically brilliant and the manner in which the hyper-detailed artwork marries to the storytellers willingness to directly tackle darker and more complex issues than most western productions would creates an impression that the material as a whole is simply more sophisticated then what we produce domestically. But when you’ve watched enough of it you begin to see that the overall arc of much of this material is very feeling-forward with experiences driven by huge emotional displays accompanied by a lot of screaming and crying. It isn’t difficult to see where the cultural divide between Japan and the West comes into play as this work comes out of what has traditionally been a much more emotionally reserved, some may say repressed, society. The things we subdue in our daily lives tend to find expression in our art because that expressive energy has to go somewhere. So the narrative elements we typically associate with anime like hyper-violence, overt sexuality and huge emotional outbursts come from members of that culture looking for an outlet for things they have traditionally been trained to put to the side.
What you also tend to see in a lot of this material is an emphasis on perseverance and hard work, putting in hours of training to achieve a goal, a reliance on your connection to others and a feeling that what you’re doing isn’t just for you but for those whom you love and who love you. These are the things that often drive the characters to achieve and, in the process of, resolve their arcs and tell their stories. It’s not surprising that the emotion first aspect of anime is what makes it so appealing to its target audience of, lets face it, kids. The great majority of anime is targeted towards teens and younger so maybe it shouldn’t be all that surprising that Evangelion didn’t hit me as hard as it could have as a person just coming into their mid-20’s, even one as emotionally stunted as I am. I love anime even to this day, but I feel we often attribute a level of intellectual sophistication to it that it doesn’t deserve. Evangelion compounds this issue because it purposely creates the illusion of dealing with big, mythological and existential ideas that all sound very impressive but mean almost nothing while its creator, by the end of the ‘Rebuild’ series, is all but making the statement that the world would have been better off without it and everyone just needs to grow up. Maybe Anno was talking about all of us. Or maybe he was just talking about himself.
And yet here I am, an adult pushing 50 looking back on a show I was probably too stale for when it was fresh and asking myself, “Did I just not get it?”. I feel like I understand the story being told and the experience created to tell it. It honestly feels like it should be entirely up my alley but instead it leaves me with the impression that it’s just up its own ass. So why do I feel like I need to revisit it? Gunbuster is a series I haven’t seen yet, the same with Shin Ultraman as a more recent release. So why do I feel like I need to go back to a show that’s almost 30 years old? Perhaps it’s because even Anno has all but admitted that Evangelion is the work that he’s put the most of himself in to. It may be the defining work of his career as a storyteller, and that has value. But these other works have value too, so why am I focusing on just the one?
If I had to lay all my cards down I would say it’s probably because I found the ‘Rebuild’ films a fucking chore to get through.
See, the ‘Rebuild’ films were Anno, after finding himself somewhat creatively stuck and looking for ways to fund newer works, trudging back to the salt mines of Evangelion to re-imagine it both as a set of theatrical efforts, with all that entails, and as a way to open up the closed ended original work to let other storytellers come in and play around in that world. Unfortunately, other storytellers found the prospect of digging around in Anno’s emotional minefields too overwhelming and the project fell to Anno himself which, given the amount of time it took to complete, may not have been the best idea. What was meant to be a re-telling of the original series ended up becoming a sequel series that served as a kind of commentary on itself. At least that’s what I’ve been told. Honestly, by the third film in the series I was feeling more and more disconnected from the material such that by the time fourth finally rose from the murky depths my interest was more in just getting to the end of the damn thing that it was with anything the film was actually trying to say and, by extension, the series as a whole. Those movies just lost me and they made me look back at the entire Evangelion experience with a skepticism I hadn’t before. I use to think I didn’t, “get” Evangelion because I wasn’t as smart as my brother (who has always been the brightest of us siblings), or because I didn’t pay close enough attention, or because I was ultimately too shallow to see past the cool robots and hot action. Whatever it was, I believed that if there was a problem I was at the root of it. I believed that the problem with Evangelion – was me.
But after painfully making my way through the ‘Rebuild’ series, I began to think that maybe, just maybe, the problem with Evangelion is fucking Evangelion itself. That for all its pretentious bluster, and for all the sung praise from the fans exalting the story for how important it was to them and how fundamental it was to shaping them into the people they are now – maybe, as a whole, Evengelion just isn’t very, “good”. And maybe it never was.
Clearly there is a lot about the Evangelion series that is simultaneously mixed up in and with the personal life of its creator and because of that the material has spoken to a lot of people. I cannot and would not ever negate the emotional resonance the series has maintained were it even within my meager powers to do. But if you run all the way back to the original broadcast series, discounting the concluding film its fans so dearly love that brought it to its intended conclusion and really just examine that as the singular entity it was originally intended to be you have to ask; does the show do what it set out to do as a piece of storytelling? Does Neon Genesis Evangelion, the 26 episode television series, need to lean on everything that was built up around it just to be able to stand at all?
If the Death and Rebirth and End of Evangelion cycle of films tell what is considered to be the complete story of Evangelion, even being considered the better version of that story due to the more satisfying and complete ending, does that mean that the message the broadcast series ultimately communicated isn’t what Anno really wanted to say? On that same note, with the ‘Rebuild’ series actually being a sequel to the original show, and not a retelling of the series as originally advertised, bringing a final, final conclusion to Anno’s long winded story; does that mean that whatever the last of those films says now replaces what was communicated in End of Evangelion? When the final footnotes in the big book of Evangelion are written and the covers bound and closed once and for all, does the original series value exist only in its role as the primordial protoplasm from which these grander versions emerged? At the end of Evangelion, will the first impact of the original series matter at all?
I don’t believe in prophecy. I don’t believe in fate. “I don’t believe in Beatles. I just believe in me.” But I do believe in the power of process and it seems that as part of my process of continued growth, coincidence and opportunity have brought me back around to the beginning. Well, at least back to the beginning of Evangelion. With a fresh Blu-ray in hand I need to know if my view of the show has been tainted by my own insecure sense that I somehow wasn’t smart enough or astute enough to, “get it”, that I was putting too much emphasis on the wrong things and spending so much time examining each individual tree that the entire forest became too overwhelming. Maybe the years I’ve worked on my own process for watching, assessing and writing about storytelling will bring me a new perspective on the material, allowing me to see it in the manner it was intended. Or maybe I’ll just reaffirm my previous perspective and the discs will go on the shelf in my library as an artifact possibly to be unearthed in another 20 years. Maybe by that time senility will finally rob me of the last of my lean, functional faculties and I’ll be able to watch the show again as if it were the first time. What will I think about it then?
And who will bring me my pudding?
I want to watch Gunbuster. I’m interested in seeing Shin Ultraman, but I’m in no hurry to do so. I will re-watch Neon Genesis Evangelion but I can’t say it’s something I’m looking forward to with great anticipation. It isn’t lost on me that it took so very little to spark a renewed interest but I would be remiss in not admitting that there’s an issue of my own ego at stake. When it comes to taking a hard look back at Evangelion I know I’m not alone in thinking maybe it was given more credit than it deserved because it just happened to hit at a pivotal moment in the worldwide expansion of anime as an art form. It’s not a matter of being unable to advance without revisiting this show; it’s not like some trauma I have to face before I can heal. And yes, I’m well aware of the fact that despite the show having taken two stabs at getting its message across the common wisdom is that you cannot redo the past. But thrice upon a time I have been confounded by this series and, honestly, at this point I’m just fed up with it. Maybe this time I’ll find a way to plug this hole in my curiosity that suits me as I finally synchronize my thoughts. Will the angels of grace shine a light on my re-evaluation so I can mercifully lay this this issue to rest at-field? Who knows. It’s taken me a time skip to get to this point and if my head hasn’t popped yet it’s not likely to anytime soon.
Man I hope Gunbuster is good because I feel like another loop may just be the end of the world.
Clever endings aren’t my bag.
Laterz
*NotThePopularOpinion 