daibakuha said:
DANGER- MUST SILENCE said:
Sylocat said:
Getting a head start on Schlocktober, huh? All righty then.
Wait, this movie was directed by Hideaki Anno? Otherwise known as "Gen Urobuchi, v.1.0?" I guess this was before he lapsed into the fit of suicidal depression in which he wrote Evangelion.
Actually, no, this is much after.
Original run of Evangelion was 1995-1997. Cutie Honey was 2004. The only conclusion we can draw is that making mad bank on a maudlin series about pointless miseryguts and getting acclaim as some kind of soulful genius when all he really did was make a show vaguely alluding to weird stuff without bothering to connect the dots in any coherent way made him so happy that he was able to direct Cutie Honey with frenetic energy.
The problem with evangelion, and it's something that you don't seem to understand either, is that it's not really about what's happening and you kind of have to have had depression to really understand what he's trying to accomplish. So what seems like a random series of events, is actually building towards a theme.
Anno is a genius. and Evangelion is his master work.
You're presuming quite a lot there that you don't know. Actually, I went through a fairly serious period of depression for many years where I pretty much unwittingly sabotaged every opportunity I had to be happy in life. And in that time, yes, I thought NGE was some great, thoughtful, soulful thing.
Then I chose to stop wallowing in self-destruction and I started making the choices I needed to make to deal with my problems instead of constantly sitting around feeling bad about them. And NGE didn't just lose all its appeal, it became excruciating to watch. From the transparent harem show fan-service to the superficial cribbing of Christian/Kabbalah imagery without the slightest bit of effort being put into exploring those ideas in any meaningful detail, to the terrible storytelling where huge swaths of backstory and key plot points are explained instead of shown, to key events happening because they're needed for the plot or for stylism/marketing purposes rather than because of any rational causation or decisions by characters, to the endlessly maudlin self-pity, to the fact that Gainax keeps constantly re-doing the show every few years through movies and manga with the implication that some day they'll get it right and tell the story in a way that it will make sense, the show has become nigh un-watchable to me.
It doesn't help that I've taught Japanese youths who are super-fans of the show, and they inevitably have been self-destructive angsty teens who undermine their own happiness with their own choices. If Anno is a genius, it's not because of his artistic ability but because he's managed to convince a generation of
hikkikomori that he truly understands them while he takes their money for a sub-par product and laughs his way to the bank. I'll not fault anyone who enjoys the show as a guilty pleasure, because many of the fight scenes have undeniable style to their choreography. But like a cheez curl, there's no substance.
That's pretty much all I'm going to say on the matter so as not to drag this thread off topic. If you'd like to discuss this in further detail, please feel free to start a thread devoted to it in Off-topic.
Its an OVA series that any anime/mecha fan should check out!
