What with Neon Genesis Evangelion finally available on Netflix, it’s worth having a look at its origins, influences and why it didn’t come out of nowhere in a cultural sense.
Back in the mid-90s, Neon Genesis Evangelion aired on Japanese television and was almost an instant hit. However, Evangelion’s success didn’t come from nowhere but had a long lineage of various influences behind it.
First was the studio that created it, that of Gainax and the show’s director Hideaki Anno. The studio and Anno had a long history of exemplary works behind them, from The Wings of Honneamise to Nadia and the original Gunbuster. So a new Gainax anime had a degree of expectation behind it, especially with fans of the medium.
The second was that Evangelion slotted into the well laid out genres of mecha anime and kaiju tokusatsu shows. The latter, especially in the case of Ultraman, where a lean athletic giant battles huge alien monsters every week pretty much laid out the narrative structure for most of Evangelion.
The mecha anime influences were also much broader and arguably quite complex. While series such as Space Runaway Ideon were an apparent influence, it was clear that most of Yoshiyuki Tomino’s works played a part in inspiring Evangelion.
While many focus on the shy introverted nature of Shinji Ikari as the pilot of Eva-01, this was not a new thing in terms of mecha anime, as characters such as Amuro Ray from Mobile Suit Gundam was hardly a willing or eager pilot to begin with. Not to mention the battle-weary and depressed Chirico Cuvie from Armored Trooper VOTOMS. Even the biologically infused mecha in Evangelion were not a new thing, as the mecha in shows from Aura Battler Dunbine had done something similar decades earlier.
So the important thing to understand was that in Japan at least when Evangelion aired on television it was not some strange anime coming out of nowhere without any cultural context to back it up.
That meant the reaction to Evangelion was based off this cultural heritage but what elevated it further was how Gainax leveraged their deep understanding of what made series like Ultraman and much of Tomino’s mecha anime so good.
The nuanced approach to characterization, as well as the bleak tone of the story, were done very much as a homage to past works that Anno and his team loved a great deal.
The problem here is that when Evangelion eventually came Westward, much of its cultural context was entirely missing and the subsequent interpretations of the story were often bizarre in the extreme, as they just didn’t get the context.
Admittedly the ending of the TV series was a disaster in Japan, as it was abroad, and the follow-on movie The End of Evangelion didn’t help matters much either, but most of how the series worked prior to that point tended to go overlooked or at worst misunderstood by many people in the West.
So here we are around 25 years later and while more of the cultural context behind Evangelion is now readily available in the West, such as Blu-ray releases for Ideon, Mobile Suit Gundam, VOTOMS, Dunbine and a slew of others, this hasn’t quite filtered through in a broader sense yet.
The result is that we have strange takes on the series as though it exists in a vacuum and that somehow mecha anime was more for kids prior to Evangelion.
Obviously, none of this is true and Evangelion was very much meant as a continuation of a long tradition in mecha anime and tokusatsu shows.
It’s a shame, as Evangelion is a great series and one that is painstakingly wrought but I still feel that even after all these years outside of Japan, it’s not really understood or even appreciated for what it actually is.
It is worth pointing out here that there were obvious Western cultural influences within Evangelion, with the novel Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke being one of many examples. However, the issue is that the Japanese context behind Evangelion has mostly been overlooked in a mainstream sense.
The only thing that cheers me up here is that this Japanese context will definitely filter through Western pop-culture over time. Streaming has changed the cultural landscape and given access to all sorts of anime that had been previously unobtainable. The same goes for modern Blu-ray and DVD releases of various anime series, many of which played a formative role in shows like Evangelion and many others.
So hopefully people won’t continue to think that somehow everything is derivative of Evangelion, without knowing that Evangelion is inherently derivative itself.
Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. I also manage Mecha Damashii and do toy reviews over at hobbylink.tv.
Read my Forbes blog here.
