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Evangelion live action movie.

Kaji gets involved in progressing the plot for the viewers, but he's almost exposition man by doing this, which is maybe even worse than non-proactive characters.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrr...the reason for this is that making them come to terms with their inner turmoil is more important, right? That's why we had instrumentality at the end. But why did we need it? I don't think those characters deserved peace of mind if they didn't bring it upon themselves through actions rather than a lot of subconscious brain-raping.

Well, that can be said of any story except the really terrible ones. I think any movie or anime will have characters that some person will connect to, and it's different for every person.

What I did was Google "evangelion unsympathetic" and "evangelion sympathetic." Look at the very first page of hits and it'll show you what I mean. Even that second entry yields more complaints than anything. It's one of the biggest criticisms of the show. I think there are more key criticisms than that nitpick to focus on, but it is true that a lot of people were turned off by it.

But on a side note, people suffering from clinical depression in real life is not the same as one in a story. In a story, we're a lot more interested if that person gets up and tries to make their life better somehow. Even if it's a terrible path to take, drugs or something, taking any action is interesting and we think it's more human. If someone is clinically depressed and sits around crying about it in a movie, we lose interest, because we do know that person isn't real, deep down. We expect better of them.

The characters spend the whole time running around the same circles until they experience a mental breakdown, but then they come out of it okay because they reasoned it away. They didn't do anything to earn that! *shakes fist* Their lives may have been miserable, but I don't buy them feeling better because they've found their inner truth either.

People call me a dude all the time on these forums cause I have male avatars and like male shows.

Touche. Doesn't mean she wasn't shoddily developed, though, but considering her character, well, it's hard to really delve into a mind like that, isn't it?

I don't go for that thing a lot of the time, but apart from a couple of flat cliche comic relief characters, I thought the Rumbling Hearts girls and guy acted pretty normally...

No, but it is pretty uppity-spoken, isn't it? A lot of the dialogue is difficult to understand and things are kept so unbearably vague that you always have to run the video back a couple times. It takes a lot of effort to justifiably appreciate Eva, much less understand it completely. Wolf's Rain, eh, you could watch it half-awake and get what's going on, but if you did pay close attention, you'd get even more out of it!

But...it's not presented universally, and that hurts its credibility as a "great story." Everyone should be able to understand it if what it has to say is so deep and important.

Well, they shouldn't go into film, ,

If the skeletons of Eva's characters were so important, I would have liked to have seen them through the glass more darkly a lot sooner instead of verbally explaining what's inside their heads in the last few episodes, just show us from episode one, right?

??? Oh. Um, the first angel, then? Was that him? Adam was the embryo-thing...you know, the names get scrambled in my head, but I know what it meant for humanity, and why it was hung up there and why Kaworu didn't contact it. I kind of get that.

I wasn't aware of this plot point because...I haven't seen the movie.

I'll watch it, I promise.

You just generalized it...

... and you also painted it a lot brighter than it is.

I do think it's one of the main purposes of Eva, though, but you can prove me wrong if you'll tell me what the real point of the story is.

Geez, what a monster-post. (What have I created? Mwa-ha-ha.)

The point of Evangelion can be summed up by what's described by Ritsuko in episode three as the "Hedgehog's Dilemma" (I've looked it up and found no search term, so it's a creation by Anno, I guess): "Even though a hedgehog may wish to get close to another hedgehog, the closer they get, the more they injure each other with their spines."

Quote:

The point of Evangelion can be summed up by what's described by Ritsuko in episode three as the "Hedgehog's Dilemma" (I've looked it up and found no search term, so it's a creation by Anno, I guess): "Even though a hedgehog may wish to get close to another hedgehog, the closer they get, the more they injure each other with their spines."

Eh? Now I'd heard of that one before I watched Eva, Freud was quite proud of it, although he was far from the first to discuss it and did not come up with the metaphor.

Porcupine Illusion

It just has a different name. (Staples, that was easy.)

A) I think you're right. I think I do need to see EoE, but I hardly think I'm completely mistaken about Eva from having missed it.

You're basically trying to say that Instrumentality is an entirely negative thing, right? (Which the TV series does not communicate, but it is admittedly incomplete.) But that doesn't change the fact of what it is: spoiler[a messy great goo of every human mind into one uniformity as pushed for by SEELE and...I think Gendo, but did you say I was wrong? Sure looked like that's what he was going for, even if only for Yui/Rei's sake...]

There's a reason so many independent films are BAD even by far compared to Hollywood cliche-grab-bags.

Since I am loving this site for helpful discussion, I believe these types of stories really speak to your tastes in media:

"Overt Symbolism at a Price to the Timid Observer."

I laud that only when it is done in a way that seems almost real, rather than surreal. Otherwise, it pulls a revulsion in me that "The Writer Cares More About Being Proud of his Avant-Gardeness than Changing his Audience."

I personally believe Eva, for all its brilliance, just pushes this too much. I feel Anno is trying to fulfill himself through his art instead of making his ideas clear to others, resulting in a minority of Eva fans that laud themselves for "getting it" and pity us poor trilobites who insist on a moderate amount of convention to make stories accessible.

Eva turns many people askew emotionally, there are so many eye-roll worthy theories on the characters that it's obvious they weren't portrayed stable enough, with all that psychoanalysis in the way, and there are FAR more instances of people so desperate to grasp its symbolism that they spit up all sorts of Epileptic Tree Theories ...because it didn't make itself clear.

I really wanted to think of the Evas as extensions of the pilot's souls, but that's an oversimplification for a bigger and gnarlier mindrape, as it turns out.

My bias: I like it when the creator knows what he wants to say and what conclusion he wants the audience to reach, whether they agree with it or not.

So, you thought Trigun was a laughable example of portraying a theme well.

Fine, another embraced example: Cowboy Bebop. It's considered a "genre unto itself" by many so ya definitely can't accuse it of being conventional like you could the paint-by-numbers Trigun epic.

No you are not crazy. I don't have a clue what all this emphasis on freud is about either. The problem with Freud is that it can be applied to many situations. In this case I think it is being given too much importance to be honest.

So you don't want introspection? (This, y'know, really does not happen in Evangelion at the frequency critics say.)

You must hate Oshii and Tarkovsky, then.

That said, I'm not sure on what substantial argument (i.e. what critique with evidence) you're proposing: (A) the latter option is a bad thing and (B) Anno's process is the same, and he really did force the characters to fit the theme.

Hm. So you're stating that you don't like surrealism, or something else?

See, that's what I'm talking about above. I'm not saying a person has to like the characters or Evangelion; however, if they're going to engage in a serious critique of the story, then they're revealing an issue with themselves and not the series. (Saying I don't like this element is NOT the same as saying this element doesn't work for the story.)

Uh, except they aren't better. ("Don't understand Instrumentality, take three!")

Plus, I don't agree with your take on Jake La Motta in Raging Bull -- self-destruction did not get him anywhere and isn't proactive, and he never showed any kind of sympathy for anything we're shown in the biopic -- but that's another story.

If Rumbling Hearts has good writing and believable characters, then Guiding Lights is [expletive] Shakespeare.

Does this mean that Persona and 2001 aren't great stories because people don't understand them, even though they have some of the most universal themes around?

The television series' ending doesn't really provide a satisfying punctuation to that message, even though the staff planned on doing so. As a result, they fully explore and conclude it in The End of Evangelion, resulting in the one of the most satisfying, moving and narratively fitting final scenes in anime.

Actually, I got into an argument on another forum about how predictable Cowboy Bebop is, the nature of predictability, whether it's an inherent negative, et cetera.

But, uh, yes, I think Bebop is a better example for the type of storytelling you support.

Still, I don't see why you'd compare that to Evangelion. Both anime are meant and do different things. It just goes back to the fundamental difference I pointed out earlier,

and my question of, "Why does ambiguity mean that a story does not fully succeed?"

I don't think that's a useful way of looking at things. Pegholing a work into a philosophical "type" and then dealing with the type instead of the work seems an odd way of dealing with things. Or, to put it another way, could you explain your problems without bringing it down to a philosophical/"worldview" difference? Since most of your problems seem to have the word "Freud" in them, and, like I said, I. . .honestly don't see that. Maybe I'm just crazy.

Eva really is VERY existentialist. I'm not trying to pigeonhole it, it really really is.

Freudian ideas cover Evangelion in so much of its illustration, it's more impossible to avoid discussing than the religious imagery

NOOOOOO! Don't do this to me again, darn you! I get it, I get it, shut up and stop wasting minutes on looped "insightful" animation.

"Eva's message is a lot of nonsense/garbage." That is technically what I believe

Not all that OFTEN?! Hoooo boy, well, it was too much for my tastes. I kept literally yelling at the screen, "Stop telling me how the characters are feeling and SHOW me. Don't treat me like I'm stupid and then turn around and act like you're smart!"

Oshii, well, I've only seen Ghost in the Shell, and I kind of mentally shelved the introspective parts, which were...lackluster, I guess. (I get the feeling I'll be rewatching this one too, won't I? It was an early title for me as well.) The action scenes were great, and I liked a lot of the characters.

The danger of picking a theme as your grand framework and building a plot and characters around it completely is that you paint the world too warped, too simply, too attached to an ideal that doesn't seem real to people once it's up on screen.

I see it abused too often, so I tend to be disgusted with it, yes.

This doesn't mean you can't have spiritualism and science in the same story, but it means that abusing too many types of mindfrag, things we have to suspend disbelief for and think "Okay, in this world, this exists, unlike in ours," results in people giving up on you when they really shouldn't have to.

If there's anyone that's perfected employing surrealism, it's Satoshi Kon. Period. Kon loves surrealism and figuring out what his imagery means isn't easy but it's very clear, and he obviously knows exactly what he wants to do with real and fake elements without a lot of waste or shock fallout.

But I despise David Lynch stuff. Talk about cramming a film with shock fallout to make yourself look sophisticated!

For Evangelion, it just carries that air of "trying too hard to look intelligent" in its mindscrew bits. Even if you can interpret the core of the ideas present in all those crazy montages, you only find that there's a lot left over when you're done that wasn't needed and seems extemporaneous, unrefined, and "pulling Sartre out the wazoo," I guess.

Well, the series is for people to react to. There are very few people, perhaps none if you want to get really technical, who can look at something solely as a professional and not include how it rubbed them emotionally, because that's part of the package. In fact, it's BETTER for a critic to incorporate their personal feelings about something. Beliefs and biases, those we have to be leery of, but gut reactions, no matter how different they may be for each person, yes, we have to incorporate those in judgment.

So, people that say they hate the characters aren't being unprofessional at all. If the creator wanted you to hate those characters, they succeeded. If the creator wanted you to emotionally resonate with them, then they failed.

You just CAN'T look at it solely as "art" and go, "Well, these characters make my blood boil because they're so unrealistically stereotyped and inactive, but I'm sure the creator was trying to say something through it, let's see."

Okay, all of the times you've pointed out that I didn't get the Instrumentality process, you're right. Although technically my only misunderstanding was spoiler[that it was a NEGATIVE rather than a POSITIVE process.]

Pretend you've never seen EoE, watch those last two episodes, and what is your impression of Instrumentality?

It's a painful healing, apparently. I got that wrong, but that's not because I was "mistaken," it's because it was "miscommunicated." I had to watch the movie to "get it," which isn't cool at all, just my opinion.

(If I was Japanese, I might make this same argument against Wolf's Rain. But I'm American, so I don't have to, the OVA was merged into the series. Even then, I don't know if it was advertised very clearly in Japan that that was not the ending and the series was still being finished or not.)

I see "average stuff" hurts your brain.

Well, it was what it was. Another thing about criticism is that you have to try and approach each subject by genre. Romance is only slightly above Action and Comedy in the mud on the totem pole of sophistication in cinema.

Forced and irrational? No, they all acted like you would expect those characters to act, every step of the way...

Haven't seen Persona.

2001...mmmm...it was groundbreaking, and there were a lot of good things about it, but I think its cold, drawn-out, distant approach did alienate people, yes. It had great ideas, but they weren't human enough for anyone to give a big s***.

Everyone remember HAL9000 singing "Daisy," but nobody remembers what that movie was about to begin with, which could be considered a shortcoming.

Consider the "Lethal Weapon" movies. I dare you to tell me the plot to a Lethal Weapon movie, like, what are they after?

Just watched it and I beeeeeeg to differ. -.-' I do think it encapsulated its theme very well, but moving? I felt something moving, I think it was my bowels going "ick."

I compare it to Evangelion precisely because it's so different, or, I guess the messages of them are so different. (You REALLY can't get much more opposed than Steinbeck and Freud, except for the human struggle angle.) So, I wanted to provide a Big Ole Contrast.

The answer: Because it is the enemy of inevitability. The conclusion to anything must leave audiences with either an absolute or an ultimatum, and the journey must leave them feeling that whether they predicted the ending or it came completely out of the blue for them, "It's the only way it should have happened."

If the journey itself is too ambiguous, people cease to care and you could honestly end the story any darn way you please.

This is Paranoia Agent, for instance.

I shouldn't HAVE to pick apart something to understand the basics, I should understand the basics by paying steady, simple attention and then find joy in picking it apart later to discover much much more, that's my philosophy.

As I've mentioned before, my beef with Eva isn't solely based on my beliefs being very different from its message. In fact, none of my arguments have been, "Eva's message is a lot of nonsense/garbage." spoiler[That is technically what I believe, but] that's not my criticism.

Its already been discussed and concluded that the religious imagery is there for asthetic* value only. It is there only to look pretty. It isnt deeply symbolic, only a cool way of showing an explosion. If you want to view it as religious in nature then you can simply say that it adds to the whole atmoshpere that evangelion is trying to create.

Well, if you want to claim Eva isn't blatantly influenced by Jung, feel free, but it's a bit like asserting that the Wachoski Bros. didn't draw upon Philip Dick for Matrix, and that Citizen Kane isn't a roman a clef of William Randolph Hearst's life. I didn't need Carl Gustav Horn to tell me that Jung was an influence on Anno: from the use of Jung's pet symbols to the use of Jung's psychological theories, the show's so Jungian it's almost a textbook.

But I'm certainly not asserting that the symbols are part of some allegorical code that contain the answers to all questions about the show... that's as silly as the opposite extreme of saying the symbols mean nothing (and heaven knows people at cons tend to say silly things. And in my own experience of putting theatrical productions together, second bananas often make assertions about production design that are comically inaccurate. Just keep those light cues straight, Mr. Assistant Director...)

The symbols work as motifs when taken pretty much at face value. Consider the Kaballah (which was a key subject for Jung.) The Tree of Life is a representation of a rigourous schematic for understanding and reshaping the world; a representation that hinges on the idea that something's broken in the world and must be fixed. Raise your hand if you think this was associated with Dr. Ikari purely because it looks cool. Now raise your other hand. Now clap! Wasn't that fun?

Or consider those cross-shaped explosions. If you're japanese there's a perceptible connection between Christianity and horrible explosions in japanese urban centers. These religious motifs aren't part of a rigourous Pilgrim's Progress-style allegory, but obviously they aren't in the show by happenstance.

If you alluding to meaning within the show, and also using religious references to reinforce real-life associations, then yeah, there's meaning to the religious imagery. There's just no Christian allegory attached to it.

Literature is the question minus the answer.
Roland Barthes (Literary critic)

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.
Ingmar Bergman (Filmmaker)

I didn't think; I experimented.
Anthony Burgess (author)

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.
George Eliot (author)

When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.
T. S. Eliot (Poet and Playwright)

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T. S. Eliot

Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.
Kahlil Gibran (Poet)

I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it.
Peter Greenaway (Filmmaker)

What exactly is nonsense and garbage about evangelion's messedge, if indeed it has one set- in stone messedge?

Anyway didn't mean to offend you there Jesu but I'm also not one for mincing with my words and what I think of some types of arguments.

We're not arguing here, are we?

What I'm doing anyway, is just sharing a take on why people like me have trouble enjoying Evangelion, and your replies illustrate why people of your bent just revel in it.

... we both seem to be learning more each time we reply to one another, I'm enjoying this.

It's complicated at its heart, but it's not hard to follow as it progresses or anything.

I get that it's "deep" and all, but I think there are much kinder ways (to an audience) to do it, and I honestly think it's too easy, and that you effectively talk down to your audience when you flip into surrealism for that long and repeat yourself to hammer it all in. Can't we rely just on the character's actions and well-nested dialogue in order to communicate these psychological underpinnings? I find that more sophisticated, even if it is a lot simpler.

I won't say why I don't agree with existentialism itself, though, because that's off-topic and shouldn't affect my professional criticism. I think a lot of the ideas in existentialism are nonsensical: relative truth, for example, is hard to argue for and leaves its staunchest believers scratching their heads when you ask them to apply it practically.

What I'm doing anyway, is just sharing a take on why people like me have trouble enjoying Evangelion, and your replies illustrate why people of your bent just revel in it

(I'm not sure if the hung over thing was applying to you or me or whatever, but if it was you, I hope you're feeling better. That's no fun at all. Sad )

Well, yes and no. We obviously disagree and our putting forth our own viewpoints, but I don't think either of us are emotionally fraught over this like Ikari1 seems to be.

Like watching The Matrix, another movie I don't care to revisit after seeing twice. It's also silly to say that I think the end is "just looped animation." I get that it's "deep" and all, but I think there are much kinder ways (to an audience) to do it,

Evangelion has one set-in-stone message, and I think that's just dandy

This is what you said about the end however so I did make comment on you saying this. The point of the end of evanglelion is that it isnt kind to the audience and is supposed to be ' difficult' to watch. I think it was a poster called Zinsiki that best described why the ending was difficult to watch. I'm trying to back track on to our previous conversations but I can't find them at the moment.

'm normally aware of what it is exactly about a piece of film that is moving me. In this case I didn't. All that saved me from complete despair was Shinji and Asuka, corporeal and recognisable, sitting on the beach -as humans- as they look out to the abyss they were once a part of.