u/oleandersun

No at this point i was trying my best to follow it.

I don't know how to do a submission statement. But i just saw this from the balcony of a hotel i'm staying at in Vietnam. It was there about 3 minutes before and i assumed it was just a drone but then when it started moving, i filmed it.

It makes sense they'd react like that, though.

Imagine trying to teach someone English who can't even read a basic news story on the internet and being asked to explain to them the reason why it's "an apple" vs. "a apple".

To learn Japanese, you're going to need to memorize an enormous amount of information. And the "why" is not going to help you speak better Japanese when you're at a stage where you still need a teacher.

It's the same as etymology in your own native tongue. Cool trivia. Not really necessary to become fluent.

Look at how crazy their website is: https://www.uline.com/Corporate/About_President

lolwut

can you provide some context? and some other examples, too?

this is amazing

These don’t have Fly Me To The Moon either. Hard pass.

Why are the rights to that song suddenly so hard to get?

Okay.

I think that is a genuine challenge for a lot of viewers these days, not to get instant gratification from answers

It's also something that is far more common in Japanese cinema than elsewhere.

Whether something "works" or not is just another way of talking about whether you think it is good or bad. Which isn't the scope of this discussion, as I mentioned in the OP and in these replies with you already.

There's A LOT about this film that doesn't work for me. But that's not what this discussion is about. It's about the "why" behind the intent.

I think they had more than enough time to craft a story just as great and coherent as the original series, especially if they expect you to already come in with information from the series. The problem is they don't spend their time very wisely.

I agree with this actually. I think that around the end of 2 onward, this stopped being an attempt to tell a completely "new" Evangelion story and sort of became a Hideaki Anno art project. He was more or less using Evangelion as a weird blog and sandbox for various ideas, rather than attempting to tell a complete story.

That's pretty true of the original as well at some points, though it was far more coherent with far better pacing.

You keep conflating my take on this as my suggesting that I think it's good, which is going to make this conversation impossible to progress. I'm not really sure how to articulate it more clearly than I already have.

But for the record, yes, it's entirely possible and extremely likely that the choices that were made were intentional and not a "mistake".

I totally understand that position and why it's frustrating. I don't think anyone is required to like the choices that were made. But they were made. So it's worth discussing why.

but most people just don't want their time wasted on things that are meaningless and don't matter.

This is where we differ. My sense of enjoyment isn't derailed by whether or not all the dots connect. Evangelion as a story has already been told. I don't judge this film as Anno's attempt to prove himself again as a masterful storyteller. It seems, to me at least, to be clearly an attempt at deconstructing his own works. He's also said as much.

I think a lot of the sci-fi nonsense almost was an intentional parody of Evangelion. I don't think it was an honest attempt at gripping sci-fi that was poorly handled. I think it was poorly-handled on purpose. To what end, however, is up for interpretation.

The giant Rei head is another one of those things that is a give-away, for me. The CG choices for the texture on the face and the "just-too-far-apart" separation of the eyes seemed to be going for an uncanny valley effect. Again, to what end is up for interpretation.

Have you ever been to a modern art museum and stared at a painting that was essentially just a dot on a canvass and think...."Okay..so wait, is this actually art or what?"

When an artist who has already established themselves as being capable in their craft goes from painting ornate landscapes to painting just a dot on a canvas. We can assume there's intent. He's not painting the dot on the canvas because he can't paint. He's doing it for a reason. That painting might still suck, but there was an intentional choice to make it a dot on a canvass, versus a picture of a tree.

To clarify, I'm not suggesting that there's some insanely deep meaning behind these choices. They could very simply be "an attempt at deconstructing popular misunderstandings of Evangelion" as an artistic choice. I'm just suggesting that there's clear intent, because we know the artist's history.

Whether that art resonated with you or not, is an entirely separate conversation. And there was plenty in this film that did not resonate with me.

It seems to me that people's experience with rebuild is entirely dependent on how much they expect it to be standalone work.

There's a different story being told here wrapped in "Evangelion-y" things that we're expected to be familiar with before we go in. The movies are only 1.5 hours long, so expecting deep dives like you could get in a 26 episode series plus an additional film is unrealistic. These films, from the very first frame, are made for people who have seen the original. If you view these films as a stand-alone story, they're wildly shallow and probably don't make a lick of sense.

IMO, they're best thought of as something similar to a "branching path" in a Visual Novel. We appraise a visual novel as a sum of its parts. Not with each branch being treated as a completely separate property.

They're not meant to be telling a coherent, air-tight story. And that's totally okay.

Again, whether that's good or not is up to you, but using the same metrics for storytelling that you use for other standalone stories doesn't really apply here.

I prefer EOE over Thrice Upon A Time.

But I also don't see them as comparable. I have trouble articulating this, but I see them as related, but separate endings to different stories.

I don't think 3.0+1.0 would be anywhere near as rewarding as it is if you haven't seen the original. EoE is an extremely fitting, complete ending for the story that the original series is telling.

As for why I prefer EOE, it's not due to nihilism. It's actually just the overall pacing, music choices and the scene choice.

3.0+1.0 is still stellar, though.

I think there were a lot of different sequel theories. Because this is the first time I've read that version of sequel theory and I've been following since it was first proposed.

Totally. I literally used to spend every afternoon of every day in discussions on the Evangelion Mailing List with a bunch of people pouring over every detail of the film, rewatching the same shitty bootleg, fansubbed VHS tape over and over and over again looking for answers. Things were nowhere near as conveniently explained as they are now.

Shit, I remember people were excited back then because End of Evangelion collectible cards were coming out and they had a little extra information on them that was considered "canon" back then. People were DESPERATE for answers.

Yup.

"There are a lot of giant robot shows in Japan, and we did want our story to have a religious theme to help distinguish us. Because Christianity is an uncommon religion in Japan we thought it would be mysterious. None of the staff who worked on Eva are Christians. There is no actual Christian meaning to the show, we just thought the visual symbols of Christianity look cool. If we had known the show would get distributed in the US and Europe we might have rethought that choice."

-Kazuya Tsurumaki http://web.archive.org/web/20020622231224/http://www.akadot.com/article/article-tsurumaki2.html

No. You're confusing traditional storytelling with the way that Anno plays with the medium.

Why have giant robots in the show at all if it's actually just a story about human relationships? Why have scenes in the original TV ending, EOE and 3.0+1.0 of literal storyboard sketches or real life footage if you're just making a sci-fi story about a fictional universe?

So what seems more likely to you? That Anno just "forgot" to mention all of these super important story terms into the plot of a project he's been working on for the last decade and got to last 1/3 of the movie and was like "oh fuk lol, guys we gotta jam these in"....

...or that maybe he specifically chose to do things this way for a reason?

It was pretty obviously intentionally meta.

Again though, I'm not telling you that you have to like it. I'm not even sure how I feel about it myself.

It was bad CGI in a way that made it seem intentional. Like it was clearly supposed to give an uncanny valley feeling.

I'm not great at reading subtext though, so I can't really determine what that choice was supposed to evoke. But it was certainly weird and uncomfortable.

Why do they have to do anything? Anno is an otaku, through and through. There's a huge opening battle in Paris that exists almost solely because Anno thinks it looks cool. Every piece of religious iconography in the show exists solely because it "looks cool". (Literal quote from the production team")

I understand not liking it. But you should open your mind more to the concept of artistic intention, because this was very clearly intentional. If you're not interested in diving into why it was intentional, that's fine. But the odds of it being a "lol who gives a fuck lets throw some random shit lmao" situation are pretty low.

Because the confusing sci-fi stuff isn't required to have an explanation or backstory. Much like the choice of using religious iconography, it was clearly put here for aesthetic reasons.

Since we know that Anno is capable of giving answers to complex questions, the fact that there are none to be found here suggests that the decision to backload all of these new terms and concepts all at once was intentional.

So what was the intention?

Like others have said here, it was to make you change your focus to the heart of the story, rather than trying to unravel the puzzle.

It may not be satisfying to some, but it's clever.

100% agreed. The overload of new terms was intentional.

Agreed. In Japanese, it sounded more like specifying the color, rather than the official name

It may not be a literal donor. But the scenes immediately proceeding where Kaworu is literally wearing Gendo's clothes and being referred to as Commander certainly seem to suggest a deeper connection.