Background
In March 1992, Gainax had begun planning and production of an anime movie called Aoki Uru, which was to be a sequel to Oritsu Uchugun set 50 years later (so as to be easier to pitch to investors) which, like Oritsu, would follow a group of fighter pilots. Production would eventually cease in July 1993: a full-length anime movie was just beyond Gainax’s financial ability – many of its core businesses were shutting down or producing minimal amounts of money:
“General Products had closed shop. We’d pulled out of Wonder Festival [a "flea market for garage kits"] and garage kit making altogether. We weren’t taking on any subcontracting work for anime production. We did continue to make PC games – Akai had seen to that – but there wasn’t a lot of work tossed our way. With mere pennies coming in, we were having a hard enough time just paying everyone’s salaries. Finally the order came down for us to halt production on Aoki Uru. We were simply incapable of taking the project any further.”
With the failure of the project, Anno who had been slated from the beginning to direct Aoki Uru was freed up. Legendarily, he would soon agree to a collaboration between King Records and Gainax while drinking with Toshimichi Outsuki, a representative at King; with King Records guaranteeing a time slot, Anno set about actually making the anime. Unsurprisingly, elements of Aoki Uru were incorporated into the nascent Evangelion:
“One of the key themes in Aoki Uru had been “not running away.” In the story, the main character is faced with the daunting task of saving the heroine…He ran away from something in the past, so he decides that this time he will stand his ground. The same theme was carried over into Evangelion, but I think it was something more than just transposing one show’s theme onto another…”
The original early plot line for Evangelion remained relatively stable through development, although later episodes appear to have changed dramatically from the fluid and uncertain early conceptions; for example, originally there were 12 angels and not 17; and the climax would deal with the defeat of the 12th angel and not with the operation of the Human Completion Program; Kaworu Nagisa’s appearance was changed from being a school boy -who could switch to an “Angel form”- accompanied by a pet cat, to his eventual actual design, etc.
Production was by no means placid. Sadamoto’s authorship of the manga (Neon Genesis Evangelion) caused problems as multiple publishers felt “that he was too passé to be bankable”; the stylized mecha design that Evangelion would later be praised for was initially deprecated by some of the possible sponsors of a mecha anime (toy companies) as being too difficult to manufacture (possibly on purpose, and that models of the Evangelions “would never sell.” Eventually, Sega agreed to license all toy sales.
Eventually, Evangelion began to be shown: the first episode aired 4 October 1995, long after it was originally planned to air. Coincidentally, that year Yom Kippur fell on the 4th. Initially unpopular, viewing grew slowly, and largely by word of mouth; by the 18th episode, it had become enough of a sensation that Eva-01’s violent rampage “is criticized as being unsuitable on an anime show that is viewed by children”, and episode 20 would be similarly criticized for the offscreen depiction of Misato and Kaji having sex With this popularity came the first merchandise, “Genesis 0:1″ (containing the first two episodes). Beginning a trend, it sells out. As the series concluded on 27 March 1996 with Take care of yourself., the story apparently remained unresolved: Third Impact and the Human Complementation Project are implied to have begun or even finished, but the episodes focus largely on the psychology of the characters, leaving deeply unclear what actually happens. The radically different and experimental style of the final two episodes alienated many fans and led to years of debate and analysis, both scholarly and informal. Anno commented in various interviews after the conclusion of the series that “anime fans need to have more self-respect” and to “come back to reality”; in a Newtype interview 10 May, after the announcement on 26 April of a new movie and re-edited versions of the TV series, he also stated that “computer networking is graffiti on toilet walls.” These statements were even more controversial.
Gainax launched the project to create a movie ending for the series in 1997. They first released Death and Rebirth, consisting of a character-based recap of the entire series (Death) and the first half of the new ending (Rebirth). The project was completed later in the year, and released as The End of Evangelion.
The two endings are similar in plot, but while in the film Shinji rejects Instrumentality, in the television series his decision is left ambiguous. In still frames in episodes 25 and 26, Unit 01 is depicted with wings and the corpses of Misato and Ritsuko are shown, hinting that these events had been planned. In the English-language Director’s Cut version of episode 24, the preview of the next episode shows concept frames from the fight between Asuka and the mass-produced Evas, and the title of the next episode is presented as “Air”, which is the title of the first chapter from The End of Evangelion, rather than showing scenes from the TV series ending as it does in the original cut. There was a sudden shift in tone around episode 16 of the series. This was partly due to scheduling restraints, which drastically reduced the number of frames that could be drawn for each episode, and partly due to the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway on March 20, 1995, which occurred while the series was under production; Anno decided to remove elements of the series plot that he felt were too similar to the real-life attack. Anno stated before production that he did not know how the show would end, nor what would become of the characters.
In May 1998, Gainax was first audited by the National Tax Agency: Gainax was suspected of tax evasion on the massive profits from Evangelion. Eventually Takeshi Sawamura was arrested for concealing income of 1.5 billion yen failing to pay corporate taxes of 580 million yen. Yasuhiro Takeda defends Sawamura’s actions as being a reaction to Gainax’s perpetually precarious finances and the shaky accounting procedures internally:
“Sawamura understood our financial situation better than anyone, so when Evangelion took off and the money really started rolling in, he saw it as possibly our one and only opportunity to set something aside for the future. I guess he was vulnerable to temptation at that point, because no one knew how long the Evangelion goose would keep laying golden eggs. I don’t think he purposely set out with the goal of evading taxes. It was more that our level of accounting knowledge wasn’t up to the task of dealing with revenues on such a large scale.”
Neon Genesis Evangelion (Shin Seiki Evangelion), commonly referred to as NGE, Eva, or Evangelion, is a commercially and critically successful, influential and popular Japanese anime and manga that began in 1995. The anime was created by Gainax, written and directed by Hideaki Anno and co-produced by TV Tokyo and Nihon Ad Systems (NAS). It is an apocalyptic mecha action series, and refers to Judeo-Christian symbols from the book of Genesis and Biblical apocrypha among others. Later episodes shift focus to psychoanalysis of the main characters, who display various emotional problems and mental illnesses; the nature of existence and reality are questioned in a way that lets Evangelion be characterized as “postmodern fantasy” Hideaki Anno, the director of the anime series, had suffered from clinical depression prior to creating the series, and the psychological aspects of the show are based on the director’s own experiences with overcoming this illness.
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Credits: Neon Genesis Evangelion
March 21 2008 05:47 am | Evangelion
link the image to: http://afufu.net/freewill