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I think so many people focus on the personal emotional journey of Shinji and the horror of the Evas, it's so easy to miss how good NGE is at things like this.

by Pxtl 5y ago

I think so many people focus on the personal emotional journey of Shinji and the horror of the Evas, it's so easy to miss how good NGE is at things like this. Personally what surprised me on re-watch and through the rebuild-series is how much emphasis there is on the beauty of industry itself - so many scenes of machinery on landscapes. This is particularly notable with Ramiel, the beam-weapon octohedron - in the original series they explain that the weapon to defeat it will require all of the electrical power in Japan. In the rebuild, they make the effort of "we have to build electrical equipment to get all the power in Japan into one spot for a few seconds, and we have to do this in like a day or two" feel real and amazing. As much as Evangelion is a story about isolation and loneliness, visually there's a sort of celebration of industrial civilization - especially the rebuild. Not just individuals, but kind of a "together look what we can achieve" thing. In most other series, the images of machinery and industrial equipment weaponry splayed out over beautiful mountain landscapes and put to task would be dystopian... but in Evangelion, the artists instead make it heroic. The original series has this too - everybody loves the machinery of Tokyo 3, even poor Shinji, it's just amped up in the rebuild.

debo_ 5y ago
In comparison, I continually found myself wondering how the heck Gendo kept building so much crazy stuff when it seemed like his entire staff consisted of him and Kozo (especially in the rebuild movies.)
- EamonnMR 5y ago
  Yeah, that definitely stretched believability. In NGE Nerv has a huge support staff that we see glaring at Shinji in ep1.
- Pxtl 5y ago
  Hah, yeah. The (spoilers!) more prolonged apocalypse of the rebuilds combined with the larger industrialization of the Evas in Rebuild does make the absence of the industry that marked the first two volumes a bit conspicuous.
GhettoComputers 5y ago
In the rebuild, I instead saw Asuka’s emotional journey to make her “the Shinji” of the rebuild.
caseyross 5y ago
Indeed. Admiration of human industrial progress is the foundation for every mecha show, but Evangelion really makes it visual and in-your-face, down to the most unheroic pieces of machinery. Power lines, payphones, escalators, elevators, funiculars, cables, gantries, hatches, and long shafts with quick-closing blast doors work almost like everpresent background characters, reminding viewers time and again about the little-noticed, mundane strength that resides in machinery all around us. Typography is merely another piece of tech in this context, and it gets displayed like the rest, in honest, spare, brutalist form. Some viewers might see this industrial aesthetic as just eye candy (and in the Rebuilds, it mostly is), but I actually think it's at the core of what makes the original series great. The most memorable part of the series, the fragility, anxiety, and despair of its characters, doesn't land nearly as hard without a foil to contrast against. This is provided by the aforementioned machines-as-characters, not just because they reliably perform their basic duties, but also because they're physical evidence of what other humans could accomplish, people who weren't consumed by doubt, fear, and mistrust. We're constantly seeing juxtapositions between frail man and stable machine, whether it's the elevator patiently clicking through floors while someone inside seethes, the telephoned voice that falls upon would-be-closed ears, or the commuter train being used not to go places, but rather to avoid all places entirely. (And that's just at the surface level --- the broader plot, of course, goes much further and deeper into these themes.) It's only because the industrial aesthetic is so heightened in Eva that the opposing human-fragility aesthetic can reach as low as it does.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  > This is provided by the aforementioned machines-as-characters, not just because they reliably perform their basic duties, but also because they're physical evidence of what other humans could accomplish, people who weren't consumed by doubt, fear, and mistrust. I never seen it that way before! Some things reliably melt into the background, but MAGI was not predictable in EoE, it performed its duties with no problems until it was featured as an attack vector, the weapons against angels were reliably useless unless Eva were involved, and sudden power surges could also occur to make estimated reliability/functions work better. A lot was in the background and I never thought of it that way, but the problems I mentioned are when the reliability goes awry.

by Pxtl 5y ago

debo_ 5y ago

In comparison, I continually found myself wondering how the heck Gendo kept building so much crazy stuff when it seemed like his entire staff consisted of him and Kozo (especially in the rebuild movies.)

EamonnMR 5y ago
Yeah, that definitely stretched believability. In NGE Nerv has a huge support staff that we see glaring at Shinji in ep1.
Pxtl 5y ago
Hah, yeah. The (spoilers!) more prolonged apocalypse of the rebuilds combined with the larger industrialization of the Evas in Rebuild does make the absence of the industry that marked the first two volumes a bit conspicuous.

GhettoComputers 5y ago

In the rebuild, I instead saw Asuka’s emotional journey to make her “the Shinji” of the rebuild.

caseyross 5y ago

Indeed. Admiration of human industrial progress is the foundation for every mecha show, but Evangelion really makes it visual and in-your-face, down to the most unheroic pieces of machinery. Power lines, payphones, escalators, elevators, funiculars, cables, gantries, hatches, and long shafts with quick-closing blast doors work almost like everpresent background characters, reminding viewers time and again about the little-noticed, mundane strength that resides in machinery all around us. Typography is merely another piece of tech in this context, and it gets displayed like the rest, in honest, spare, brutalist form. Some viewers might see this industrial aesthetic as just eye candy (and in the Rebuilds, it mostly is), but I actually think it's at the core of what makes the original series great. The most memorable part of the series, the fragility, anxiety, and despair of its characters, doesn't land nearly as hard without a foil to contrast against. This is provided by the aforementioned machines-as-characters, not just because they reliably perform their basic duties, but also because they're physical evidence of what other humans could accomplish, people who weren't consumed by doubt, fear, and mistrust. We're constantly seeing juxtapositions between frail man and stable machine, whether it's the elevator patiently clicking through floors while someone inside seethes, the telephoned voice that falls upon would-be-closed ears, or the commuter train being used not to go places, but rather to avoid all places entirely. (And that's just at the surface level --- the broader plot, of course, goes much further and deeper into these themes.) It's only because the industrial aesthetic is so heightened in Eva that the opposing human-fragility aesthetic can reach as low as it does.

GhettoComputers 5y ago
> This is provided by the aforementioned machines-as-characters, not just because they reliably perform their basic duties, but also because they're physical evidence of what other humans could accomplish, people who weren't consumed by doubt, fear, and mistrust. I never seen it that way before! Some things reliably melt into the background, but MAGI was not predictable in EoE, it performed its duties with no problems until it was featured as an attack vector, the weapons against angels were reliably useless unless Eva were involved, and sudden power surges could also occur to make estimated reliability/functions work better. A lot was in the background and I never thought of it that way, but the problems I mentioned are when the reliability goes awry.