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This “new apocalypse” really started with Neon Genesis Evangelion, an anime about a young man being coerced by his uncaring father into defending a world the pr
by bugglebeetle 4y ago
This “new apocalypse” really started with Neon Genesis Evangelion, an anime about a young man being coerced by his uncaring father into defending a world the prior generation had effectively already destroyed. I expect its drowned cities and alienated youth will only gain more poignancy with time.
Anno was a far better (if perhaps not as innovative) artist than Matsumoto because of his refusal to retreat into the recuperated fascism that dominated much of postwar culture, instead choosing to show its true social and psychological impacts.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoFar before that, although it may be the first work to introduce those themes into the pop culture of Japan. See in Christianity with the parable of the garden of eden and it's destruction, in Islamic literature with the catastrophe of the sack of Baghdad causing a several hundred year cultural dark ages, in republican Chinese literature with the ideal classical civilization being replaced with mindless roving warlords, albeit with superior Western technology, etc... Though perhaps anime has become less unusually ambitious in rendering elite thought into lower brow entertainment, a sort of regression to the mean of the world cultural millieu.