This Week in Anime

That New Eva Project

The immediately funny thing about the past week or so is the sheer volume of Evangelion news and discussion I saw. The socials were abuzz. And it felt especially remarkable for a series that loudly advertised its previous, and supposedly final, entry with the tagline "Bye-bye, all of EVANGELION."

And of course, this picture only becomes gnarlier when you take into account, well, everything you can see on this page, for starters.

Yoko Taro, for those not in the know, is the creator and director of the Drakengard and Nier video game franchises, which are renowned for their messy characters, dark fantasy settings, formal experimentation, irreverence, and overall idiosyncrasy. He is, in other words, responsible for some of my favorite games of all time, and he is also a fellow Evangelion acolyte. The signs are there if you look for them.

Additionally, I have to imagine it wasn't too difficult for Khara to recruit Yoko Taro onto the project when Square-Enix, by all accounts, certainly doesn't seem interested in utilizing him right now. For heaven knows what reason.

Which is why I don't think we should ignore the other names attached to the project either. Your mileage may vary with how much you withstood GQuuuuuuX, but speaking personally, Kazuya Tsurumaki has a lifetime pass for putting together FLCL and Diebuster. For my money, though, the most interesting addition here is co-director Toko Yatabe. She's a younger female artist with an impressive resume, and I'm very excited by the prospect of her take on Evangelion.

But that's a good segue back into talking about Evangelion as an entity. Like, what, truly, is Evangelion? When Anno founded Khara, he did so as a reaction to the corruption he saw fester in the halls of Gainax. The Rebuild s, therefore, were his means of not only retelling Evangelion, but redoing its production in a way that could actually benefit the animators and other artists who worked on it.

I don't doubt there was some egotism involved there, too. Whom amongst us? But I do believe he wanted to change things for the better.

At the same time, though, it feels weirder with Evangelion than with Gundam, doesn't it? The original Mobile Suit Gundam certainly could have only been a product of Yoshiyuki Tomino's bizarre brain, but even that didn't feel as psychologically entwined with its creator as Evangelion. Like you said, some of the satisfaction of Evangelion's "true" ending stems from the audience's knowledge of Anno's personal relationship with it. As with any insanely popular media franchise, we have to reconcile that connection with the realities of capitalism and consumption, but "fragmenting" Evangelion in an honest-to-goodness franchise is only going to exacerbate that weirdness.

Like, if this ends up being another multiverse project that explores a slightly (or even not-so-slightly) different concatenation of events, I'm probably going to feel a lot less enthusiastic. I grow weary of the multiverse.