Anime's Apocalypse: Neon Genesis Evangelion As Millennarian Mecha
Anime's Apocalypse: Neon Genesis Evangelion as Millennarian Mecha review essay by Mick Broderick Introduction: 1. From its startling opening credit sequence the 26-episode TV anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion (NGE), which first aired in October 1995 through to March 1996, foregrounds its overtly apocalyptic trajectory and postmodern form. For many the series remains at the zenith of Japanese television animation and it is unlikely to be surpassed any time soon due to its staggeringly complex detail and textuality; its allegory, characterisation and design. 2. Of interest here is how the program melds the sensibilities of post-war modern Japan with a post- holocaust, science fiction future.[1] It combines ideas/ideals of catastrophe, myth, mecha, agency, spectacle, kinesis, chaos and montage with a ubiquitous sense of imminence, solitude, quiescence, introspection, prophecy, teleology and predeterminism. 3. It is hardly credible to do justice to the Neon Genesis Evangelion project, designed to broadcast its cumulative ten-and-a-half hours of animation across a half-year of screen programming, in the few pages of analysis allotted here. Hence, my focus is on privileging some of the more enigmatic and subtextual lines of narrative which broach the series' concerns with the apocalyptic and its multifaceted, cross-cultural manifestations. Series Summary: 4. Neon Genesis Evangelion takes place, according to its creator, Anno Hideaki, along the following schema: The year: 2015 A world where, fifteen years before, over half the human population perished. A world that has been miraculously revived: its economy, the production, circulation, consumption of material goods, so that even the shelves of convenience stores are filled.
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