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. A world where the people have gotten [sic] used to the resurrection - yet still feel the end of the world is destined to come. A world where the number of children, the future leaders of the world, is few. A world where Japan saw the original Tokyo destroyed, discarded and forgotten, and built a new capital in Nagano Prefecture. They constructed a new capital, Tokyo-2, then left it to be a decoy - then constructed another new capital, Tokyo-3, and tried to make it safe from attack. A world where some completely unknown enemy called the 'Angels' comes to ravage the cities. This is roughly the worldview for Neon Genesis Evangelion. This is a worldview drenched in a vision of pessimism. A worldview where the story starts only after any traces of optimism have been removed. And in that world, a 14-year-old boy shrinks from human contact. And he tries to live in a closed world where his behaviour dooms him, and he has abandoned the attempt to understand himself. A cowardly young man who feels that his father has abandoned him, and so he has convinced himself that he is a completely unnecessary person, so much so that he cannot even commit suicide.[2] From this description, written in mid-1995 before the program went to air, it is clear that writer- director Anno had an apocalyptic world-view for his mammoth anime undertaking. 5. A catastrophic event occurs at the dawn of the new millennium, a time of prophetic rupture in Christian mythology. And like Revelation's upheavals, much of the world is destroyed in the wars following the cosmic cataclysm. But the apocalyptic, millennial and messianic trajectory of the series is dispersed across both macro and micro scenarios. As Anno's prologue suggests, there is another battle occurring; one which parallels the global and cosmic conflicts, namely that of the individual and the interpersonal, where a reluctant and unwitting messianic hero must choose between preordained destiny and withdrawn self-interest. 6. Anno's description also embraces the intrinsically dualistic nature of apocalyptic teleology—from destruction and chaos comes rebirth and renewal, but only through the conscious intervention and agency of a liberator, one who leads an elect few into a new realm, usually outside history and place. Indeed, this TV series is overtly situated during the apocalypticinterregnum: the time in- between the penultimate and ultimate battles that decide humanity's final outcome. 7. Neon Genesis Evangelion is difficult to summarise in terms of plot. Its modernist (and postmodernist) narrative strategies deliberately disrupt conventional discourse and expectation both in terms of form and theme. So much so that the final two episodes (25 and 26) deconstruct the entire series, individual characters, human history and the animated/representational process to boot![3] This is no mean feat. 8. At the risk of alienating its audience, NGE layers its animation with vast amounts of text in Japanese, English and German often making it impossible to read and decipher in 'real time', hence it is self-conscious of its potential cult status, requiring repeated viewings from video-tape and/or DVD releases to aid comprehension. Similarly, the disjunctive nature of the narrative, its temporal and spatial dislocations, the rapidity of dialogue and exposition, and metaphoric/mythic allusions all necessitate an understanding retrospectively at the series' conclusion—a very apocalyptic narrative structure. Yet this is not achieved via a perfunctory coda or gratuitous exposition in order to neatly 'contain' the text. NGE concludes in a manner which is almost impossible to anticipate in a conventional cognitive linear fashion. So, to 'make sense of the ending', in Frank Kermode's ideal we must embrace the discordant elements along the way.[4] And, as Northrop Frye has shown, by applying a hermeneutical exegesis to the series, we can discover the typologies which explain the familiar resonance with Judeo-Christian apocalyptic traditions.[5] 9. The following summary is linear and historical, unlike the series. Figure 1. Second impact at Antarctica 10. On 13 September 2000, a mysterious event takes place at the Antarctic that instantly melts the polar cap and sends a devastating deluge across the globe which permanently shifts the Earth's axis. A series of wars and nuclear strikes follow, in which half of the planet's population perish. The United Nations adopts a cover story of a giant meteor strike to explain the event, when in fact it was triggered somehow by human contact with the First Angel, named Adam, a giant of light observed in Antarctica. The disaster is called the Second Impact, the First being a cosmic impact over 4 billion years ago when terrestrial ejecta was large enough to coalesce and form the Moon. Figure 2. The first angel, named Adam 11. 12. A few years earlier in the late 1990s, three brilliant scientists—artificial intelligence engineer, Dr Akage Naoko; the ruthless soon-to-be Commander of the UN's secret agency NERV, Ikari (Rokubungi) Gendou; and a professor of Artificial Evolution, who becomes Gendou's deputy at NERV, Fuytsuki Kouzou—all based in Japan, commence work for the secret SEELE organisation, which operates from the mystical prophecies of the Dead Sea Scrolls predicting apocalyptic battles to come. Their secret task is to implement the Human Complementation Program—a transhumanist project to evolve homo sapiens into a super gestalt being by shedding human form and communing with the cosmic divine. The race is to achieve Complementation before other Angels appear to destroy humanity by their reuniting with Adam. 13. In order to complete this mission NERV is established to defend humanity and battle the invading Angels. At enormous cost (like an international Manhattan Project) it is clandestinely located at the centre of the Geo-Front, a circular cavity beneath the surface 'decoy' city, the rebuilt Neo-Tokyo-3. But NERV and its director Ikari Gendou have a hidden agenda—to facilitate this (r)evolutionary Complementation. Figure 3. The rebuilt Neo-Tokyo-3 14. 15. At the time of the millennium's Second Impact a number of special children are born, one of whom is the son of Commander Ikari, named Shinji—the Second Child. The series depicts five children selected by the mysterious Marduk organisation to pilot a test range of giant cyborgs, the Evangelions (or EVA units). Despite these other adolescents, it is ultimately the confused and immature Shinji upon whom the fate of the world depends. But his near autistic social and psychological withdrawal from the world, fuelled by oedipal wrath against his father for abandoning him, leaves Shinji seemingly ill-equipped for his messianic task. Figure 4. Shinji 16. 17. When Shinji is summoned to Japan's NERV headquarters he is immediately sent into combat against an approaching Angel (No. 3: Sachiel) after the UN's defence forces fail to penetrate the being's AT (Absolute Terror) Field. To everyone's amazement Shinji melds instantly into synchronicity with the cybernetic AI system of the EVA he pilots (Test type: Unit-01) which also possesses its own type of protective AT Field.[6] In a colossal hand-to-hand battle above Neo-Tokyo 3, inside his robot EVA, Shinji finally defeats the monstrous intruder, which self-destructs in an attempt to destroy them both. 18. The other teenage EVA pilots all attend Shinji's school in Neo-Tokyo 3. Shinji feels some empathy and a growing affection for the taciturn Ayanami Rei, the 'First Child'—an injured girl-pilot of Evangelion Unit-00, who both saves Shinji and is saved by him throughout the series. Rei is later revealed to be a mere clone, one of hundreds created by Shinji's father, yet a homunculus devoid of a soul. The Third Child, Soryu Asuka Langley, part-German part-Japanese, is flown in from the US NERV centre, and shown to be a precocious, aggressive and over-confident enfant terrible who, like Shinji, has suffered a traumatic childhood of abandonment but compensates by an over-zealous competitiveness. Suzuhara Touji, the Fourth Child, is at first a school bully who picks on Shinji but later admires Shinji's courage in piloting EVAs and befriends him.