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Rating: "Gospel of the New Genesis" is how one could interpret the title of Hideaki Anno's complete work. I say interpret because in this gospel, all one can do is interpret. But then, let's take it easy. What am I talking about, dear readers? In response to your question, dear ones: this review will be about something never seen before, an anime; an animated series broadcast on TV, and I’ll say a few words about the movie too (which is nothing but the series' finale).
It was the year of our Lord 1995 when Studio Gainax decided to propose a new series based on giant robots, the fortune of all Japanese anime. Thus, Studio Gainax found itself with impressive responsibilities: first, to collect the legacy of Go Nagai and, later, Gundam. But while Go Nagai got us used to seeing robots (much loved in the beautiful country) like Mazinger and UFO Robot (ALABARDA SPAZIALE!!) which were simply indestructible and fought all the demons of darkness to defend Tokyo, Gundam distinctly changed the route by recreating a more realistic and credible story that spoke of a war that engulfed the Earth and its colonies from two factions using robots to fight each other.
So what did yet another robotic series have to offer us?
Neon Genesis Evangelion starts from the premise of all the Go Nagai series: a series of enormous and rather unusually shaped monsters begins to systematically attack Tokyo (here renamed Neo Tokyo 3) and a leading company in the field of self-defense sets its gadget into motion to clear the place. This is precisely what, in the first 4-5 episodes, that genius of a director wants us to believe. In fact, nothing is as it seems. The story takes place in 2015, exactly fifteen years after a huge catastrophe called the Second Impact (the first impact being the meteorite that extinguished the dinosaurs). Therefore, the scenario we see on the screen is quite sad: in fact, after the Second Impact (which, for the press and public opinion, was a meteorite that hit Antarctica, but then...) more than half of humans disappeared, the waters rose with the melting of Antarctica, and radical climatic changes upheave all the cities still left. An organization called Seele found the Dead Sea Scrolls (actually discovered in 1947 in a cave in Israel consisting of the New Testament and some unreleased pages) on these scrolls there are many writings concerning the advent of angels on Earth and the subsequent destruction of it. Based on what was read on the scrolls (more or less... I won't elaborate) Seele creates the Evangelions: enormous humanoid combat machines, humanity's last hope against the angels. Seele thus concentrates all its knowledge in the ultra-defensive outpost called Neo Tokyo 3, delegating the use of the Eva to Nerv, another extra-legal organization the latter is also tasked with finding the necessary pilots to operate the Eva. This is how we will meet Shinji Ikari: the protagonist.
Shinji is a 14-year-old boy (therefore born during the Second Impact), the son of the head of Nerv and an orphan of his mother, his father abandoned him when mother Yui died and only contacted him again 10 years later to have him pilot the Eva. Given his devastating childhood, Shinji has many problems relating to others, opening his heart to anyone, and consequently, he is shy and nihilistic. However, it should be noted that all the protagonists (and others) have very strange but well-defined characters, all with a past to forget or change, but they have substantial differences when it comes to reactions with others.
With these two short paragraphs, I’ve managed to introduce 2 out of the 3 fundamental parts of the work, namely: the part concerning the story itself and the psychological part of the characters; now I am about to describe the most difficult part which is the religious part (it should be noted that all three parts of the work provide objective feedback, but most is open to free interpretation as I mentioned at the beginning).
Neon Genesis Evangelion seeks to tell a new genesis by drawing inspiration from here and there. Primarily taking ideas from Jewish Kabbalah but also from the Bible, with what is written in these texts it manages to reinterpret the end of the world according to its own interpretation. For example, the angels are practically all rhetorical figures taken from Kabbalah and all have the real names of angels: from the cherubim to the archangels. To tell the story, Anno adopts many other figures, naturally transforming them according to his will: one above all is the mystical Spear of Longinus, the Roman soldier who pierced the side of the crucified Jesus, Adam and Lilith, the true progenitors of humans according to Kabbalah and according to Anno (at the beginning of time, Kabbalah explains that initially Lilith was Adam’s true wife, then left Eden to procreate humans), the Tree of Life and its fruits, the fruit of knowledge we humans possess, and the fruit of life that angels possess instead; only God possesses both and consequently has to prevent anyone from reaching His level, otherwise there would be a replacement for Him.
What do you think so far? Strange, huh? If all this has even piqued your curiosity a little, try to find this series because what I told you is truly a minute fraction of everything Anno will narrate, perhaps this is also one of the main problems of the anime since it puts too much on the table, in fact at the end of the series, all the questions that should have been answered remained incomplete; thus hordes and hordes of otakus forced him to end the series with two (fabulous) films that tried to put a period to the series. They didn’t succeed. In fact, in 2007 a new film was released in Japanese theaters which proposes itself as a tetralogy (four films!) which will partly recount events already described in the past simply trying to put a bit more order, and finally propose the real (we hope!) ending.
But let's get to the point. I wanted to describe to you in 2 seconds what the psychological part of the work consisted of. The protagonist, in order to save the human race, must travel a very tortuous psychological path: exactly the one described by the Tree of Life in Kabbalah (Jacob’s Ladder in the Christian world). Shinji in fact, if at the beginning he appears insecure and introverted, as the story progresses, climbs the Tree of Life, constantly changing his thoughts through introspections of his self (also known as mental musings) he manages to stabilize himself psychologically (let's say roughly). The entire work is permeated with hidden meanings, there are connections to anything: from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Freudian conflict between Eros and Thanatos, also for Freud the oral stage and the mechanism of repression, various connections to Pirandello, Schopenhauer; and much, much more, one just needs to want to look within the plot, and one can find everything necessary to satisfy anyone’s cultural needs.
In this review, I didn’t want to make any kind of spoilers as it seemed unfair, probably not everyone will catch what I intended to convey with this text if they aren't a bit mentally flexible. Furthermore, for anyone who has never seen an anime in his/her life, starting with this complex gospel could be traumatic; however, trying does no harm.
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