Below is the original script for my video discussing Neon Genesis Evangelion’s editing and presentation, originally titled “The Edit of Evangelion,” which appears on the video’s thumbnail. The first iteration of the script was much longer, and the first recording session captured over 30 minutes of audio, which prompted me to rewrite and cut out large segments of the video

Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Three absolutely bizarre words strung together as the title of one of the world’s strangest animated series. The show debuted its finale today, twenty-seven years ago, and we’re still discussing it now as much as ever. And it’s not hard to see why: with religious iconography and clever utilization of science-fiction tropes all used to analyze deep psychological and emotional states of the human condition, the show has carved its place into pop culture history as one of the most provocative and widely interpreted works of sci-fi since its inception.

[Not to mention, it’s got giant robots, giant monsters, punching, boobs, emotional struggle, parental neglect, suicide, suicide by bot, boobs, sex, sexual tension, multicolored hair, a penguin, boobs, and a final act that’s quite possibly the best visual adaptation of an Aphex Twin album I’ve ever seen.]

Unabashedly strange, emotionally translucent, and undeniably epic, it’s the kind of show that sticks with you, reruns in your head, leaves you with two answers and a question like all great stories do. And as much as I wanted to rewatch the series the moment I finished it, life got in the way, and I found myself without the time or ability to do so.

Till last month, that is.

They say you never know a story until you know it twice. Something about the safety of the destination gives you a chance to explore the journey, and where my first viewing had been a blissed-out, admittedly confused trip down an artistically ambitious road, my second viewing sparked nothing less than obsession.

Long shots I’d thought boring became the highlight of the show, genre identity forced me to think real hard, and I will never see the color red the same way again. But what can you really say about this show that hasn’t already been noticed? From 90’s internet forums to early thousand’s blogs to YouTube essays distributed all throughout the 10’s, this show has been dissected to death, its premises and plot viewed through every lens and pontificated on from every school of thought. And yet, to my eyes, one aspect of the series remained almost completely untouched by discussion.

I’m not here to rehash the show’s overambitious emotionality, the psychoanalytical postulations it plays with, or the theological material it blatantly displays. I’m pretty sure more men than I could credit have already tried, and I’m not looking to join the masses. Because even after hours of digging through articles and blogs and video essays, I can’t find anyone who’s mentioned how this show is put together. I’m not talking about the story behind the story: it’s well known how showrunner Hideaki Anno suffered from clinical depression during production and how his views and interests shaped the series. But everyone’s obsessed with the art or the artist, and they’re ignoring the presentation of the present. With Evangelion, the topic of discussion tends to revolve around the psychological and emotional impact of the series, and rightfully so; but after rewatching the show more than I care to admit, I couldn’t help but notice that everyone focuses on the story, not the anime.

The composition, framing, lighting, use of music, use of color, visual motifs, screen direction, messages lost in translation: not everything about this show’s delivery goes unnoticed, but the bulk of it goes unmentioned.

So I guess I gotta speak up.

The Edit of Evangelion

The edit is as old as the camera. Since the first moving picture was captured on celluloid, people have spun it in reverse, flipped it around, cut it shorter, and dabbed paint across the film. If to film is to think, then to edit is to say, and much like the language we all use to function, film editing has evolved and morphed over the years to streamline the communication of information and convey new ideas.

A movie, of any length or nature, is made principally of two components: the shot, and the order of the shot or shots. As films matured, and more shots could be captured and messed with, people began experimenting more with their order and presentation. The cameraman could adjust the lighting, the angle, the composition, the aperture, even the framerate, but the editor took charge from there: if the shot was a word, the edit was the sentence, and it did not take long for people to say some wild things.

Like all languages, film adapted out of necessity to preserve clarity. Nowadays with over a hundred years of trial and error, we as an audience have a fundamental understanding of how film language works: how to read it, if you will. We know films are shown horizontally, usually 16 by 9; a close-up denotes intimacy, a mid-shot conveys presence, and a wide-shot intends spectacle. Filming conversation? Shot-reverse-shot. Want to show off? Shoot a oner. These and a thousand other techniques have become conventional in film, some specific to individual genres, with only a few projects brilliant and daring enough to break a rule and get away with it.

But Neon Genesis Evangelion doesn’t break a rule. It breaks all of them.

All right; let’s back up. How do we know when a rule has been broken in filmmaking? Simple: the same way you know you made a bad joke: context clues. Remember when I said editing techniques have become conventional for specific genres? That goes for media of all forms. If an audience is on edge while reading your rom-com, you probably gotta work on your grammar, and nobody puts jump scares in a musical. Otherwise, you fall into a sort of Narrative Dissonance, which is a fancy way of saying you give off mixed signals.

So, what is Evangelion, technically speaking, what signals should we receive from it, and what rules, if any, does it break?

Well, let’s start with a good old definition.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Japanese animated series released in October of 1995. It follows a group of characters, Shinji Ikari chief among them, as they use giant robots to wrestle with supernatural Angels while trying to overcome their greater flaws.

A quick Google search reveals Evangelion to be of the Action Drama genre, and honestly I think it’s hilarious we’re still using labels as basic as these for media. Wikipedia goes a bit farther, associating such genres as Apocalyptic, Mecha, and Psychological Drama—and bingo, we’re getting closer.

Hyper technically, Evangelion, like most stories, has two genre distinctions, which we’ll call Setting and Nature. Evangelion’s setting falls into the post-dystopian mythic science fiction genre: I know, I know, let’s break that down. Dystopia is a popular genre setting denoted by a society on the brink of ruin, usually in decline due to environmental factors or authoritarian overextension. In Evangelion’s world, it’s both: an apocalypse has already occurred, and a major point of conflict is the government preventing the Angels from triggering another one. This is done using Mechas, giant human-shaped robots built for combat, and thus the show adopts an element of mythic science fiction—my personal favorite genre—which is to say it’s fantasy disguised as sci-fi.

Now what I mean by a genre’s Nature is simply genre in a more traditional sense of the word: the intertextual patterns within social dynamics known to elicit specific emotional responses. The genre Nature of the film Kate & Leopold is that of romantic comedy, while Titanic is melodrama, and Inception is a psychological thriller.

For the majority of its run, Neon Genesis Evangelion is all three, mainly psychological melodrama with elements of romance and comedy sprinkled throughout, not to mention a good dose of fantasy action whenever the Evas come out to play. As the series progresses, though, we see these genres begin to break down: that is, we notice the conventional elements of these categories being contradicted, subverted, and outright missing from interactions and happenings down the line. This has earned Evangelion a reputation of genre deconstructionism, making it a work of meta-genre: a series aware of its identity.

This is the first rule it breaks. It’s not the first of its kind to do so, however, but we’ll come back to that. Let’s continue.

Most stories, films especially, are graded both on the execution of their individual premises and their adherence to the conventions of their genre’s Nature. Action films are judged on their vivacity, comedies on their hilarity, and romances on their…well, romanticness. Of course, that makes a work of meta-genre like Evangelion notoriously difficult to analyze or critique, which is why so many commentators have taken a stab at it with wildly differing takeaways.

On top of genre difficulties, you also have to consider medium. Medium is the form which artwork or storytelling is shown in. For film, this is usually live-action, two- or three-dimensional animation, or spliced visuals. More than this, you have arguably the most important aspect of any form of storytelling: receptive presentation. People go to the movie theatre to experience films in their optimal presentative condition. In gaming, there’s a big difference between a flat screen and a phone, and even the same book with altered font and kerning reads differently.

Evangelion is an animated television show. That seems really basic to say, considering what we’ve already covered, but there’s a lot to unpack there. Evangelion was produced by studio Gainax, hand-drawn in traditional two-dimensional cel-styled animation. During its original presentation, Evangelion was released on an episodic basis, with twenty-three minutes of content airing on public television once a week for twenty-six consecutive weeks.

Great. So now that we know what Evangelion is technically, let’s take a quick look at what it does narratively.

Shinji Ikari is our central emotional tether and audience surrogate; we get thrown into high-pressure situations with him while everyone else in the show is already clued-in to some degree about the happenings surrounding him. We’re on his path of discovery, and the only time we deviate from his perspective is to reveal plot information to heighten the viewer experience or delve into the personal emotions of other characters that are complicating their relationship with Shinji. Everything is about Shinji and his struggles, and the local world reflects that.

Sigh…now I gotta explain local worlds.

So there are two kinds of worlds a story takes place in: local and nonlocal. A nonlocal world exists regardless of the characters and their struggles. The Marvel Cinematic Universe takes place in a nonlocal world: if you subtract any major character, life goes on uninterrupted, other characters living out their personal stories. A local world exists only for the characters within it; it’s a stage set for them. Without those characters, there’s no reason for the world to exist. Most stories take place in local worlds, and you may not even realize it. Signs—remember Signs? The alien invasion occurs solely so that our characters can use it as a foil to solve their emotional problems. Not a half-bad film when you see it that way.

Where were we? Oh right.

Evangelion also inhabits a local world: the history of supporting characters and organizations exist solely for Shinji, Asuka, Rei, and Misato to reach a moment of emotional climax where they might overcome their flaws. Every character’s past has been meticulously constructed to pit them in a place of optimal emotional struggle. The Angels themselves, the central protagonists of the series, all represent a personal struggle the characters are attempting to overcome at the moment, whether that’s fear, vulnerability, misunderstanding, or the other numerous obstacles between them and peace. Realize this: not once does somebody get in an Eva to fight for humanity; they are fighting Angels to kill their demons.

Even the name Angels hints at this local purpose. Anyone who’s watched their fair share of anime can tell you spirits in Japanese media, called yokai, are almost always translated into the English word demon or devil, even if their nature is benevolent. Evangelion distances itself from this stereotyping by specifically using the word angels, even making a point of it in the show when Shinji himself questions why the attackers have the “names of divine messengers.” The word “angel” notably originates from Abrahamic religions, where angelic encounters typically force change by struggle. They prompt maturity by way of pain. Not a one-to-one comparison to angelic behavior throughout the show, but the intent of the title is important to keep in mind, especially as the series progresses.

So to sum up, Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Japanese animated television series featuring a local post-dystopian mythic science-fiction world with narrative elements of psychological melodrama, fantasy action, and romantic comedy. Got it? Got it.

Now then, most people like to break Neon Genesis Evangelion’s twenty-six episode run into four arcs, distinct in their direction, focus, and escalation of the narrative, but I personally found the series actually breaks down pretty cleanly into a five-act structure: Episodes one through four detail Shinji’s decision to involve himself; five through ten outline the major relationships of the series, namely Rei, Misato, and Asuka; episodes eleven to fifteen mark the first evolutions of these relationships; and episode sixteen is where the mold begins to break, with sixteen through twenty deconstructing the individual relationships between characters; and twenty-one through twenty-six—our final stretch—ending in the conclusion of the plot and the deconstruction and reestablishment of the individual.

Even the episodic structure is unique and intentional. Nearly every episode has two titles: the first, in Japanese, shown after an episode’s introductory scene, and the second, in English, shown after the midway break. Both titles were chosen purposefully by studio Gainax, and you’ll realize that while the first establishes an episode’s central premise, the second tends to operate as an update on that premise’s exploration.

By the time we reach the final Act of the series, the structure begins breaking down. Next-episode previews are no longer finished shots, but undeveloped animatics. Two episodes skip the opening sequence altogether, and the final chapter in our story deteriorates into live action photography and swathes of bold lettering aimed at our characters from no known direction. Animation as a medium undergoes deconstruction, complex structures reduced to basic lines, and Shinji speculating on his innate identity in relation to the symbols used to represent him.

Here, Hideaki Anno weaponizes the neorealism of animation to interact with ideas like this directly. Critic Roger Ebert touched on this unique power of animation, how it bypasses our perception and hooks directly into our sense of conceptuality, in his review of another anime classic, Grave of the Fireflies:

“Live action would have been burdened by the weight of special effects, violence and action. Animation allows [Director] Takahata to concentrate on the essence of the story, and the lack of visual realism in his animated characters allows our imagination more play; freed from the literal fact of real actors, we can more easily merge the characters with our own associations.”

In Evangelion, there isn’t a single frame, let alone an episode, of dead air: every second plays a part in pushing the central characters forward to conclusion, even when seconds seem to stop.

Evangelion is somewhat infamous for its use of ultralong shots, at least four of them in the series running upwards of 40 seconds. That is an extended period of time, especially within a twenty-three-minute episode, and it’s one of the most unique aspects of the show. Hard to ignore given their glaring lack of cuts, these shots, like this one from Episode 4, offer more than enough time to wonder what these characters might be thinking, and then what you might be thinking these characters are thinking, and then realize you’re thinking about what these characters are thinking. In this 43 second still shot, the show plays its first exercise in audience mindfulness, purposefully breaking immersion and causing us as viewers to pay attention, wonder what the show is saying, and then realize we’ve created a thought loop in wondering why we’re wondering.

Long static shots like this are nothing new to anime; in fact, it’s a known trope, originating way back with the medium itself. In 1963, Osamu Tezuka, a revolutionary artist and creator of a small character named Mighty Atom—that’s right, Astro Boy—turned his art house into animation studio Mushi. Unfortunately, Tezuka agreed on far too sparse a budget for his studio’s first foray into serialized animation.

In his novel Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World, author Matt Alt recounts Tezuka’s decision, stating:

“Mighty Atom was a success, proving the viability of domestically produced televised animation, but it also placed an arbitrarily low cap on budgets for decades to come, to the detriment of studios across Japan, his own included. The beloved hallmarks of Japanese animated fare—the striking of theatrical poses, the lingering freeze-frames, the limited ranges of motion—evolved from desperate cost-saving workarounds into the key factors that distinguish anime from content produced in other lands. But they are more than stylistic flourishes. They are the direct result of that fateful choice Tezuka made so many decades ago.”

What others have used as a crutch, however, Evangelion uses as a club. Instead of a cost-cutting measure (although it’s also that), Evangelion takes a traditionally low budget technique and uses it to reinforce not only the realistic passage of time an emotionally stunted teenager would take to formulate their thoughts, but also make a meta-point of it to the audience by causing them to realize, really realize, what’s going on here. It’s not just enough time to breathe, it’s enough to think, to digest and process what’s just occurred and what’s about to occur, the longer the shot holds, the more the anticipation builds.

There are double-edged edits like this scattered throughout the series: reused animation templates intoning a sense of perverse irony; or bathing shots in red until we associate the color with pain and isolation; or, possibly my favorite, arranging the frame in a way where characters move right to left to signal regression, weakness, fleeing…and the opposite: strength, positivity, and courage when they finally turn around.

Characters say a lot they don’t truly mean. Either veiling their hearts or untangling their thoughts, how they present themselves to others, even to themselves, is often obscured by performance. But take a closer look at what we’re shown, at what the series itself is telling us, and you realize in a game of lies that actions don’t speak.

They scream.

That better be enough for you, cause I got nothing else.

As much as I want to full-dive into this show, there is not enough time in a single video to say it all. Several other motifs and brilliant editing tricks show up later, but I don’t want to drag this out. I tried to keep this relegated to Evangelion’s identity as a show, I really did, but let’s be real: this is a show about a lot of things, and I could never cover it all.

Not here, anyway. So if you liked this, let me know. I’ve got another script already written deep diving into Act I of the series, and notes for the rest of the show overall that I’d love to share. Discord members get early access to videos, extended cuts, and some behind the scenes goodies, so if you’re interested in seeing that, feel free to join us.

Until then…I don’t even know, honestly. You guys have no idea, I had to cut so much for time, even rerecorded everything. All of that will end up in a separate video at some point, for sure, but until then, if you liked this, let me know. Like Shinji, I crave validation.

I’ll be doing more film reviews soon: I know you guys and gals liked the last one, so I’m covering the D&D movie releasing later this week and the Super Mario movie coming out next month. So stick around if you want more unsolicited opinions on art.

In the meantime, I’ve been Jir0, you’ve been amazing, and I wish you only the best.

God Bless.