It's been a while since we looked at a stone-cold classic around these parts, but with the last of the rebuild films, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0, finally about to get a UK release and so bring the whole saga to its long-delayed conclusion for those of us on this benighted isle - well, until Anno decides to start over again, anyway! - it seems like as good a time as any to take a look at the last film that promised to wrap up Evangelion, a mere two and a half decades ago.
And now that I think, that's not even the only exciting ending to a classic series that would go on to be heavily rebooted we have this time around, and there was probably a great themed post to be had here, but the other two titles have completely blown it, so I guess we're stuck with the hotchpotch that is Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion, Hermes: Winds of Love, NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX, and Birdy the Mighty: Final Force...
It's hard to think of anything more pointless to review that The End of Evangelion. Not only are there the usual caveats that come with a film adapting a hugely popular series - if you like the show you'll probably like the movie, if you haven't seen it you'll have no idea what's going on, and all that - but End of Evangelion goes a step further, in that, true to its title, this is literally the culmination of 26 episodes of television. Or rather, of 24, for, as we discussed back when we looked at Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death (True)², there were those who objected to the original ending so vociferously that Hideaki Anno would eventually opt for a do-over that effectively supplants what came before. Except, this time around, there'd be no question of muddling through with a limited budget: this would be a true cinematic release, and just in case anyone doubted it, studio Gainax consolidated their own considerable expertise with support from the mighty Production I.G.
As is well known, The End of Evangelion would not turn out to be the fix that many of the fanbase were craving, and really, what would that even have meant? In all its incarnations, Evangelion is a work born of many, varied, and fundamentally contradictory influences. Probably what audiences of the time essentially wanted was an ending that would do justice to the giant robot show they'd had every reason to believe they were watching for at least the first half of the show, and though it was abundantly apparent by 1997 that Anno had been more interested in interrogating and deconstructing the genre, that remains the sort of project that could be brought to some sort of coherent ending. Indeed, there's quite a large chunk of running time where it looks as though this is precisely what The End of Evangelion is offering, and there are good reasons that its climatic action sequence is legendary both for its thrillingly visceral action and its exemplary animation.
Only, that action climax comes not even halfway through the film, and once it's done, so are any pretensions of being a story about giant robots, deconstructionist or otherwise. Well, OK, that was probably too much to ask for, but at least we might get some explanation of the series' vast and bewildering cosmology, right? And sure, that's another thing The End of Evangelion does, sometimes with startling bluntness, as though Anno was a little annoyed with fans for having failed to follow along, or perhaps for having failed to realise that the precise details were never terribly important. At any rate, there are answers to be found, but they're not of the satisfying kind, and again, how could they be?
But you know what stood absolutely no hope of wrapping up in a satisfying manner? That would be Anno's study of mental illness, and specifically of depression, and more specifically of that particular brand of depression so crushing and numbing that it makes you want to erase yourself from existence just so you don't have to endure another moment. This is where we meet young Shinji Ikari, and this is where he spends pretty much the whole of the film, so terrified of being hurt or of hurting others that he's almost entirely immobilised. And any illusions that Anno was somehow trying to make amends with the fanbase evaporate entirely in the final third, which is very much the last episode of the TV show, a deep dive into Shinji's fractured mind and tormented heart, but more so and pushed to the limits of what late nineties anime was capable of being. Which brings us, I think, to why it's inconceivable that a version of The End of Evangelion should wrap up neatly: how do you tie a bow on soul-killing depression? Yet it's here, paradoxically, that Anno comes closest to being candid with us the viewer, and here that there are answers to be found, however rough, painful, and ultimately inconclusive.
There are, I'm sure, many who'd consider The End of Evangelion's contradictory aims and arguable inability to offer a satisfying take on any of them as a fault and even a fundamental failing. I'm not one of those people. I find its wild swinging for the fences, its inscrutability, its seeming hostility towards the audience and itself, its mix of the grand and the grubby, the sublime and the pathetic, to be utterly hypnotic. As I said when we covered Death (True)², I can't pretend to be at all objective about Neon Genesis Evangelion, a work that affected me profoundly and that I love more or less unconditionally, despite fully recognising its flaws, and so there was never any likelihood of my not loving The End of Evangelion. Yet, with all that bias acknowledged, I'd still argue, as impartially I can, that it's a masterpiece anyone with the faintest interest in anime owes it to themselves to experience.
Said cult is, according to my half-hearted Wikipedia research, named Happy Science, and has quite the track record of inserting their god into places where he / she / it doesn't belong, so from their point of view, mythical ancient Greece was perhaps as good a fit as any. But for the viewer who has to watch this nonsense? Not so much so. Because, while there was never going to be a great or even an especially good version of Hermes: Winds of Love, it's the necessity to serve as a medium for a set of beliefs that, however much they're explained to us in ponderous detail, don't make a lick of sense, that really shoves it down into the depths of wretchedness. When it's merely called upon to be a somewhat over-earnest tale of Greek heroes contextualised with a surprising amount of realpolitik, it trundles along quite happily, with the odd sequence - as, for example, Theseus's confrontation with the minotaur - rising to the level of genuinely exciting.
And throughout its first half, this is all Hermes: Winds of Love is up to, with only occasional clues - such as the opening shot of a golden feather composed with shockingly poorly integrated CGI - to hint at what awaits. But here we get to the other enormous problem, which is the animation. Find stills of it and you might imagine that said animation is rather decent and even above par for the time, but you'd be deceived. It's evident there were talented people working here, presumably among the key animators since solitary images often impress, but the inbetweening is dreadful and sometimes barely there and gestures as simple as people waving are routinely mucked up, with anything more complex - horses, say, of which there are a predictably large number - going wildly off the rails.* And even that's not really the heart of the problem; anime, after all, has been finding ways around such issues since it began. No, the problem is that rather than adopt the usual shortcuts where we'll barely notice them, in dialogue, crowd scenes, and the like, the makers throw their limited resources uniformly at everything, meaning that the badness is evenly spread and consistently ruinous.
The goal, I think, based on the character designs and the historical action adventure / musical format (yes, it's also a musical, and precisely one song is some good) was to ape what Western animation was up to at the time, except with a fraction of the budget, and thus we get a film that manages to be actively painful to watch rather than one that mostly looks okay and shines when it needs to. That gets us back to the core of the thing, which is that it was presumably intended to appeal to as many potential converts as possible, drawing in both Western and Japanese audiences with a tale and approach to animated film-making drawn from the former culture while still being essentially Japanese enough to play in the home market. And you know what? A version of Hermes: Winds of Love that didn't need to be religious propaganda - that didn't stop dead to sermonise dully at us, that didn't devote what feels like roughly three hours to developing its cosmology at precisely the point when it was already running low on steam - might have pulled that off in a modest fashion.** But of course such a version could never have existed, and what we actually got is pretty much rubbish and way less trashy fun than it ought to be.
It's not for me to tell Discotek their business, but if it was, I might wonder why, having decided to release the TV series NG Knight Lamune & 40 and its follow-up VS Knight Ramune & 40 Fire, they would make NG Knight Lamune & 40 one release and lump its two OVA sequels in with VS Knight Ramune & 40 Fire. Then again, I'd probably also want to ask why they'd consider releasing either in the first place, given that, as far as I know, only the OVA to VS Knight Ramune & 40 Fire ever saw the light of day in the West, existing as a rather disreputable oddity under the title of Knights of Ramune.
The answer to the second question is beyond my guessing, but the answer to the first, I imagine, was that NG Knight Lamune & 40 was the much longer show, meaning that bunching all the OVAs in with VS Knight Ramune & 40 Fire leaves two releases of identical episode count. Great for lovers of symmetry, not so great for people who were after the entirety of the first show without buying two Blu-ray sets, and mildly annoying for those of us who might want to review NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX with some context and aren't remotely wealthy enough to splash out on both disks. Although, let's be honest, it's not as if I've ever been shy about reviewing OVAs without much knowledge of their accompanying series, and only occasionally has it caused problems, what with nineties anime having a tendency to be pretty formulaic and all that.
And wouldn't you know it but NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX is formulaic as all get-out. Indeed, its main failing as an OVA sequel is a thoroughly familiar one, in that it spends far too long re-establishing a status quo for characters whose arcs have all ended and who, in this case, have no real reason to be interacting with each other. Our hero, Baba Lamune, was whisked off to the magical land of Hara-Hara World to save it from the evil Don Harumage, and presumably he got the job done, since when we eventually join him, after the emergence of a new crisis in Hara-Hara World, he's back to being a normal high-school kid; so normal, in fact, that he's apparently forgotten all about his adventures, much to the chagrin of his former flame Princess Milk.
The pair's subsequent bickering will go on to take up about ninety percent of NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX, or so it felt, but the exact ratio hardly matters given that my tolerance for the whole business had been exhausted by the end of the first scene. It's not as if everything surrounding Lamune and Milk and their I-guess-we-have-to-call-it-a-romance is especially wonderful, but everything else is certainly better: they're the dullest members of the cast, Milk especially since she does effectively nothing, and when her sister Cocoa can build giant monster truck tank things out of scrap and brainwashed antagonist Da Cider has a talking snake living in his shoulder pad, you do have to wonder if the focus is really in the right place. All told, the Lamune and Milk stuff feels a lot like filler in a plot that already consists almost entirely of filler.
The main compensation for the thin story and the annoying central pairing - not to mention some cheap animation and the odd rather ugly design, especially when it comes to the various robots that occupy a big chunk of the third and final episode - is a measure of goofy charm and a healthy dose of random weirdness, like whatever the heck was going on with that snake. It's not a lot, nor enough to make NG Knight Lamune & 40 EX worth recommending, but it keeps most of the running time on the side of mildly amusing, so that's something.
Back when I covered the first half of U.S. Manga Corp's two volume set of the Birdy the Mighty OVA, I proposed that all this second half had to do was stick the landing and maintain the high quality level that had been established. And it does both of those things, so it's probably unfair that it left me feeling a tiny bit dissatisfied. But let's come back to that and focus on the positives, because they're considerable. Everything that worked in volume one, Double Trouble, works equally well here: the animation remains terrific, especially during the imaginative, well-staged action sequences, and the concept - regular human Tsutomu is stuck sharing a body with badass space cop Birdy Cephon Altirra and together they have comic mishaps and try and foil an alien plot - is obviously just as good as it ever was. What dragged down Double Trouble a touch, the annoying end theme and generally lacklustre score, along with some weak comedy that did little but put the brakes on the show's momentum, is no worse here, and in the latter case probably better, since there's less room for distractions as we move into the climax.
But it's there, insomuch as there's a problem, that the problem lies. Birdy the Mighty sets a lot of plates spinning and by the start of the fourth and final episode, I was already getting concerned that it wasn't going to wrap up even slightly. That turned out not to be the case, thank goodness, and the ending is probably the best compromise that could have been come to under the circumstances, satisfactorily resolving the central crisis and dealing with a major villain while leaving some hefty loose threads flapping as to the who, what, and why of the bigger conspiracy we kept getting glimpses of. What we're given is a self-contained story, it's just that there's no attempt made at hiding that there are plenty more adventures in store for our protagonists.
Well, there were and there weren't, but as far as nineties anime went, this was all we'd ever get, and it's hellaciously frustrating, even as it's clear things could have been an awful lot worse. But for once the blame doesn't lie with poor sales, creative differences, behind-the-scenes crises, or anything like that, and director Kawajiri and writers Chiaki J. Konaka and Yoshiaki Kawajiri were arguably making the most of the hand they'd been dealt. Because Masami Yuki's manga, upon which the OVA was based, had come to a close nearly a decade earlier, having lasted a mere three years. I don't know how far it got plot-wise, but given that it ran to all of a single volume, I doubt there was much more material to adapt had anyone wanted to. So while you might argue that it wasn't terribly fair to incorporate so much that would lead nowhere, it was at least true to the source.
But here's the kicker, and what leaves me with distinctly muddled feelings when it comes to Birdy the Mighty: fifteen or so years later, Yuki would decide to take another crack at his irresistible concept, and he got an awful lot further that time, which presumably is why the year that second run concluded saw the release of the series Birdy the Mighty: Decode. And Birdy the Mighty: Decode is not only a fine bit of TV anime in its own right, it would recover much of the ground of the OVA with largely the same cast of characters, meaning that all those outstanding questions do sort of wrap up, just not where they ought to. For while I like Decode plenty, I do slightly prefer Kawajiri's take, which is more fun and upbeat and content to imply a lot of what Decode would expand to slightly unnecessary lengths. And that leaves us with a largely top-tier OVA that ends on a somewhat frustrating note that's almost more unsatisfying for the knowledge that any answers you might want are out there in a great but not quite as great TV series. The obvious answer, of course, is to watch both and appreciate each on its own merits, and yet it sure would have been lovely to have a few more episodes of something this delightful.
-oOo-
I suspect that most people who read these posts don't even know that I keep scores for the titles I review, since those scores are hidden away on the summary pages, so I may as well point out here that Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion is only the fourth ten out of ten rating I've given in 130 posts and somewhere around 520 reviews. I don't know if that's a controversial conclusion; I guess it will be with quite a few people, given how often I've seen Neon Genesis Evangelion declared to be hugely overrated. But hey, they're wrong, it's a masterpiece if ever there was one, so there!
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
* Granted, a little of the blame ought to go to the reliably awful Image Entertainment and a ghastly non-anamorphic print that's so ugly I hardly know how to describe it, though "very green" gets us some of the way there.
** But probably not, given what a rough ride the superficially similar and infinitely better Arion received.
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