Evangelion background

We're in the year 2015, the 80% of the Earth surface is covered by water after an enormous liberation of energy -"second impact"-; supposed to be caused by the crash of an asteroid, ocurred in the Antartic. Now mankind fights the future; fights to survive... again; but now it has weapons, Noe's history won't be repeated...

That is the starting point of this fabolous story by GAINAX studios; presented on October, 10th 1995 with the episode "The unexpected angel's attack" or simply "angel attack" on TokyoTV at 7:00pm (Japan hour). This is the best series I've seen (not only of anime). It has everything: comedy, action, drama; it's very hard to define it. The thing that impressed me the most was the psichological charge of the series: the feeling, the angustia. I have put some abstracts of the episodes here.

The weapons mentioned above are the giants "Evangelions" or "Evas". At first they seem to be robots; but they roots are darker than we can imagine. These robots are managed by an UN independent organization: Nerv (it comes from the German); this organization was created to fight strange creatures presented as "shito": it actually means "messenger"; but it has translated to English as "angels".

The characters are presented in a very special way; and it's hard to avoid indentifying yourself with them. They all have traumas, scaries, suspects. Some episodes are just about the feelings of a character... To see more on characters, see the characters page. A detail I was forgetting is the music; the musicals and the background ones are extremely deep; and you can't avoid to feel your heart shaking when you listen to it.

Well, after 26 episodes the series ended in a very strange way, the 26th episode "The beast that screams to the love in the world center" or "Take care of yourself", left more dudes than the 1st one. So, fans in Japan started to scream for a clearer final; but director Hiadeki Anno denied to continue the trame, arguing that Evangelion was turning too real; finally, he had to resign (thinking of the millions that he earned is easy to see why). The trama has finished in the summer (in Japan) of 1998, with the two "sugoi" (fantastic) movies: "Evangelion Death and Rebirth" and "The end of Evangelion" (soon abstracts). Now, I stop telling you the history so you can get it and don't make my mistake: start with the movies L

Oh, don't forget: rent it now; but rent the japanese version: the original voices are incredible.

What happens with the Eva movies is very complex, I will try to explain it easily. In Japanese cinemas there were threee presentations: "Evangelion: Death" ; "Evangelion: Rebirth" (the both the same day as "Evangelion: Death & Rebirth") and finally "The End of Evangelion". The cause of this confussion is that at the beginning Gainax planned to present OVA's; but it was clear that the benefit will reach the sky if movies were used instead. Death is a quick overview of the series, which has 3 versions: Death, Death (True) and Death (true)2, the first contained new scenes that later were incorporated in the LD version of episodes 20-26; so for True and True2 those scenes were removed. The Ova's original plan included two episodes more: Air (episode 25') and Magoro wo kimi ni (I need you, new episode 26). But Air wasn't ready to the time of the premiere, so only the first part was presented as "Evangelion: Rebirth" (I'm not sure until what part was ready). A year later "The End of Evangelion" was presented with the rest of Air and the new episode 26.
Here in Peru (where I live) there is an excellent fansub organization that subtitles DVD's and LD's; so I just have watched the LD version; far as I know, for LD format, episodes 25' and new 26 were finished so they were lauched as final versions. "Evangelion: Rebirth" and "The End of Evangelion" NEVER were recorded in LD format; to be exactly, there are just one LD that contains "Air", that ends with the scream of Shinji and "Magoro wo kimi ni" with Shinji again in the final scene, this time with a hurt Asuka... Well, with this I expect your dudes have cleared up (really??).

This page was designed by Javier Loza Herrera
Last modification on: 02/07/2000 06:36PM -0500