Thesis of a Cruel Anime
This week I have been mostly watching Neon Genesis Evangelion.
It's great to re-discover a series you haven't watched for a few years and find you still have a deep love for it, especially if you're a little bit wiser the second time round and are able to appreciate it more fully. It's a fiendishly complex series in places with a rich potential for interpretation (especially in the film which is ridiculously heavy with symbolism), so it was rather edifying to watch it with at least a casual understanding of Fruedian psychoanalytic theory and early Judeo-Christian mythology. It was fun to able to put things like Lilith and the Sephiroth (the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, not the long haired dude with a long sword from Final Fantasy 7!) into a historical context. And surprisingly I found myself able to break past my usual inability to perceive visual metaphors, so I was spotting things all over the place (mainly sexual in nature, but then it's just that kind of show).
Something that made me laugh about the whole thing today though, is when I asked myself whether watching Evangelion the first time round had prompted me to go out and learn about BIG IMPORTANT CONCEPTS like psychology and religious symbolism, or if instead I'd spent the past two years learning about those things just so I could watch a cartoon and actually have any idea what was happening in it. I tell ya, I never had this much trouble over Duck Tales!
It's great to re-discover a series you haven't watched for a few years and find you still have a deep love for it, especially if you're a little bit wiser the second time round and are able to appreciate it more fully. It's a fiendishly complex series in places with a rich potential for interpretation (especially in the film which is ridiculously heavy with symbolism), so it was rather edifying to watch it with at least a casual understanding of Fruedian psychoanalytic theory and early Judeo-Christian mythology. It was fun to able to put things like Lilith and the Sephiroth (the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, not the long haired dude with a long sword from Final Fantasy 7!) into a historical context. And surprisingly I found myself able to break past my usual inability to perceive visual metaphors, so I was spotting things all over the place (mainly sexual in nature, but then it's just that kind of show).
Something that made me laugh about the whole thing today though, is when I asked myself whether watching Evangelion the first time round had prompted me to go out and learn about BIG IMPORTANT CONCEPTS like psychology and religious symbolism, or if instead I'd spent the past two years learning about those things just so I could watch a cartoon and actually have any idea what was happening in it. I tell ya, I never had this much trouble over Duck Tales!