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SPECIAL FEATURE!
Gainax's Hiroyuki Yamaga speaks about Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Despite the fact that youse (as Toji might say) been great about sending in letters (and some really cool art!), I'm preempting this month's letter column to bring you to the scene of last Valentine's Day weekend's Fanime Con '98 in Santa Clara, California, where the Japanese Guest of Honor was Hiroyuki Yamaga. Best known as the director of Gainax's first film, Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise (available through Manga Entertainment), he was also intimately involved with the Evangelion TV series as its co-producer, and is a long-time friend and creative partner of both Yoshiyuki Sadamoto and Hideaki Anno. There's much more about Yamaga and his long-awaited new film, Blue Uru, in this month's issue of Animerica magazine, but for now, read what he had to say in response to audience questions (summed up in boldface) about Eva just after watching Evangelion: Death (True) and Evangelion: Rebirth with a packed house of 900 American fans.
On Evangelion's distribution and target market, which seems to be teenage boys, although sometimes the series contains concepts teenagers would smirk at, yet adults might understand....
YAMAGA: Evangelion was shown two years ago on T.V. Tokyo on Wednesdays at 7 in the evening. T.V. Tokyo is one of the smaller networks, and the first time it was broadcast, the only people who could watch it were those in the vicinity of Tokyo, Osaka, or Sapporo. As far as the target age is concerned, this may not be something that the network originally intended, but generally speaking, the range was high school through college. But personally speaking, in my mind at least, it was targeted at people who were Mr. Anno's age- around thirty-five. [LAUGHS]
On whether he anticipated the incredible success of Evangelion....
YAMAGA: I didn't know it would become such an overwhelming success, but I was completely convinced that if Mr. Anno was the person who created it, it would be a success. That's one reason I was very much in favor of the project. But even Mr. Anno had difficulty visualizing the project, and there was a period of three or four years (before Eva) during which he was actually having a great deal of problems. But while this was going on, I had the opportunity to see the rushes of the first episode that Mr. Anno created. When I was that I know it was going to be a huge success, because he had really succeeded in creating a good robot-based story. I realized then that because he had been successful in creating the robot element of the story, the rest of the story he planned to incorporate would ultimately draw people in to watch the whole thing.
On whether the entire plot of Evangelion was decided before it began production, or whether the story grew as it went along....
YAMAGA: As far is the story is concerned, there were parts of the plot that were determined before the show was produced. Certain elements of the story were evident, but it wasn't clear how they were all going to be linked together. Those linkages were established as the production progressed. This doesn't mean that the production went forward without any clear goal in mind; that's not the case, although that often happens in Japan [LAUGHS], and Mr. Anno, in certain interviews, has suggested something to that effect. But that's certainly not my understanding.
On whether there are more plans for more Evangelion stories beyond The End of Evangelion....
YAMAGA: Mr. Anno is the director of Eva, and if he says it's over, then it's over. [LAUGHS] I don't think he's planning to create another sequel. Maybe this would be a good time for me to comment on the order in which the Evangelion series was released in Japan. First of all, it was released as a weekly 26-episode TV series [between October 1995 and April 1996-Ed.]. But the director apparently wasn't satisfied with episodes 25 and 26. It was very difficult, unfortunately, to re-do them for TV, but when Mr. Anno said he wanted to re-do them as part of a theatrical feature, it was easy to get sponsors because of the TV show's high ratings.
But the film companies opposed the idea of just taking the last two episodes from the TV series and simply showing them again in a theater. So the distribution companies requested that they re-edit episodes 1 through 2 into a movie. There would then be two theatrical releases, shown together, so the people who saw the first one [called Evangelion: Death], re-editing episodes 1 through 24, would understand what went on in the TV series, and would then be prepared for the second theatrical release [called Evangelion: Rebirth], which would give them the whole story, including what the director originally intended.
The person selected to re-edit the first 24 episodes was Mr. Masayuki [character designer of Macross Plus], who was Anno's top staff supervisor on Evangelion. But Mr. Masayuki didn't want to go back and just re-edit the episodes, he wanted to create something more. He wanted to make something of interest not only for those who hadn't seen the TV series, but also for those who already had. What happened, however, was unfortunate. When Death was released, it turned out it was very difficult for people to understand. Even worse, the production of Rebirth was so delayed that it wasn't finished in time for the scheduled premier [March 15, 1997].
So, the next thing that happened was that in Japan last summer [July 19, 1997], a sequel, The End of Evangelion was released. There's more to the story after the ending credits you just saw. That enabled Anno to accomplish what he had intended to accomplish, namely, and ending to the Evangelion story. [Rebirth, essentially an incomplete story, ended on a cliffhanger. The End of Evangelion consists of the footage of Rebirth plus over 40 minutes of new footage that continue the story past the cliffhanger. Therefore, The End represents the “new” version of episodes 25 and 26. Meanwhile, Death was re-edited, presumably to make it easier to understand, and was re-released this march as Death (True), together with a re-release of The End of Evangelion. It was Death (True) that was shown at Fanime Con '98.]
On Anno's severe depression or “crisis of the soul” as the impetus behind the development of Evangelion....
YAMAGA: Well, I think Anno may have appeared in the Japanese media as you suggest; he's made comments about wanting to die, and so forth, but at least from my perspective, things were never as serious as they appeared in the press. [LAUGHS]
On the reasons for the use of Judeo-Christian symbolism in Eva....
YAMAGA: I don't know exactly why. I suspect that Mr. Anno may have read some book on it, and there were some thoughts he wanted to express on it. I personally am glad that he didn't express some obscure Buddhist theme instead of Christianity, because then it would have been linked more with Aum Shinri Kyo. [LAUGHS]
On whether or not Anno and Yamaga are fans of David Lynch, and whether Anno is the “Kurt Cobain of Anime.”
YAMAGA: As far as Mr. Anno committing suicide or anything like that [LAUGHS] I'm not really sure how to say this, but, while sometimes he might seem very emotional, when you get to know him, he doesn't come off like that at all. [LAUGHS] As far as David Lynch is concerned, I don't dislike David Lynch, but on the other hand, he's not someone I'm a huge fan of, either. As far as Anno, there have been people who have called Evangelion the anime equivalent of Twin Peaks. [LAUGHS]
On how it felt to sit in a vast auditorium during the Eva movie with a “teeming mass” of American fans, most of whom didn't speak Japanese, but responded enthusiastically anyway to a film he helped realize....
YAMAGA: First of all, I must say from the bottom of my heart that I feel extraordinarily grateful to have had this experience. How does it appear from my position? It seems to me, more and more, that language is not that big an obstacle, after all. I think you've all come here, and you're making an attempt to understand what we were doing, and everybody is gathered here, in a sense, with that purpose in mind. While I can't say that there's no language barrier involved at all, I nevertheless feel that if we make an attempt to understand each other, this is easily surmountable. From the time I was a child, I watched American movies, and I didn't think of the people in the movies as foreigners or strangers who were all that different from me; I felt sad in the same places, happy in the same places. I didn't feel as though there was a barrier of race, or culture, or whatnot; I thought that there was something in those films that transcended that. That's something I've felt from a very young age.
Special thanks to Frederik L. Schodt, Yehoy Lee, Tomoko Shintani, and Danielle Scott.
Carl Gustav Horn