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The End of Evangelion (1997)

Okay, so back when…

No wait, y’know what, we need to go back in time if I’m going to tell this story right.

Further than that.

Further…

Little more…

Perfect. Okay so.

It’s my third year in college and I’ve started going out with this dynamite gal who will, unbeknownst to her, one day be known as “Spouse of Mouse” to a bunch of randos on the internet. Now we’re at that awkward early stage of the relationship where we’re starting to realise that we can’t just keep kissing constantly and we should probably figure out if we have any actual…y’know…common interests.

So I pull my calloused lips off her and says to her, I says “what are you into?”

And she says “Oh…y’know. Comics. Movies. Animé. That kinda stuff.”

Now, believe it or not, but at this early point in the Earth’s history where the molten surface was still hardening, I had not yet seen that much animé. I mean, Pokémon and Speed Racer, sure, but none of the really big name shows or movies. So I go into a video rental shop, avoiding debris from the recently formed Moon that rained down on the hellish surface of the Earth like so much fiery marble, and I go into the animé section and I see a DVD for a movie called Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth. I had heard the name before, but I knew nothing about it and figured “hey, if it’s so famous that even a total noob like me has heard of it, it must be a great entry point to this exciting world of animé! This will be a great way to bond with my new girlfriend who I hope to one day marry and make a supporting character in a weirdly detailed animation review blog/ongoing comedy series!”

So we sit down to watch this movie together, and around ten minutes in she turns around, takes my arm in a vicelike grip and stares straight into my eyes with a gimlet gaze.

“I’m sorry” she said. “I don’t like animé. I just wanted you to think I was cool. Can we please watch something else?!“

And we turned off the movie and watched Family Guy instead. Because, Christ help us, we were young and in love and knew no better.

So that was my first introduction to Evangelion and honestly, I could scarcely have picked a worse one. I know now that Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth is one half clip show with the first 26 episodes of the TV series edited into a single 70 minute cut almost perfect in its incomprehensibility for a newcomer, and the other half the first twenty minutes of what would become The End of Evangelion that was due to be released several months later.

And they did this because…because…

Honestly, maybe spite? Like, just another thing to fuck with people trying to make sense of what often seems like a deliberately opaque franchise? Pity anybody trying to make sense of Evangelion, and that’s before they even have to tackle the plot.

There’s the original 26 episode animé series which ended with a finalé so despised that Gainax received death threats.

There’s Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth which is basically the world’s most inscrutable “previously on Buffy” and which also has two alternate versions: Evangelion: Death(True) and Evangelion: Death(True)² (and Tigger too!)

And then you have The End of Evangelion, which I will be tackling in this very post, which aims to be the true ending of the TV series.

Then there’s the Rebuild series, an entirely new ongoing four movie cycle re-telling the events of the original show and The End of Evangelion which aims to give ANOTHER ending to this rigmarole (sure, why not?).

Oh and there’s the manga (different continuity), the ANIMA light novel series (ditto) the PS2 game, the parody series, the audio dramas, the commemorative plates and on and on it goes. This thing is a beast.

But okay, here goes, I will now attempt to describe what the hell Neon Genesis Evangelion actually is.

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Gravity Falls (2012-2016)

Hey everybody! Man, it is so good to be back you have nooooooo idea! I have been waiting for this for a really, really long time.You see, Gravity Falls is my favourite TV show ~~help~~. Not favourite kid’s TV show. Not favourite cartoon. Favourite TV show ~~help me~~. Period. Why is it so good? That’s actually an incredibly easy question. With some shows you have to explain the appeal but with Gravity Falls it’s pretty cut and dry.

It’s gorgeously animated.
Wonderfully acted.
Impressively scored.
Brilliantly written. ~~help~~
Frickin’ hi-larious.

Gravity Falls is basically Golden-Age Treehouse of Horror: The Series, combined with some of the best ongoing mystery plotting I can ever recall seeing in a TV ~~don’t listen to him~~ show, regardless of demographic. The show is the creation of Alex Hirsch who was born in 1985…

Screw you, Alex Hirsch.

Just screw you.

The show is the creation of Alex Hirsch and centres on the ~~don’t trust him~~ adventures of the 12 year old Pine twins, Mabel (Kristen Schall) and Dipper (or “Pine Tree” to his friends) (Jason Ritter) who are sent by their parents to spend the summer with their Grand Uncle Stan who’s voiced by Alex Hirsch…

Screw you, Alex Hirsch.

Pine Tree discovers a mysterious journal ~~it’s not me~~ hidden in the forest and soon the twins are investigating the spooooooky goings on in Gravity Falls with the help of Grunkle Stan, loveable dim-witted handyman Soos (Alex Hir…SCREW YOU ALEX HIRSCH) and Wendy Corduroy (Linda Cardellini), a teenage girl who works at Grunkle Stan’s Mystery Shack and who Pine Tree has a massive crush on. So it’s a pretty standard set up for a half hour cartoon; kids chasing monsters. Hanna Barbera sucked that ~~tell Walt~~ well dry long ago. But it’s all in the execution. Gravity Falls did what so few series have ever managed to do; it came, it told its ~~hurry~~ story, it wrapped it up in the most satisfying and awesome way possible and then it ended right when ~~leave now~~ it needed to, in stark contrast to its biggest influence.

JUST. LET. IT DIE.

And because I really want to do the show justice and ~~stop reading~~ because I’m still very busy with UNNAMED HORROR I am actually going to split this review into two parts. The first half is going to discuss the series as a whole and then review ~~running out of time~~ the first episode of Weirdmageddon, the three part finale, with the second review finishing off the final two episodes. Got that, meatsacks? Good, let’s get started. ~~LAST CHANCE GET OUT OF HERE~~

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Roller Coaster Rabbit (1990)

Alright, this series of reviews that was supposed to last for one month has been going on since August so it might be a good time to pull the car over and try to figure out how we got here before the cannibal hillbillies come back. We started with animation in the silent era before moving to the dawn of integrated sound. We then had animated shorts as visual accompaniement and advertising for music and then as wartime proganda. Moving into the fifties we had the Golden Age of Warner Brothers shorts, the ignoble end of the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies in the sixties, the advent of more adult themed animation in the seventies and the first glimmer of the Pixar era in the eighties. So that brings us up to the nineties, a decade I am old enough for it to still feel like it was ten years ago. Refresh my memory, what was happening in animation in the nineties? Oh that’s right! The renaissance!

No, no, no. The ACTUAL renaissance.

Thank you.

So, exciting times. Great time to be an animation fan. Disney’s back, kicking ass and taking names, animé is more readily available in the west than ever before and even Western TV animation has stopped eating paste and is becoming increasingly not-awful. What changed? Well, the generation of kids who had grown up watching classic Disney movies and Warner Bros shorts were now adults and working in the film industry and wanted to bring the medium back to its former glory. Foremost amongst those kids was a guy called Steven Spielberg. Now, I say the word “Spielberg” and, depending on your age the first image that pops into your head is:

Or…

Or..

Or…

But you probably don’t immediately think of animation. Nonetheless, Steven Spielberg is like the Forrest Gump of American animation post-1980. Practically every pivotal moment involved him somehow. Don Bluth? Spielberg produced his earliest films. The Disney Renaissance? Wouldn’t have happened without Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The drastic improvement in TV animation? Would have looked very different without Tiny Toons, Animanaics and Pinky and the Brain. Dreamworks? Whaddya think the “S” in “Dreamworks SKG” stands for, hombre?

Shaddup.

So in the wake of Roger Rabbit’s incredible success, Spielberg’s production company Amblin and Disney partnered to bring the long defunct animated theatrical short roaring back to life with a series of high budget, high quality Roger Rabbit shorts. And my God, you just need to look at the calibre of talent attached to these things to see how serious they were. Rob Minkoff, who would later go on to direct the single greatest canon Disney movie of all time I said it it’s official no one can disagree it’s over I won, super producers Don Hahn, Rob Marshall and Spielberg himself of course, Charles Fleischer and Lou Hirsch as Roger and Baby Herman and they even got Kathleen Frickin’ Goddamned Turner back to voice Jessica Rabbit even though she only averages three lines a short. So, before we go any further there’s two things you need to know about these shorts.

1) As animation, they are absolutely jaw-droppingly gorgeous.

2) As cartoons, they don’t really work.

That’s not to say that they’re complete failures. Anything this beautifully animated fully justifies its existence. But they are a fascinating example of the whole being less than the sum of the parts, and why sometimes fans of something are not always the most qualified people to make a new version of that thing. I’ll get back to that in a second. Only three shorts were made, with a fourth cancelled in pre-production and they very closely follow the formula established in Somethin’ Cookin’, the opening short in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The formula is as follows:

1) Mommie Dearest leaves Baby Herman in the care of Roger Rabbit, warning him that there will be dire consequences if anything happens to him.

2) Baby Herman wanders off into danger.

3) Roger loses his goddamn shit and screams like a Bedlam inmate.

4) Roger has to protect Baby Herman while suffering violence upon his body normally reserved for the Christ.

5) Gratuitous Jessica Rabbit cameo.

6) Gratuitous Droopy cameo.

7) Roger ruins the take and bursts through the fourth wall into the real world and everybody hates him for being a screw up.

8) FIN.

So let’s see how that plays out in practice with Roller Coaster Rabbit, the second short and by far the strongest.

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Injun Trouble (1969)

My friends, the time has come for me to tell you the tale of the last Looney Tune, and I feel less like an animation blogger and more like Red from the Shawshank Redemption. I wish I could tell you that the Looney Tunes fought the good fight. That they brought Chuck Jones and Mel Blanc and Michael Maltese back for one last time and went out with a short that could stand up with the very best of them. That when that really was all folks, those folks knew that something wonderful had gone out on a high. But animation is no fairy tale.

Well, except when it is. Look, we’re getting off track.

What animation buffs call “The Dark Age of Animation” lasted from around the late fifties to the early to mid eighties (meaning the next few reviews will most likely just be me making sounds of pain and distress) and I don’t want to exaggerate it so I’ll just say that this was the worst period in human history where everything good and pure in the world was killed and hung from a gibbet. It was around this time that TV finally came into its own and starting muscling onto cinema’s turf in a big way. Facing increasing financial pressure, cinemas had to cut back on luxuries like lavishly animated cartoon shorts of pure loveliness. Cartoons in this period had to find a new home on television, where the appetite was there (boy, was it ever) but the budgets simply weren’t. The animation studios that survived in this era did so by being cheap, lean and mean. This was the age of Hanna Barbera and Filmation. A wolf age. An axe age. Hell, even the Disney movies in this era looked dog rough.

And what of the Looney Tunes? Bugs Bunny very wisely sat the sixties out after False Hare in 1964. I don’t actually know why Warners decided to retire the character after that, but in my mind he went to Italy to pursue a celebrated career as a director of independent film. It’s what he deserved.

The Looney Tunes/Merry Melodies in this decade, at least after Chuck Jones was fired in 1963 for moonlighting on UPA’s Gay-Puree, focused more on Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote as well as Speedy Gonzales, who was now paired with Daffy Duck, thereby capitalising on the well known and established hatred between mice and…

“…”

“…”

"Begone, pond-fiend. My kind have protected the internet from your filth for generations."

“Begone, pond-fiend. My kind have protected this land from you feathered scum for generations.”

"Your numbers grow few, furred one. One day you shall let your guard down, and the webbed ones shall rule over as was foretold in the prophecy!"

“Your numbers grow few, furred one. One day you shall let your guard down, and the webbed ones shall rule over all as was foretold in the prophecy!”

“Some day, mayhap. BUT NOT THIS DAY!”

Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah. So Warners were still using a lot of the classic Looney Tunes characters but they weren’t resting on their laurels (they were doing something else on their laurels but certainly not resting). As well as featuring older established characters, the new shorts studio under the management of Alex Lovy* introduced such timeless household names to the Looney Tunes Pantheon as Merlin Mouse, Bunny and Claude and Cool Cat. Truly a who’s who of “Huh? Who?” It was like the Itchy and Scratchy and Friends Hour except that Disgruntled Goat did not have his moments. I don’t want to rip on Lovy or Robert McKimson (who directed this short) because they were both seasoned professionals who worked on some great cartoons over the years. But at the same time, COOL CAT IS THE GODDAMNED DEVIL AND SHOULD BE ON FIRE ALWAYS.

The enemy. I shall teach you to hate him.

Now, my problem is not that Cool Cat is utterly, completely, instantly dated as a concept and a character. The fact that he is a sixties pop culture creation to his very bones does not mean that he could not be a good character in his own right. Know who else is utterly a product of his time?

He’s literally a parody of a Clark Gable character from a thirties movie called It Happened One Night mixed with Groucho Marx.

But there’s a key difference. Bugs comes by it honestly, he is a product of thirties pop culture created by young men who consumed, enjoyed and understood that pop culture. And Cool Cat was created by a bunch of old men desperately trying to relate to the youth of the time in the most cynical and pandering way possible.

Also, his cartoons suck and are not funny.

So let’s take a look at Injun Trouble.

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