The best reason to watch Evangelion is also the most obvious: it's worth watching because it tells a great story. I did not have years of remembrance and reflection on the series, and did not experience it as it made its debut and established its influence.
Genre: Action, Drama, Sci-Fi, Psychological, Mecha. Other names: Evangelion Shin Movie: Jo (Dub) Status: Completed. Thrust into the midst of a dangerous battlefield, Shinji must find the necessary courage and resolve to face against the Angels' incursions before it is too late.
Protagonist Shinji Ikari fights monsters in what is more or less a giant robot, though it looks suspiciously humanoid, and is tasked with saving humanity, only to learn that saving humanity takes a massive toll on his mental health. Series creator and director Hideaki Anno conceived of the show as a kind of postmodern giant robot series — a send-up of other shōnen anime properties (which target a young male demographic) like the Mobile Suit Gundam and Space Runaway Ideon series. Here’s a question-and-answer guide to everything you need to know about the 26-episode anime and its two movies, Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth and End of Evangelion, all of which are now available on Netflix.Why is Neon Genesis Evangelion such a big deal?Evangelion has been one of the most popular anime series ever created pretty much from the start. The franchise is also an anime classic — equivalent in acclaim, auteurship, and cultural footprint to America’s Twin Peaks or 2001: A Space Odyssey.A significant subset of its vocal fans, however, have spoken out against the Netflix release, taking issue with Netflix’s new English translation, which replaced the one that first came to the United States more than 15 years ago, as well as the omission of the series’ iconic ending theme song, a version of “Fly Me to the Moon.”If this brewing backlash seems like a deterrent to new viewers unfamiliar with the series, it’s worth taking a step back and survey what’s been gained, as well as lost, in Evangelion’s translation to Netflix. Evangelion debuted in Japan in 1995 and has since earned a reputation as a controversial, psychologically complex, difficult piece of art. If you have a pulse and a Netflix login, you’ve probably at least heard of Neon Genesis Evangelion, the Japanese anime that the streaming service recently licensed for American audiences.
“Any person can see it and give his/her own answer.” That’s at least partly because Anno reportedly couldn’t always decide what he wanted the answer to be. When the final two episodes aired, Anno infamously got death threats because viewers were so put off by the shift.“ Evangelion is like a puzzle, you know,” the director told Newtype, the Japanese monthly magazine dedicated to anime and manga, in 1996. By the final two episodes, however, its plot has taken a backseat to trippy, simplified animation and a patchwork of voice-over–driven psychoanalysis of the main characters.
That replacement 25th episode, “Rebirth” is also the first section of The End of Evangelion, which serves as a replacement and complementary ending. To Anno’s credit, he refused to compromise in the two follow-up films, which should be watched in conjunction with the series and are also newly available on Netflix. The first 67 minutes of the film Death & Rebirth are a clip-show retelling of the TV series, while its final act functions a sort of replacement 25th episode. Thus, Evangelion’s TV run ends with the lead characters’ minds being systematically shredded apart and put back together.Death threats aside, Evangelion was a major success, one that saw fans clamoring for a “real” ending.
In the end, Netflix did pick up global streaming rights to both the TV series and the movies — a deal that likely cost north of $3 million, by conservative estimates. “There isn’t anything in anime like Evangelion,” writer Max Genecov recently wrote in a long analysis of the series’ bootleg history for Polygon, “nothing that has been so popular but has made itself so scarce.”Thus the show was locked in an odd state of rights limbo over the years, with rampant speculation as to how much it might cost a Blu-ray distributor or a streaming service like Netflix (a company that spent $100 million to license Friends) to license the whole series. The only way you could watch it for years was through shady pirating methods or buying after-market or bootleg DVDs. As Crandol wrote in 2002, “Paradoxically, Neon Genesis Evangelion is a work that suffers major shortcomings yet still has managed to become a resounding critical and commercial hit.”The “commercial” piece of that is why Netflix licensed the show in the first place.Why is it such a big deal that Neon Genesis Evangelion is on Netflix?For the better part of the last decade, Evangelion had previously been out of print after its English-language licensee, ADV Films, went out of business in the late 2000s.
The concepts of loving and liking are defined a little differently in Japanese from how they’re defined in English, so while “like” may be a more literal or true-to-source interpretation, as Kanemitsu has argued on Twitter, the change smacks of straightwashing their relationship. In the original English dub, Kaworu tells Shinji “I love you,” whereas in the Netflix dub, he says “I like you.” As Aja Romano at Vox pointed out, this significantly alters the meaning of Kaworu and Shinji’s relationship, which had been coded as queer for a quarter-century leading up to Netflix’s dub.The moment also serves a powerful narrative and thematic purpose, given that it comes at a moment in the plot where Shinji feels he is utterly unworthy of love. One scene that became a target of backlash originally featured an emotional exchange between the protagonist Shinji and the male character Kaworu Nagisa. Instead, what appears on Netflix are new translations of both, created by Dan Kanemitsu and David Fleming, respectively.Sorry but this is not ok (right is from the new netflix eva script) pic.twitter.com/LehJYFjMng— Jimmy Gnome June 21, 2019The translation issues fans have flagged are numerous and on the whole aim toward a more literal translation, sometimes at the expense of Evangelion’s themes and subtext. The dub that appears on Netflix is not the same English ADV dub released in the early 2000s, nor are the English subtitles the same.
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“Dubbing is important in any territory for a show to achieve maximum penetration, because there’s a large segment of the audience who just doesn’t want to watch something with subtitles.”What else is different about the Netflix version?The new dub also recast the voice actors for the show, to the dismay of the cast behind the original English dub.“This time I will be heartbroken if I don’t do Rei’s voice,” voice actor Amanda Winn-Lee tweeted last year, as rumors began to fly around a new dub. Whether it’s Misato casually describing herself as an “international civil servant” in the new dub versus a “government official” in the first one — or the way the new dub refers to the individual pilots as the “first children” or “second children” as opposed to the “first child” or “second child” — or the fact that the new dub’s pronunciation of secret government agency Nerv (Nerve? Nairv? Nirv?) is inconsistent throughout — it just doesn’t always work.Why didn’t Netflix just use the original version of the dub?Netflix has not responded to request for comment on its reasons for making these changes, but Jason DeMarco, senior vice president and creative director of on-air for Adult Swim, told Vulture, “I would guess the ADV dub was rejected due to rights issues.” DeMarco was instrumental in getting the ADV dubbed version of Evangelion to air on Cartoon Network’s Toonami and Adult Swim blocks in the mid-2000s, and he has pushed to include more anime on air in his long tenure at the network.“Although wasn’t a bad dub, dubs from that era are frequently looked down upon by current fans, so a new dub probably sounded like a fun way to drum up interest in the show,” DeMarco pointed out in an email.
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