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think i'll rewatch rebuild of evangelion because a friend mentioned shikinami asuka and it's been an eternity since we saw the first three films so we don't remember how her characterisation has changed. also we still haven't seen the fourth movie so this is finally our chance

okay, time to rewatch evangelion 1.11!

tfw there's no sound during the logos so you question if your audio setup is working

instead of just re-releasing evangelion in hd with the original film grain they have to destroy culture by pointlessly reanimating it in horrible 2010's widescreen. look at how dead this still looks. in this essay i will—

oh wait oh my god this is the first time in our life that we have realised that the “N2 mine” is what you would call a “tactical nuclear weapon”. when gendou says “conventional weapons” (通常兵器) won't work, that's the implication. we always thought it was a cool new explosive

“N2” just always felt like it fit in alongside “TNT” and the like!

the earlier tweet was a joke but nearly 9 minutes in and the "remake"-yness is constantly irritating me a little. it's not as pretty and it just feels a little off sometimes, the way the shots have been changed. i don't know

it's particularly weird because it alternates between stuff that looks straight out of a 2010's anime and something that's trying to look like 1995 cel shading

but i'm also finding the particular choice of subtitle font (left) is putting me in the wrong mood. luckily this release has uh. a huge selection of different sub tracks mashed into it (don't ask), each with different fonts, so i'm just picking another one (right).

「知らない天井だ。」

it feels like things are moving too fast…

„Plan zur Komplementarität der Menscheit“ huh

the 3DCG is bothering me and strangely enough it's the opening and closing of sliding doors which is doing it, which should be trivial to animate, I don't understand

as ikari shinji-kun stares at another 知らない天井, at least he still has his SDAT player

this shot is pretty cool

when rendering that clip i didn't realise at first i had to request a downmix from 6.1 to 2.0, and in the process discovered that you can easily get a mix where there's just the background music, no speech. that's kind of cool. i think i might like to watch a whole movie that way

the rest of that sequence, with shinji staring at the clouds, has this almost ætherial feeling to it, i wish i'd posted the whole thing

I guess, without it being cut into episodes with their natural stopping points and OPs and EDs, they have to change pace occasionally to make the flow feel right

Ikari-kun über dem Nebelmeer (again)

oh lmao there's still an eyecatch in the middle. i guess that's a good spot to put an intermission. they don't do intermissions these days. they should

the “requisitioning the entirety of japan's electrical supply” thing is famously cool but i also can't help but think about how you simply can't use an entire nation's electricity supply in one place at one time because there just isn't the transfer capacity

oh they have specially laid “superconductive cables” so i guess they anticipated that!

really the coolest thing about that is the idea that an entire nation's industrial might can be commandeered to improvise multiple pieces of a solution to a problem in the space of less than 24 hours. alas in the real world even a timeframe of months is optimistic

despite my complaints i did get into the flow of it once i was maybe half an hour in. it did move me a bit in the way that the original evangelion does. i'm not sure how i feel about the positron cannon segment of the film though. it felt weak somehow

why does this film end with a kingdom hearts opening-ass song

hmm. i guess i enjoyed that? but i think i am going to sleep, and then rewatch the corresponding episodes of the original series, to put it in context for me

oh my god the reason the ending song sounds like an utada hikaru song is that it's an utada hikaru song

okay i'm gonna rewatch a few episodes of the original evangelion tv series just to have a comparison point

…the original series has Cruel Angel's Thesis and the rebuild does not. that's a huge point to the original right there. it's really strange to think i've just watched what's supposedly equivalent the first few episodes of evangelion, but without that OP

i rewatched the first two episodes of the original evangelion tv series to ground me… evangelion 1.11 is quite a different thing? i need to try to explain…

evangelion 1.11 reproduces a lot line-for-line, shot-for-shot, scene-for-scene, so it you could watch it having last seen the original over two decades ago in your youth (i.e. being the target audience) and feel like you're rewatching it, like you've seen it before

evangelion 1.11 is from the digital age and so it just doesn't have that "realness" to it in that particular way. what it does have is being made for a big, wide screen, not a small 4:3 one, and the vividness of digital colour. it does have some soul to it, if in a different way

one example of a visual change in 1.11 that i think is a true improvement is the psychedelic visuals when shinji enters the eva for the first time and it's synchronising with his brain. that was something they didn't have the technology to pull off before. they sell it better now

but the biggest difference between 1.11 and the original series is this experiential quality i struggle to convey. the former is a movie and the latter is not, and the flow is very different as a result, even without them re-ordering things and cutting out certain little moments

i don't think i like the little wink-wink nudge-nudge things like how they changed SEELE's conversations with Gendou. i don't like watching a remake movie that assumes you are a capital-f Fan of the thing it's remaking. it makes me feel a sadness i can't really describe

evangelion 1.11 made me feel things, different things to rewatching the original series, and i did find myself absorbed by it for most of the running length, so i do think it succeeds as a film, and i do think i liked it.

time to rewatch evangelion 2.22 and see what exciting feelings it may produce in us

the logos at the start of this movie have sound this time, even though they're the same logos as the previous one, which did not give them sound. fascinating. so even this is a creative decision

…the hell is this 2010's 3dcg mecha b-movie anime shit

this isn't evangelion. i'm not sure what it is, but it's not evangelion. i don't think they want me to think it's evangelion either. the way they use 3dcg here is very different from the previous film, it must be deliberate

naughty pilots get sent to the Organic Compound Electrolytic Dissociation Re-Sterilization Pool Treatment Room to atone for their crimes

a friend remarked to me ahead of me watching this that that this film has nonstop intimacy, almost like the opposite of the original series, and unfortunately we can't tell you how we'd perceive this if we hadn't heard that comment, but boy are we noticing it only 24 minutes in

it feels like a blorboified, flanderised evangelion almost. like yes this character looks and talks like shinji, and this other character looks and talks like asuka, but it's just. it's … unnatural? they want me to feel they're the same, but they're in such a different context?

i know she's not "asuka" because this is "shikinami" and not "souryuu", but like. saying "baka shinji" doesn't make you asuka. it's not the catchphrase that makes the character. i feel uncomfortable

oh wow they actually depict the second impact, and not in any half-hearted way. that's something

gaaaaaaah lines like “you're not the only one who's got it tough” (kaji's remark to shinji) really piss me off because they rest on a conception of a character that doesn't feel consistent with the actual world of the film

i don't like the new visual direction in this film, the visual readability and comprehensibility of what's happening on screen is a lot worse than both the previous movie and the original series, our brain can't process what's going on in these action scenes

case in point:

computer graphics were a mistake

…i'm clearly too tired and agitated to reasonably keep going right now. i'm at the 37 minute mark. i'll wind down, go to sleep, and continue after that

it's so tempting to use the word “slop” for the heavy 3dcg stuff but that's not quite what this is

time to return to the 逃げちゃだめだ mines

the way they're still repeating old shots and lines in this from time to time even though it's not even trying to be a remake anymore feels so strange

strange is not a strong enough word. jarring. I don't like it

I think we last (first) watched the first three rebuild films ten+ years ago, so we don't remember much, but we definitely were frustrated that they felt essentially skeletal, lacking the depth of the original series and falling back on presumed viewer familiarity with it

and I mention it because I'm feeling it really strongly again this time. I'm trying to be open-minded, I really am, but it's getting at me. it doesn't bother me as a technicality, it's not critical pedantry, it bothers me because I can't process the world being presented as real

basically this is how it's making me feel

(though mostly about asuka)

the way the characters keep remarking on the fact they're being unusually sociable too… it hurts our brain

what drugs do i need to be on to enjoy this movie

the dummy plug entry plug crushing incident didn't land for me, am i just in a bad mood

the vocal performances in this are weaker than the originals, alas

okay the final act is a return to form and i did enjoy that

I guess I can respect the whole trippy bizarro world preceding a breaking point concept

I think I'm going to be unpopular in considering 1.11 to be a stronger film than 2.22

given I complained about Asuka twice, I should add that Rei's characterisation was similarly grating, and she isn't ostensibly a "different character" in this movie. I think Shinji's probably would be too if he weren't so protagonist-shaped (I don't know what I mean by that)

this is a truly insulting comparison so I must apologise for making it, but in essence I disliked Evangelion 2.22 for similar reasons to why I disliked Chou Kaguya-hime. they are both incredibly uncomfortably hypertextual, if in very different ways.

okay that's all I gotta sleep

@hikari In a similar way, there's a tv-capture of Northern Exposure floating around that not only has the original music but also has the TV broadcast feel. The Blu-ray release might be technically "better," but there tv-capture unofficial-release feels more like watching the show again