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Evangelion Live Action Movie
Rob Sollanych writes "ADV Films has just announced the production of a live action movie based on many people's favourite anime series of all time, Neon Genesis Evangelion. Special Effects will be developed by Weta Workshop, Ltd, the company that made the Lord of the Rings look so good."
I can't see this movie doing anything but hurting the rest of the plot of the series. If they want to do a live action they should do cowboy bebop. You can fit another cowboy bebop film in about anywhere you want. But Neon Geneis is completed. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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So they are going to condense the 26 episodes into some live action fiasco?? Ughh.. are they going to include the freak out in Shinji's head in the last episode..
Beat up an angel every 10 minutes in the film?
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...perhaps because low-budget live-action anime adaptations do not have a reputation for quality?
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What is needed is a live action Gundam film, and yes i know there already is one, i want one i can see in theatres. With the current crop of superhero/sci-fi action films doing so well (spider-man, x-men, the matrix) i thikn a movie about giant city smashing robots would do pretty well, its a fairly new concept to americans.
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I never really thought much of Anime in general. I grouped anime watchers in with goths, freaks, Magic the Gathering players, and others i just ignored.
I'm a Matrix fan, and as such, i downloaded The Animatrix: The Second Generation, Part I. I was astounded. Rather than large mouth monkey drawn, slow plotted, boring anime, such as is found on the Cartoon Network, instead, something more akin to what i thought Asimov's robots would be like was presented. I've since downloaded all the free short stories from the Wachowski bro's, and plan on buying the DVD.
What i want to say though, is that perhaps this anime converted to real life will have the same effect on people, perhaps to a larger audience, showing more people that anime isn't just a cartoon for the vast unlaid, but rather something more meaningful, with great plots and scriptwriters. On another note, I'm going to watch Spirited Away this weekend, due to its great reviews, and the fact that i saw the first 5 minutes, and was impressed at the overall feel of it.
Good luck with this project, i hope it does great!
Seriously.. Alot goes on in the anime.. 13 angels to destroy.. a shit load of character development and thats not even including the End of Evangelion movie.
The series is done. Let people look back and say.. "damn that was an awesome series" instead of " What the hell was that live action POS"
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ok, I predict that this will probably suck. but presuming that more rational heads will not prevail, who would you cast to make it not suck? Sinji Ikari - Toby McGuire? naw. wouldn't survive the 1st angel what with his bad back and all. McAuly "i hate homealone" Caulkin? trying to think of who to cast of Risuko (presuming we get to see her naked....)
Amen. While I don't like to down a movie not even completed ... I'm saddened to think that one of the most overhyped, over advertised, and over fanboy'd will be made into a live action. As if the dub wasn't bad enough, now we'll have to SEE the people acting in it. I'm sure they'll rename and change things for us poor confused americans, since the dubbies are obviously the reason this is being made. I can't argue with the majority though ... as sad as it is, that's where the money is :(
So they are going to make a movie about some kid who pilots a huge robotic weapon to battle alien invaders.
How can you watch Shinseki Evangelion and not understand:
- They aren't alien invaders (in fact, they're 98% human), they're angels. You know, as in from Heaven? They've come to earth to bring about the 3rd Impact which will (pressumably) destroy humanity.
- The fight with the angels is secondary to the plot. The story of Evangelion is about Ikari Shinji who embodies the inante human fear of other humans (hence the existence of the Absolute Terror Field or AT Field). The goal of his father, Ikari Gendou, is to eliminate the AT Fields so that all humanity can be united and thus ascend to the level of God.
Evangelion is intensely deeper than that and I've shaved off most of the details, otherwise this post would be pages long. But those two things are obvious if you've only seen the episodes (in which Gendou is successful and a "positive" 3rd Impact is achieved). The movies turn that around and show what would happen if things went wrong (because of Shinji's own emotional strife).
I could go on and on, but Eva is not just about action. In fact, the action often carries meaningful undercurrents (especially when Shinji first fights Sachiel).
*sigh*
Nevermind.
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I agree on so many lives. Live action EVA is bad, wrong, and stupid. Are they going to have a tall, busty Japanese woman playing Misato? Are they going to have fourteen-year-olds in skin-tight vinyl? Are they going to have a penguin? Are they going to have lots of Rei clones? Are they going to invoke the wrath of the Christian right with the decidedly mangled Christian imagery in Evangelion? Is Misato going to die in the second reel? How about Touji? Is Gendou going to cheat on his cute pregnant wife (who will almost have to be played by the same actress as the various Reis) with Ritsuko and her mom? Will Shinji be allowed to oedipally fantasize about all the-- again, fourteen year old-- girls on the cast?
Unless the scriptwriter, director, and producer are willing to portray this story in all its gory beauty, they shouldn't even bother. I can't see them doing *HALF* of the things I listed above, and you really need *ALL* of them to get the story right.
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Is anybody going to watch a live action movie so filled with angst and self-loathing as Evangelion? I mean, leaving aside the attention span of the average movie goer, the plot of Evangelion is so damn convoluted it's scary. I'm firmly convinced that anybody claiming they really knew what Evangelion was about is A LIAR. Sure, the action is good, and some of the plot elements are well done, but it's going to have to be heavily edited and altered before this becomes anything but painful feature to watch.
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I don't disagree but I think people are acknowledging that this project has a lot going against it.
Romeo and Juliet (this is what we're talking about, yes?) Is a relatively simple story (young lovers kept apart by families' conflict, plot to unite young lovers goes awry, young lovers die...oops, Spoiler Warning), about fairly universal themes (the universal nature of love, the futility and consequences of conflict), and a plot that fits pretty well in a feature-length format.
Evangelion is a dense, complicated, and sometimes barely coherent tale of youth hijacked by world events, father abandonment, mother love, the loss of self in technology, fighting monsters with giant robots, with a lot of wacky theology, philosophy, conspiracy, pseudoscientific babble and PG-13 sexuality thrown in for good measure. It's original scope covers 15 hours, it's totally dependent on lavish special effects to work, and let's face it - it's not exactly Shakespeare.
I'll certainly wait and see but my hopes are not high.
Refer to my earlier reply to one of your posts as to the meaning of the last two episodes. I'd just like to comment further on your portrayal of the significance of EoE.
Shinji doesn't freeze at the moment of truth; he's eventually ready to unite with all humanity, but Asuka's rejection of this causes him to choose to return to individuality. The movie doesn't show a "failed" Third Impact, just a scenario in which the uniting of humanity does not take place as Yui planned. She ends up as the only human to live for eternity (that's why you see Shinji's Eva floating off; it's carrying Yui). Rewatch it and listen carefully to Yui's "conversation" with Shinji.
**********MAJOR SPOILER for people who haven't watched EoE***********
The final scene of EoE is very ambiguous; Shinji and Asuka (and possibly all other humans except for Yui) have been reincarnated as individuals as a result of Asuka's rejection of unification with Shinji. Many people see this as an indication of Asuka's feelings for Shinji, in that she doesn't wish him to know how deep her emotions are for him. Even the last line (which, in all the subbed versions I've seen, seems to be mistranslated) is ambiguous; it was actually an adlib by the voice actress, which Anno considered to be better than the script. What Asuka says could either be taken as a further rejection of Shinji as an extension of her earlier rejection, or as an indication of a genuine dislike of him. It's a bit hard to justify the latter considering what has occurred previous to that, though. I think the ending of EoE is actually rather positive - "humans should make the effort to do get along with each other as individuals".
Thanks for the thoughtful response - much appreciated.
Could you give a spoiler for this? I didn't catch that. I've seen 25 & 26 many times and as far as I'd gathered, Gendou's plan went about as intended. Certainly Shinji was tripping out (as any human mind would after experiencing that), but I basically saw it was a relearning/reeducation in a "perfect" world.
If you watch closely (can't remember if it's 25 or 26), there's a very quick flash that shows Misato's death scene, as well as another that shows Ritsuko floating in the liquid around Lilith. It all seems to indicate that what was happening in the 'real world' matched EoE, but Shinji was just rejecting it all (again, a more pragmatic explanation exists - Anno had already done some of the scenes for 25/26, following the plot of EoE (which wasn't planned at the time), so he put them in the mix).
Anno had already used up almost all of his funding by the time he reached episode 23 or 24 - that's why there's so many silhouette scenes, not to mention the roughs (pencil drawings) used in place of completed scenes. He wasn't able to get more funding until the fan outcry about 25/26 convinced the production company to cough up some more money.
Alan Rickman as Gendo Ikari.
Now that that disclaimer is out of the way, on to an explanation of the series (I'll try not to have too many spoilers.) For the first half of the series(up until around episodes 14-16,) Evangelion is your average Japanese anime about teenagers piloting giant robots and figthing giant monsters to save the world that attempts to be somewhat more deep and intelligent than your average giant robot anime and succeeds somewhat. In the second half, Evangelion is a giant robot anime which is incredibly successfull at being more deep and intelligent than your average giant robot anime.
The protagonist is Shinji, the pilot of Evangelion Unit-01, who most people agree is a bit of a wuss. Personality-wise, he kinda reminds me of Charlie Brown. He believes that he is worthless as a human being unless he pilots Evangelion; that piloting Evangelion justifies his existence, which is the sole reason why he pilots it.
Then there's Asuka, the pilot of Unit-02. Personality-wise, Asuka seems to be the exact opposite of Shinji: she's loud, proud, and kinda bitchy (okay, she's very bitchy.) She's actually very much like Shinji in that she's entierly dependent upon the Eva to justify her existence, to the point where she tries to kill herself when she can no longer pilot it.
That's just two of the main characters; I don't want to ramble on for too long. The thing is, Evangelion is much more about the characters than the giant robot battles, especially in the second half, which is when they stop having angels(the giant monsters the Evangelions fight) every episode just because they feel obligated to. There are still battles against angles about every other episode, but they serve to advance the overall story along as opposed to just being there to have a cool fight scene. The second half of the series is when the characters' lives go from being on the verge of some sort of happiness to pure hell.
And then there's the ending. Here's the story with that: Hideaki Anno's(the writer and director) script for episode 25 got rejected for being too violent (or some say they just didn't have enough money; perhaps it was both,) so he decided to make 25 more of what he planned on 26 being- more about the internal conflicts than the external ones. 25 was a look inside the minds of all of the main characters; 26 was mostly about Shinji. The fans hated it, so they decided to make a movie out of their original script. They apparently got enough money to make two movies: Death and Rebirth; which was a 60-minute recap of the series (which was more of a refresher for those who had seen the series a long time ago and forgot some stuff than a summary for those who had never seen the series) followed by the first 30 minutes of the second movie, and The End of Evangelion, which consists of episode 25' and 26'.
Some people think of the movie as the 'true' ending, whereas some actually like the TV ending better. I think that the two endings are compatible, that the TV episodes can be seen as deleted scenes from the movie: they can feasibly fit into the movie, but not without screwing up the pacing of the whole thing. The ending of the series as a whole is very much open to interpretation.
As for the live action movie, I'm hopeful. Yes, US live-action adaptions of Japanese shows have tended to suck; but none of the shows attempted thus far has nearly as rabid a fanbase as Evangelion. If ADV screws this up, then they will be burned at the stake; however, if ADV uses this fanbase to their advantage and hire some of them to make sure that nobody screws it up, this movie could be truly great. It will be a challenge to keep it true to the original and still have it make sense to your average American, but I think it can be done.
And as soon as I post this, I'm going to e-mail ADV and ask them when/where they're casting. I want to play Hyuga.
You know, it has been imagined before that a live-action Evangelion movie could be done, but it ended with the conclusion : let's hope it doesn't happens.
There are a few reasons about this.
1. FUNDS. How can an adaptation of a series that's full of heavy steel, gunfire, apocalyptic explosions, mind-boggling psychotrips be correctly done, out of the "cellulo-space" ?
One of the reasons of why Anime earned such a success in Japan is that filmmakers there didn't have enough money to crank out movies without said movies seriously lacking... funds. Celluloid really IS cheaper for impossible scenes like some that are in Eva... And porting this to the silver screen should require some huge amounts of money. Where are they going to find the budget usually used for an announced blockbuster ? I hopa Gainax's not going to spend too much on that, I'd really get angry if they had to close before of the bankrupt following the release of that movie.
2. CHARACTERS. Ikari Shinji. Soryû Langley Asuka. Ayanami Rei. These surely sound European, heh ? What are they going do ? Rename all those people, thus moving the entire story in the US and getting American actors ? (yeah, "Washington-3", sure.)
Or will they stick with Japanese actors ? How can you even reproduce de-japanized japanese people drawn on celluloid well enough ? I'll be curious to see who gets the role for Ayanami Rei. If it destroys my dream vision of an almost-perfect (barring an introverted-beyond-autism personality) human being...
3. STORYLINE. How will you ever be able to summarize that twisted series that is Evangelion into something that can be seen in 2-3 hours ? Or if you take the problem the other way, how will you take a part of the series without screwing the entire context/continuity/complexity ?
And what about the complexity itself ? Will the scenario scaled-down for the non-depressed to understand ? I surely don't want to see an action film made out of THIS. Do you ?
4. WAY OF THINKING. There are things Japanese can stand that Americans can't, and the other way. What would be done about those things ? I mean, there are some in the storyline that are understood (and appreciated ?) by us nerds, but for the others... Remember the beginning of EoE, you'll get an idea of what I mean.
I spent too much weeks staring at the ceiling after having seen Eva to let it become a botched adaptation. Really.
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