Hideaki Anno – Reflecting “Reality”
For our first assignment, we’ve been tasked with making a presentation on an animator of our choosing, relate it to a theory of animation and/or theme. The main catch however is that we must choose an animator from our home country, so Japanese animators are off the table for me.
However, I wanted to write up an analysis on Hideki Anno nonetheless, as he was one of the first animators I had considered when the initial presentation assignment came up. Hideki Anno is best known for his work on the Evangelion series, a group of teens forced to control giant mechs called Evas in a world infested by destructive angels.
As documented in the NHK documentary Hideki Anno: The Final Challenge of Evangelion, Anno went through multiple periods of depression. From burning out from a series called Nadia in the early 90s (Eva Monkey), to disappointed fans wanted him to kill himself after an anticlimatic ending to the Evangelion series, to underwhelming reception after his 3rd Rebuild film, Anno has been very open about his experiences and has sought to document these through the main character of Shinji, a young teen who is scared and hates piloting the Evas.
Whether it was due to budgetary reasons or artistic decisions, Anno isn’t afraid to break the animation down to its rawest and most simplistic in order to reflect different emotions and realities. In the last two episodes of the original Evangelion series, Anno focuses on Shinji inner mind, and strips the visuals back to a rawer look, trying out different approaches.
In some instances, he simply has words in bright bold kanji, really forcing the audience to read the words and make a note of their feelings. Other times, we have warped-like textures with hues of pink and green – unknown colours from everyday life that feel unnatural and tense. In represent Backgrounds are straight up removed, replaced by a blank white screen. The art style alternates: sometimes it’s line art with hatched shading, sometimes it’s drawn in pencil with paint/watercolour-like aesthetics. This constant flux of different approaches, textures, aesthetics etc., lend themselves to the notion of uncertainty in the minds of the characters. The audience gets the impression even the characters themselves are unsure of where their headspace is at.
Similarly in the final Rebuild Film (3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon a Time) when Shinji’s father begins to explain his backstory and we look into his thought process, the animation begins to strip back. We get extremely raw, rough pencil drawings, that often loop to give the impression of the line boiling. The colours at this point are largely greyscale, they look unrefined as if they came out of a storyboard. However, when Shinji’s father talks about his emotions, his uncertainty about what he should be doing and the fear of being able to choose which is the right truth or not, we get hues of intense dark red and deep orange/yellow, overlaid by complete black silhouettes of the character and the buildings around him, highlighted by glowing glasses that signify the search for said truth.
At the end of the film, a wish is made that rewrites the world’s reality as they know it, and Anno experiments with multiple ways of reflecting how these characters inhabit this world. As Shinji waits for his friend, the animation steadily breaks down sequentially. First it’s in full colour with completed line art and backgrounds, then the background reverts to traditional, incompleted pencil, before Shinji himself becomes traditional genga, complete with timing notes that the animators leave.
Following a return to full colour as if to say the world is being reconstructed, in the future we see the characters at a station that feels significantly more grounded. It isn’t filled with vast new technologies or fictional elements like Evas, it’s a simple station that Anno visits in Japan in the previously mentioned documentary, even having the real-world jingle that can be heard when a train is arriving. The last scene features the main characters running through filmed footage of Japan, of our reality. Perhaps Anno simply is saying this is the closest the world of Evangelion gets to our own real world.
Even in a highly popular franchise, Hideki Anno is constantly experimenting with how he envisions the world. At this point, I haven’t researched much in the way of theories, but having experienced this series of the first time recently, it made for an interesting analysis into how real or fictional an animator chooses to make the world. Perhaps I should look into researching ideas and theories on world-building, on how animators construct their characters and the world, and how far grounded in the real world that they are or not.