animation errors in evangelion. there are probably more, but these are the ones that stuck out to me.
in the first scene, the dss choker around shinji’s neck disappears for a split frame before mark .09 cannonades the wunder’s interrogation room.
in the second scene, misato greets shinji wearing gold dangle earrings before they are replaced by her standard white pearls upon entering nerv hq.
attentive viewers might have noticed this, but ritsuko and kaji’s congratulations! do not feature cloud backgrounds, setting them at odds with the rest of the cast.
recurring visual imagery: downward escalator
neon genesis evangelion, dir. hideaki anno (1995)
I’ve never seen a protagonist - male or female - so effortlessly hide their ugly, unrepentant ego behind a veneer of warm compassion. Misato hits children, she hits wounded friends, she hits herself. My favorite Misato scene is when she just barely restrains herself from striking Shinji across the face, and slaps herself in redirected aggression. That’s her prerogative: redirected, impotent aggression, against the Angels and against herself.
Misato’s a walking advertisement of her own desperation, which probably nets her more sympathy than she otherwise might deserve. Her violence aggrandizes her, but behind the display is total disempowerment. She tries to win back the control she lost during her childhood and it gets her nowhere. Her authority is skin deep.
i’m screaming that naoko akagi, chief executive scientist slash supercomputer bioengineer, likely 1) met misato and kaji in college, 2) interacted with them in some capacity, and 3) actually enjoyed them as human beings. did misato invite her to a thursday bar crawl? did kaji call her a milf? did naoko find their bumbling idiot comedy routine endearingly hilarious? how fiercely did ritsuko regret her decision to introduce the three? i have a lot of questions
Asuka Shikinami’s doll and Ritsuko’s cat trinket (a lesbian named Helen!) as designed by Hideaki Anno’s wife, Moyoco Anno.
Anno doing what he does best: iterative foreshadowing. Misato, Ritsuko, and Kaji are the only characters that die by the gun, and these two scenes hint at all three deaths with laserpoint exactness. Look at the position of Misato’s gun: she aims at the back of Kaji’s head and the crown of Ritsuko’s spine. Ritsuko later dies from a gunshot wound through the spine, and well – Kaji’s corpse isn’t shown, but you can make the required leaps of imagination.
Misato confronts both Kaji and Ritsuko in the deepest belly of NERV, which is where she will eventually die. Both Kaji and Ritsuko cross-reference each other as they double-cross. Consider the history between the trio and you have what is best summed up by Kureishi: “Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.”
