A 26-year journey has finally ended, as director Hideki Anno’s final Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time film is released around the world, streaming on the Amazon Prime platform. Now that fans have seen the long-awaited completion of the Rebuild of Evangelion project, let’s take some time to reflect on what an amazing journey we’ve all been through together.
The History of Evangelion
Neon Genesis Evangelion exploded onto the scene in late 1995, instantly making its mark with its complex story, Freudian themes of characters’ difficult relationships with their parents, and a totally unique Biblical end-of-world story setting. Yoshiyuki Tomino may have ushered in the “Real Robot” genre with 1979’s groundbreaking Mobile Suit Gundam, which told gritty, political stories about humans and giant robots living in space, but with Evangelion, the genre was dialed up to 11. Suddenly the biggest possible story conceivable — the final destiny of the human race and the end of the world — was being told, against a backdrop of characters who were as challenged emotionally as any of us.
Evangelion hit just as the Cult of Doujinshi was really becoming a worldwide thing, and suddenly everyone on the nascent Internet wanted to collect sexy comics from Japan. J-List was founded a year later, in 1996, and back then I would drive to Tokyo Big Sight then sleep in my car so I could get up early and get in line for Comiket. Evangelion naturally provided fuel for the early boom in Internet memes that flourished in the early 21st century, too.
I have to say, I’m a fan of this new method of getting major anime film releases to fans quickly, which also happened with the recent Gundam Hathaway film that was picked up by Netflix. It’s much more fun writing about an anime film release when fans have been able to watch the movie, rather than wait a year for a local release on Blu-ray. I hope streaming sites and anime studios can keep this new distribution model in place in the future.
Read my blog post with my reactions to the Shin Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 film here!
That Time Eva Was Used in the Windows JPEG Icon
Did you use Windows XP back in the day? And did you ever wonder what the odd orange sunset visible in the default JPG icon was? Well, now you know.
What’s extra cool about this scene is that Hideki Anno went out of his way to do an homage to the original scene in the new film, as Shinji says goodbye to Kaworu yet again.
Evangelion Around the World
One thing that’s cool about the #Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 movie streaming on Amazon Prime is that you can flip through the various dubbed versions.
Here’s a compilation of each language version, which helps us remember what an amazing worldwide phenomenon Eva has been pic.twitter.com/uSXcni01FN
— Peter Payne (@JListPeter) August 25, 2021
When I noticed the final Evangelion film had dropped on Amazon Prime, I thought it’d be fun to flip through the initial two-minute recap segment in different languages, so I could see what the dubs in English, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese sounded like. Enjoy the clip we edited together, above. It’s a good reminder of what an amazing achievement Evangelion has been, reaching out to fans all around the world and defining our relationship with anime like no other show has ever done.
Thanks for reading this blog post celebrating the final Evangelion film. What did you think of the movie? Tell us below, or on Twitter!
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