It took Hideaki Anno years to rebuild Eva and iterate on his magnum opus with far less subtlety, flair, or charm. Shinji himself has had his issues combed out over the course of the iterative narrative of Rebuilds -- he is no longer cowering in fear but has a level of composure the original couldn't dream of. Shinji matures because he has gone through the events of Evangelion thrice now. Just as Anno has evidently grown from the original GAINAX production, so has Shinji. This is the modus operandi of this tetralogy, and explains away a lot of the creative divergences it has compared to the original series and movie.

The character work in 4.0 feels diluted, almost as a response to the prickly, hardened exteriors of the cast in 3. Misato takes a bullet and the hardened commander persona completely eases up. Gendo trauma dumps on his kid and openly bellows out his insecurities. 4 feels the need to lay everyone in its universe bare and openly express their feelings. It becomes aggressively effusive and feel-good -- the first stretch of the movie being a fetishistic village segment reminiscing on the beauty of trad farm life and slotting yourself into a role in a modest larger whole, then it pivots towards brickwalling us with CG action. It simultaneously indulges in the Ghibli naturalism Eva always managed to avoid and the egregious spectacle in lore-dumps and action set pieces. I remember watching the "farm arc" and it clicked why I wasn't gelling with it; it's a kind of blatant fetishistic nostalgia, sentimental pastoral spaces where Shinji can get enough therapy-speak to power through the rest of the narrative. After this point, where Shinji promptly matures in the blink of the eye, he operates with the desire to let go of everything. The weight of miscommunication; the burgeoning horror of the walls we put up that is oh-so-Eva like, it's close to gone. Anno blatantly frames the "fusion of imaginary and reality" as an uncanny horror, a freakish existence that needs to be put down he plays a role in creating. The last stretch of the movie, logically, is HIS Frankenstein's monster. This horror is the logic behind the uncanny Rei head. He is, in far less contemplative means, telling us the human experience is incongruent with indulgence in fiction.

Are the most biting, powerful works in anime bound to be only possible through the language of immediate mental struggle? A troubled Yoshiyuki Tomino made Char's Counterattack and Zeta Gundam while at a low point in his life, driving home the overwhelming weight of his emotions at the time. A troubled Anno made Neon Genesis Evangelion, and now that he's properly married and having the time of his life, he can't... go back. I won't wish mental health struggles on my worst enemy, but there's a weightlessness present in the Rebuilds that indicate Anno isn't quite in emotional lock-step with early story Shinji anymore.

3.0 + 1.0 aims to drown itself in spectacle, in excess, bursting at the seams and continuing to deform and remake Evangelion into a grotesque existence in dire need of being put to rest. Is this the horror of remaking cultural monuments? Do we always find ourselves chasing after the vague imagery and idiosyncracies of our older work, turning its visual quirks to an eleven and plastering them everywhere across the screen? The women in 4.0 find themselves further bound to the fate of off-screen ogling and egregious fanservice, taking the accelerated hyper-sexualized attitude present from the get-go in the Rebuilds to new heights with downright silly butt shots and angles. 4.0 is the endpoint of Eva's commodification, slathering hundreds of CG models of Evas on screen and having Shinji meticulously kill off each hand-crafted design one by one in a deliberate rush to stuff his toys under the bed.

It is just deeply funny to me Anno feels the conviction to say "do away with these toys" and metaphorically take a sledgehammer to "otaku culture" and yet sheepishly attach himself to it all the more. His recent creative output, as I've whined about before, is mostly iterating on his favorite childhood memberberries and classic otaku intellectual property. If Anno returned to the live-action film space and made introspective writings with the goal of "evolving" as a creator, I could understand this, but everything he puts out as of late is done through the lens of nerd culture. He's not meaningfully free of this stuff, and the on-the-nose fade to "reality" Mari and Shinji head into at the end, the goal to "kill Evangelion" feels silly and immature. Hideaki Anno clearly fails to understand his relationship with anime properly. He "puts down" a franchise he openly helped resurrect and now finds himself trapped in a prison of rehashing old intellectual properties he aligns with.

It angers me I can't put to screen and articulate with text my frustration at this project, at its entire existence is a method of awkward reconstruction filing superglue in decade-old fractures and cracks. The Rebuilds and Studio Khara are cathartic on the level of its animators being "done right" after the horrors of 90s GAINAX mistreatment, but this metatextual context alongside the more obvious "Anno is married and happier" thing doesn't suddenly justify the body of work here. We have looped around to try and capture the magic of The End of Evangelion once more, stumbling and wobbling towards a vaguely similar endpoint.