The Mike Toole Show

Evangel-a-like

Yōko Kanno's immense musical score was right on target. Unfortunately, Tomino's wild-card approach to storytelling and the show's confused jumble of characters and messages fell a little short. Both the TV series and manga were published in their entirety in North America, and remain pretty easy to find, though out of print.

Then there's Yoshiyuki Sadamoto than most of the rest of his work. Interestingly, Gasaraki was a pretty big deal when it first debuted, but it's sank without a trace in recent years - it's not even in print on DVD anymore.

Of course, Brain Powered and Gasaraki played it cool - the influences Evangelion had on them were as much about storytelling and structure as they were about characters and robots. Yutaka Izubuchi is a longtime colleague of Hideaki Anno, and he stated directly that his intention with RahXephon was to raise the standard of mecha anime, with the implication that the standard had been set by Evangelion. Honestly, I think Izubuchi and company do a decent job - RahXephon has some clumsy moments but is enjoyably exotic and strange. It holds up pretty well.

Studio stalwarts Production I.G, and it has a brighter tone than Evangelion. I think a remake of Reideen was inevitable, but without Evangelion, it wouldn't have looked or sounded like this at all.

A good decade after Evangelion, Gainax finally figured out that it wasn't fair to have just Shinji, so they created the anti-Shinji - a pilot raised without a real family, under siege from aliens, who reacts to terrible trauma and adversity by gritting his teeth, screwing up his courage, and breaking through the heavens! That's right, Gurren Lagann - 2007's gutsy, bombastic love letter to super robots - just wouldn't have turned out the same without Evangelion. It goes in the opposite direction from Evangelion in almost every way - there's a strong, caring father/big brother figure, a shy but eager potential girlfriend, a hot older gal without any unhappy family baggage, and brazenly physics-defying battles with bad guys that are easy to understand, and frequently gallant just as often as they are dastardly. Gurren Lagann is the perfect companion and counterpoint to the celebrated Evangelion - if you alternate episodes between the two shows, it's kind of like doing that Scandanavian thing where you hang out in the hot spring, then jump out and roll in the snow for a minute, then jump back in. Both extremes are pretty awesome. But like I said, the anti-Shinji could not have come about without Shinji himself.

So there's your ten. Overall, Evangelion's influence on the medium is pretty obvious; the aesthetics are interesting and have lingered, but the themes and narrative structure are pretty important too. What's funny is that Evangelion itself has remained evergreen even at the lowest point between the 1998 film and the debut of the Rebuild project, but most of the shows that have taken cues from it, like the ones above, have faded, some more than others. When the Rebuild films started hitting theatres and drawing huge crowds in Japan, I thought for sure we'd see another wave of imitators - but it hasn't happened yet. What do you think? Is another Evangel-a-like just around the corner, or has the industry cottoned on to the idea that only Gainax can make Evangelion? Either way, I look forward to the third installment of the series, and hoping it's as fresh as the second.