Rebuild!

I know most people who read this blog wouldn't know how to even begin caring about the forthcoming four-movie remake of Neon Genesis Evangelion, the anime nerd touchstone that combined giant robots with undigested nouvelle vague antics a decade or so ago, but lemmee just say this...

The people who made the original show are making the new movies. I'm interested in seeing what they come up with because it'll be an interesting measure of their growth as artists and as people. Put simply, they made the original show because they wanted to do something artistically ambitious, and they half-succeeded. Their collective reach exceeded their grasp, but it was so evident that they were reaching in directions that popular anime usually never considered reaching. Other anime series and films proceeded to reach in those directions, resulting in a burst of creativity, formal innovation, and blending of personal expression with pop entertainment (not that none of this happened in anime before, but now it seemed like more anime creators than ever before were deliberately striving to expand the possibilities of anime).

So Eva's influence is more important than its accomplishment as a thing-in-itself. Will they reach further? Will they grasp that for which they reach? We'll find out...