(wasn't even a damn line in the movie)

When I was a little kid, I always enjoyed shutting my eyes, like really tight, and watching the…I still don’t know what it’s called. The after-effects of light? The weird colored shapes that play across your eyelids. I would watch them slowly diminish, thinking they were germs or something. I distinctly remember one time, playing hide and seek in a classroom in elementary school, and my head was resting against a wall, eyes shut tight, and as I was counting, I was watching these…they looked like islands, and the way they moved across my eyelids made it seem like I was flying.

Then, years later, in the ninth grade I saw 2001 for the first time. Well, not all of it. I was flipping channels and I caught the word “INTERMISSION” on TCM, and I stopped, transfixed by that Futura font and the haunting music. I didn’t take my eyes off the TV until the end of the movie, and when it was over, I felt changed.

It was the Star Gate sequence in particular, the dazzling lights, that ever-present haunting music with the pitch steadily rising, the blink-and-you-miss-it frozen shots of Dave as it appears that his mind is SHATTERING, just like mine was while watching. And then you see those solarized landscapes, all blues and greens and oranges. The camera passing over canyons and valleys…and islands.

It’s like deja fucking vu. But I have no memory of ever seeing the movie before. It’s weird.

And it still gets to me to this day. I mean, I’m always hypnotized by Kubrick’s films, but 2001 is possibly the closest I’ll ever get to doing mind-altering drugs, more so than anything David Lynch or Alejandro Jodorowsky could ever shoot. And once it hits Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite, I can’t blink, I can’t breathe, my hands are always pulled up to my chest, gripping my shirt tightly.

I usually never think to mention the movie whenever I’m listing my favorite films, sci fi or otherwise, and I’m not sure why, because there isn’t any other movie out there that makes me feel the way 2001 does…

[Brett]

I’m going to talk about anime again. You may want to go read something on Cracked now instead. Or look at eerily specific Tumblr pages.

It was either in seventh or eighth grade, knee deep in my love for Gundam Wing, DBZ, and Outlaw Star (which I still declare to be one of the greatest anime series ever), when I finally started digging into stuff that didn’t come on Toonami thanks to the internet. I was immediately drawn, like any other kid mildly interested in Japan, to Neon Genesis Evangelion. I read about it obsessively, looked at everything I could, downloaded and watched AMVs over a year before I finally acquired a DVD player and a couple volumes of the show itself. It was the designs of the Eva units, the Angels, the weird psychological and religious stuff that caught my interest and I latched onto it.

(I wanted to post the AMV set to Rammstein's Engel, but it can't be embedded. This will do)

I never watched the entire series. In fact, I think I never watched any more than maybe 9 episodes and End of Evangelion. It was one of those situations where what I had in my head was so much different and better than what the actual show was. At the tender age of 14 or 15, I felt I identified with Shinji, yeah, but even then, I thought he was a bit too whiny, too much of a crybaby, and it felt like the writers were trying too hard in places to be funny or emotional. And as I grew older I eventually just dropped it entirely. In that last ultra-big anime and manga blog post I did, I mentioned my knee-jerk reaction in which I would tell people that I hate anime. This was around the start of that denial phase, when I decided that Evangelion sucked and that I would no longer show interest in it. See how that worked?

Fast forward to present day. Amazon recommended me Evangelion 1.11: You Are (Not) Alone, 10 bucks on Blu-Ray. I asked on Facebook if it was worth it, was told yes, ordered it, and watched it. And now I’m super nostalgic.
This usually doesn’t end so well.

So, the movie. I had my fingers crossed that they’d rewritten Shinji, at least a little, to make him less of an emo child. Sadly, that wasn’t so, but since this was a movie I was watching and not the show, they thankfully kept the whining and crying to a bare minimum, making it easier to deal with. Also, I was reminded of one of the main reasons I was so enamored with the series to begin with: Eva 01 tearing shit up. The battles against the Angels are like what I always wanted from a giant monster film, which is a high compliment given that I’m a stupidly huge Godzilla and Gamera fan. And really, watching Evangelion 1.11 really felt like watching a giant monster movie, having to sit through some half-interesting human drama before getting to see a giant morphing diamond thing firing massive lasers. So, not the rewrite and improvement I was expecting, but still great. I miss the graininess of 80s/90s anime, and this being a digital transfer of the film straight to high-def BD, the movie is almost TOO crisp and clean, there's no grit at all, but then you see what they did with the final Angel encounter and just stop caring about why no one gets dirty.

It’s just interesting to think of the ways in which something can influence you, even when you’re not terribly familiar with it. With Evangelion, I also owned volumes 1 and 5 of the manga, again, before I saw a single full episode of the show. Then I cut pages out of them and used them in collages and stuff, because I was an idiot and figured I’d never want to read them again.

I rediscovered these two pages that I scanned from one of the volumes, and realized that this scene was a big influence on the comic book I’m currently working on:
Really, I was not thinking about these pages, or of Evangelion at all when I got the idea for this comic and started working on it. If anything, I thought I was largely ripping off the film Altered States and maybe a little bit of Fringe and HP Lovecraft, so my mind was blown when I found these. I mean, seriously, the opening pages to my comic are so damn close to this it's kind of unnerving.

And that’s the other reason I decided to just go for it and buy the Blu-Ray, to figure out just how much the show, the manga, the designs, influenced me on some very deep level. I do believe wholeheartedly that the white Evas in End of Evangelion (which show up in the above AMV) are the freakiest, coolest designs ever and I've tried to mimic them on multiple occasions. I also think Eva 01 is one of the reasons I used purple and green so much in my work. Either that or the Mystic Cave level from Sonic 2 on the Sega Genesis, who knows?

This also could lead into an argument about things we remember and the fact that they surely exist on the internet. Is it better to just cling to your memories, especially when intentionally referencing something, or should you refer back to the source material and get as close to it as possible?

I may write some more on anime related stuff again later, considering I recently also finished reading all 2000+ pages of Akira and picked up six issues of some horrible manga by the original creator of La Blue Girl, but maybe I shouldn't go into that...

[Brett]