At the UK Premiere of Evangelion 2.0

Photo by xahl­dera and used under the Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0

Tak­ing place in Glas­gow in the week lead­ing up to the Glas­gow Film Fest­ival, the premiere was pre­ceded by the air­ing of the first movie in the Rebuild series: Evan­gelion 1.0. Bookended by an inform­at­ive talk by Emily Fus­sell of the BBFC, and an intro­duc­tion by the effus­ive Jonathan Cle­m­ents. Kick­ing off a series of anim­ated shenanigans dubbed “Scot­land Loves Anim­a­tion” and suc­ceed­ing the Scot­tish anime con­ven­tion “Auch­inawa”, Scot­land and Glas­gow in par­tic­u­lar is becom­ing one of the prime places to catch anime and Japan­ese goings on.

Begin­ning shortly before half three in the after­noon, tick­ets had been pur­chased online for the double bill and sold out in short order. The line for enter­ing the cinema stretched out of the build­ing and it was imme­di­ately obvi­ous by the dress of the pat­rons what they were queuing for. After a short wait and fil­ing into the sur­pris­ingly spa­cious cinema one of the Glas­gow Film Theatre, the pro­ceed­ings were kicked off by Emily Fus­sell, a media clas­si­fier for the BBFC, with a talk focus­ing on the tribu­la­tions in clas­si­fy­ing anime for release in the UK.

Either through nerves or dis­pos­i­tion, Emily was ener­getic and her pas­sion for the medium or her role in facil­it­at­ing its dis­sem­in­a­tion in Bri­tain was self evid­ent. The main prob­lem, she began, in clas­si­fy­ing anime is that often only indi­vidual epis­odes of a wider series are sent through which hinders con­tinu­ity. The next fives slides high­lighted some of the tongue-in-cheek ques­tions this posed:

• Gun­dam SEED — why are they fight­ing each other? Aren’t they on the same side?
• Undeter­mined (Negima possibly) — what is a chupacabra?
• Chob­its — isn’t she a computer?
• Vam­pire Knight (pos­sibly incorrect) — wait, is he a vam­pire now or not?
• Kiss x Sis (prob­ably incorrect) — how old are they? Aren’t they sisters?

These drew guf­faws and applause from the audi­ence. The remainder of the short present­a­tion covered other issues with anime clas­si­fic­a­tion, includ­ing the situ­ation that while the BBFC may apply age rat­ings, they have no con­trol over mar­ket­ing, most aptly high­lighted by the cover of the fourth volume of Daphne in the Bril­liant Blue which has a con­tent rat­ing of 12A. The mostly know­ing audi­ence erup­ted with laughter at this. After only a few minutes how­ever, the present­a­tion was wrapped up, the lights dimmed, and Evan­gelion 1.0 begun.

The pre­cise ver­sion of the film was 1.01 which was released first on DVD and re-released in theatres in Japan; the most recent 1.11 released in high defin­i­tion includes a lot more pad­ding scenes which makes the open­ing less chaotic and gives a lot more tex­ture to the movie and uni­verse. Whether it was the source or the equip­ment used, the pic­ture qual­ity wasn’t stel­lar and darker scenes suffered from a lack of defin­i­tion, coupled with a ste­reo speaker arrange­ment, the present­a­tion wasn’t as arrest­ing as it could have been. Regard­less, it was presen­ted in the ori­ginal Japan­ese with pro­fes­sional sub­titles which picked up on a lot of nuances that ama­teur and self-translated efforts missed.

Photo by xahl­dera and used under the Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0

After the film had wrapped up, Emily took a seat at the front of the aud­it­or­ium along with Jonathan Cle­m­ents and began a short talk on how she would clas­sify Evan­gelion 1.0 into the BBFC’s age rat­ing brack­ets. Sur­pris­ingly, it hov­ers on the bor­der­line between a PG and 12A — this des­pite the gal­lons of blood as well as bare female nipples and acci­dental fond­ling. The most troub­ling aspect, she explained, was Shinji’s cries for his father when attacked by the sixth angel; the enclosed space and ter­ror would likely raise the rat­ing; the thought occurs that this would be noted down as “mild peril”. The issue of blood was more con­ten­tious, the argu­ment stands that due to the alien source — the Angels — des­pite both its col­our and vis­cos­ity, it wouldn’t be coun­ted as blood and thus would likely not affect the rat­ing bey­ond a PG — this is to say noth­ing of its rain­bow caus­ing prop­er­ties. The infam­ous Rei and Shinji scene was fur­ther cla­ri­fied in that des­pite the situ­ation, there were no overt sexual con­nota­tions to the scene, helped by Shinji’s obvi­ous con­fu­sion after the event. This idea was expan­ded on in the ques­tion and answer sec­tion that fol­lowed the exchange between Emily and Jonathan.

The ques­tions came from all parts of the audi­ence but were dom­in­ated by a group of four to six people whose quer­ies man­aged to be eru­dite without being taw­dry. Emily’s forth­right­ness with answers was refresh­ing, espe­cially when it came to which words garnered which clas­si­fic­a­tion: “mother­fucker” was allowed in a 12A but repeated usage ensured 15, and “cunt” was a guar­an­teed 18. This was char­ac­ter­ised by the most recent adapt­a­tion of The Wicker Man with Nic­olas Cage which was a 12A hor­ror film upon cinema release but a 15 on DVD with the addi­tion of some curs­ing; thank­fully Emily was just as clear as to the qual­ity of the film as every­one else. Chob­its was brought up again, spe­cific­ally the scene where Chii is powered up with the switch loc­ated where her gen­it­als are sup­posed to be, for that the series was clas­si­fied as a 15. More top­ic­ally how­ever, an audi­ence mem­ber brought up the prob­lem between canon­ical age and visual age, ref­er­en­cing Yoko from Gur­ren Lagann sup­posedly only being four­teen; accord­ing to Emily this isn’t a prob­lem when it comes to clas­si­fic­a­tion unless the char­ac­ter is involved in some­thing sexual or the dis­par­ity in some way encour­ages under­age sex. This was fol­lowed by a ques­tion as to the per­tin­ence of the Extreme Por­no­graphy law that is com­ing into effect within the UK in April 2010 which makes it illegal to own drawn or illus­trated images depict­ing under­age sex rather than how it cur­rently stands which focuses on actual child abuse: this response was met with stoic and mute indif­fer­ence des­pite the polar­ising fer­vour it has stirred up in other places.

With time wear­ing on, the ses­sion was wrapped up and Jonathan intro­duced the premier of Evan­gelion 2.0. Begin­ning with an over­view of the Evan­gelion fran­chise from a mar­ket­ing per­spect­ive and ref­er­en­cing Naruto as an example of a cash cow, it was ini­tially implied that the Rebuild movies were little more than attempts by GAINAX to sell more mer­chand­ise — the expect­a­tion for men­tion of the recent Evan­gelion bike shorts and gui­tars was thank­fully not ful­filled. This view how­ever was con­tex­tu­al­ised with the insight that anim­at­ors are usu­ally just glad no one notices any faults rather than being con­tent with what is released, mak­ing the movies a good way of provid­ing a dif­fer­ent, com­plete take on the series. Jonathan’s know­ledge of both the anime industry and Evan­gelion in par­tic­u­lar shone through with a wide know­ledge of the canon and anec­dotes of the pro­duc­tion such as how late fin­ished epis­odes were being delivered to be screened, includ­ing an unvet­ted bed scene with Misato and Kaji that made it on to Japan­ese prime time television.

The most fas­cin­at­ing part how­ever was inform­a­tion on the much vil­i­fied live action adapt­a­tion. Jonathan was appar­ently con­sul­ted by AD Vis­ion (now dis­solved) on the movie, spe­cific­ally on how he would approach it. His response was to set it in Ger­many and then the US with Asuka, only arriv­ing Japan part of the way through the film; next was the ques­tion of what he would do were it a tri­logy? Use that idea as the second film and make the first about second impact he respon­ded. The idea is tan­tal­ising, to be able to see many of the things only hin­ted at, how­ever with whis­pers of Jerry Bruck­heimer being pitched the concept, the Hol­ly­wood fil­ter would surely wring all sub­text from it. There was a sol­it­ary cheer from the front of the cinema when it was revealed that ADV ran out of money and, for the moment at least, the movie remains in limbo. Wrap­ping up his ful­some and affirm­ing intro, the premier of Evan­gelion 2.0 begun.

The vis­ible area of the screen was increased and imme­di­ately the dif­fer­ence in both pic­ture and sound qual­ity was tan­gible. The view­ing was almost cer­tainly from a cinema print with the sub­titles look­ing like they had been freshly impressed upon the cel­lu­loid. Through­out there was riot­ous laughter at some of the in-jokes and some inap­pro­pri­ate chortles from sev­eral areas of the cinema at some of the more grue­some viol­ence on dis­play. Run­ning unin­ter­rup­ted for the full two hours, even with Jonathan’s prior warn­ing as to the end­ing, there were whoops and applause when the cred­its rolled des­pite the abrupt stop to the cli­max which had just occurred. Sev­eral pat­rons unwisely depar­ted dur­ing the cred­its and a roar of excited chat­ter began, com­pletely drown­ing out the Plan­itB remix of Utada Hikaru’s Beau­ti­ful World. As expec­ted though, when the epi­logue begun, the effect on the ambi­ent con­ver­sa­tion was imme­di­ate; some even begun a clipped second applause as the next movie pre­view was played. Without a doubt the appre­ci­ation was immense and the snip­pets of con­ver­sa­tion caught as the lights raised were all immensely complimentary.

In all the two movie fea­ture was well put together, both guests were fas­cin­at­ing and showed a dif­fer­ent side to a too often myopic media and while the present­a­tion of 1.0 was mildly dis­ap­point­ing, the gobsmack­ingly bril­liant 2.0 more than made up for this. Thor­oughly enjoy­able and hope­fully the first of many sim­ilar events. ¶