In an attempt to do something a little different to the information dump that was my last Evangelion post, I've made a micro-site for my Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo thoughts and theories and musings: evangelion3x.chaostangent.com.
Any feedback you have on this experiment, content corrections, technical misgivings or general Evangelion banter, please use the comments below (n.b. spoilers).
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.
Evangelion occupies a very special place in my heart: I watched the series on VHS in 1997 when I was fourteen and - without hyperbole - it was a life changing experience. A series that was smart and brutally obtuse and flitted from Jungian psychology to religious dogma was revelatory for me at the time and it questioned a lot of what I had not yet fully formed questions about; so as well as being gob-smackingly awesome, it changed who I was and consequently who I am. For those reasons I am utterly fanatical about the franchise and concept. Like a delusional lover I put up with a lot of the nonsense that GAINAX throws: I own the original series on twelve VHS tapes which I upgraded to DVD when they were first released, then upgraded them to the Platinum DVDs; I did manage to stay away from the deluge of tat that has been continuously released but it's fair to say my own lot of Evangelion merchandise is not insignificant. In what is a truly savvy move, just as patience for the constant re-releases was beginning to wane news came of the Rebuild project.