Until their depiction in Neon Genesis Evangelion in 1995, power lines were virtually non-existent in anime. After all, why draw them when they take up more time and effort during a time-packed production schedule? However, Hideaki Anno, the director of the aforementioned anime, began to implement them in backgrounds, bringing in a new kind of mechanical urban aesthetics. Anno has a certain kind of obsession with mechanical structures, such as power lines and rail tracks, as he likes the way they continue into a distance. He continued depicting them in his later works, such as Kare Kano as well as live action features such as Shiki-jitsu, Love and Pop and his recent blockbuster Godzilla Resurgence[1]. Given how Evangelion revolutionized anime, the industry quickly followed its influence including its aesthetics.
Oh, wow. How did you manage to interview Hideaki Anno?
Despite the fact that his best works are anime TV series, I always thought Anno was one of the best filmmakers alive. His works in the 90s are absolutely amazing, particularly Evangelion and Karekano. He is a complex artist on many sides; formally he is the first (and mainly only) modern anime director: he uses the long-shot substantially less in favor of close-ups, which are just harder to use (almost anything can be OK-explained by a long-shot, while close-ups are pretty limited semantically). Aesthetically he is very original, with how he plays with music (Haendel in Evangelion 22, Beethoven in Evangelion 24, Bach in the "sex scene" of Karekano) or my favorite aesthetical treat, the use of text.
Love and Pop, and then Shiki-jitsu were a very promising start for him as a live-action filmmaker... but unfortunately, it looks like personal issues got to him. In the 90s there was a trio of Japanese filmmakers with similar approaches and amazing talent: Hideaki Anno, Satoshi Kon and Shunji Iwai (who is also the main actor in Shiki-jitsu). For different reasons, none of them seems to have used their whole potentials.
I know: that's why I wrote "for different reasons". I understand that in the case of Kon it feels more unfair, as he had a great career before his death; of his 4 movies, 3 are typically considered great/masterpieces. Kon didn't use his whole potential in the same way that James Dean did; Anno and Iwai are a bit more like Nicholas Cage.
When I heard power lines, for some reason one scene from Patlabor came to mind.
It's the quintessential Tokyo city view from the window, and the quintessential view inside a window from the city. Outside there are power lines. You cannot avoid them. And looking in, you see the tatami flooring and dudes in their underwear.
I thought it might have been Patlabor 2, but it was the original movie. So that's 1989. Both movies are staples of Japanese anime.
But power lines can also be found in episode 1 of the TV series.
So my short answer would be Patlabor, but that's just from my own memory.
I think the commonality here is that the power lines are used to portray a sense of scale for the robots. A kid growing up in Tokyo knows exactly how high those lines are.
Ashita No Joe (1970) is the earliest anime series I can think of that features power lines, at least in the opening episode as it sets the scene. I'm sure there are manga earlier than this that feature them too, but I'm not sure about anime.
The shot has power lines in it, but they're not really the focus. It's a busy nightlife scene, and the power lines serve that effect.
In the Patlabor shot, the detailed power infrastructure is a bit more purposeful, adding to the atmosphere of an average suburban neighborhood full of average people. But again, it's not the star of the shot -- it's just one of a handful of choices that create the mood.
In Evangelion, the shots are framed to draw your attention to a wooden pole with a transformer box that was probably designed in the '60s, serving as a stark contrast with all the futuristic technology around it.
It's not just that - both Patlabor and Evangelion often would take a slow, languid tone to observe the city. Evangelion spends a lot of time on Shinji grappling with his depression - scenes of him just sitting on a train back and forth listening to a mix-tape on an endless loop.
Patlabor The Movie, similarly, is about Hoba taking them on a tour of the city with their investigation. Half the movie is a travelogue of futuristic Tokyo.
I think both in general were representative to of the change from the faster-paced action shows of the '70s and '80s to the languid artsy style we see in 90s anime.
I can't believe you interviewed him. That is amazing!
The rest of this post isn't directed at you specifically, you probably know this and much more. Evangelion perhaps popularized this kind of shot, but there's an interesting broader history and context.
[An establishing shot] establishes the context for a
scene by showing the relationship between its important
figures and objects.[1] It is generally a long or
extreme-long shot at the beginning of a scene indicating where,
and sometimes when, the remainder of the scene takes
place
A "pillow shot" is a cutaway, for no obvious narrative reason, to
a visual element, often a landscape or an empty room, that is held
for a significant time (five or six seconds). It can be at the start
of a scene or during a scene. At a minimum, in Ozu’s work, these pillow
shots inject a sense of calm and serenity and contribute to the elegant
and stately pacing of his movies.
The term “pillow shot” was coined [...] by the critic Noël Burch in his
book To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema:
“I call these images pillow-shots, proposing a loose analogy with the
‘pillow-word’ of classical [Japanese] poetry.”
This context is something I feel a lot of people miss when discussing those shots of power lines in Evangelion, perhaps ascribing to them more symbolic significance to them than Anno intended -- they are a stylistic hallmark of Evangelion, but aren't unique to Evangelion.
Manga have done this but many manga are created by folks with obsessive traits and a history and culture of depiction of great detail in the backgrounds. I can buy an argument that this wasn't the case for anime for a long time, perhaps because of time or budgetary reasons.
I don't know where to read, but it seems to me that end of the 90s, TV shows (real and anime) became less episode based but got a whole story arc, like we know from current TV shows like "Game of Thrones", "Breaking Bad" or "The Wire".
I always hear people talking about how "The Sopranos" was the first TV show that did this, but anime like "Neon Genesis Evangelion" and "Cowboy Bebop" came out years before it.
AFAIK, J. Michael Straczynski was the first person to get a successful arc-based television series on TV, with _Babylon 5_ - the pilot aired in 1993.
He had tried earlier with _Captain Power_ in 1987, but that only lasted a single season, and it was kind of doomed to be thought of as a kid's show because of the toyline tie-in.
> AFAIK, J. Michael Straczynski was the first person to get a successful arc-based television series on TV, with _Babylon 5_ - the pilot aired in 1993.
Would you consider Twin Peaks (1990) to be arc-based?
I was thinking of that too, especially of all the personal problems the characters had in Evangelion. I had to stop watching because of the main protagonist repeatedly asking why his father doesn't show any love for him. A lot of people are into those story-lines, and I guess it partly explains Evangelion's popularity with women too.
This was also part of the point of the show; it was setting itself opposed to all the Mecha anime from the 80s and 90s with teenagers piloting robots, often with no parents around, but showing no external signs of trauma.
Yeah, Shinji is not a lot of fun. Though, he's not really "supposed" to be likeable. Over the years I've warmed up to him, though. He'll never be likeable but he's definitely sympathetic and actually rather realistic, considering the hell he's put through.
Personally, I identified heavily with Shinji when watching the anime for the first time, and binge watching the box set ended up being some form of catharsis, finding someone relatable to myself at the time. I wouldn't say that was the only reason it became one of my favourite TV shows, but it certainly helped. I can understand other people finding him annoying, just wanted to give an alternative perspective from someone who didn't.
Right. The people behind it also wanted to create a "Hill Street Blues" for scifi. They also combined "Lord of the Rings", with each episode being a chapter. This explains Garabaldi's drinking problems, the head doctor getting addicted to drugs, Z'ha'dum, the Rangers, and the ancient races going beyond the galactic rim leaving the younger races to develop.
And Rose of Versailles did it in the 1970s. Don't forget the shoujo demographic, everyone.
This whole myth of invention being a singular moment rather than a gradual stream of improvements infects creative works more than other fields. But we all stand on the shoulders of giants.
So, this doesn't have the best translation to English, but it's probably the most useful Japanese perspective on why Evangelion was such a revolutionary work for its time. It contextualizes the series as a cultural event and shows how Anno compares with the other convention-breaking directors of that era.
Keep in mind that Azuma has his own slant as something of a pop philosopher in Japan, but I think he nails exactly what made Evangelion a surprise and a trendsetter.
Let me know if you enjoyed the article—I can post more links on useful reading or you can PM me for more.
If you have a lot of free time, I have an anthology of mostly out-of-universe discussions by people directly or indirectly involved in Evangelion from 1994 on: https://www.gwern.net/otaku
Pretty much everything I'd point you to is all in here (thanks gwern, the fandom truly doesn't deserve you).
I highly recommend the 1996 interview with Toshio Okada for a perspective on Anno's mindset, the history of the medium, and the uniqueness of the work.
Also read Azuma's interviews with Anno and especially with Krystian Wozniki--these are very illuminating and will recontextualize your views of Okada and the show as a whole.
If you can hold all of these views in mind, you'll start to understand how Evangelion absorbed so much cinematic power from its cultural moment and forebears. It's a culmination of the medium in some ways. That it did all this while remaining an intensely personal work with an auteur's sense of vision and originality makes it that much more impressive.
The best way to understand Evangelion's uniqueness is to become familiar with all the tropes in anime/manga. Then it becomes obvious how Evangelion turned them all on their heads in some of the darkest possible ways -- and became one of the biggest hits of all time in Japan; something truly "generational" like Star Wars.
Anime and manga had long excelled at high drama; the space operas and melodramas and such.
And the creators of anime and manga were certainly not lacking in self awareness; there were lots of parody and comedy in anime and manga over the years, much of the light parody focusing on other works in their own genres or the general tropes found in those works.
But Evangelion was arguably the first major work in which those worlds collided. It never breaks the fourth wall, but the subversion of anime's tropes and conventions is utterly central to its drama.
1. The protagonist is a teenage boy. No surprise there -- the protagonist of any show is usually representative of the target audience. But instead of a simple "boy becomes a man" narrative, he more or less descends into depression and PTSD. The act of piloting a robot in bloody combat against incomprehensible is not healthy for him (because it wouldn't be, for anybody) and he is simultaneously loathable and also incredibly sympathetic because god damn is he put through hell. He responds to these traumatic events in ways that we might - imagine if your abusive father abandoned you and then forced you to become a child soldier? How screwed up would you be? He's probably the first anime protagonist to say: "Wait, this isn't fun. This is seriously fucked up." (And going further down the rabbit-hole of self-awareness, Shinji is painfully aware of how messed up he is)
2. Giant robots. They are a staple of anime for a number of reasons, chiefly because they sell toys, and toy sales help to finance these shows. Evangelion give you "robots," alright, but they are utter nightmare fuel in ways both visual and psychological.
2a. A trope in anime is when the pilots of giant robots "feel" their robots' pain. Evangelion takes this to the darkest and most literal extreme possible, with damage to the robots resulting in physical and emotional damage to the pilots.
3. Weirdest. Love triangle. Ever? It would be spoilers to say more, but it makes Game of Thrones look wholesome by comparison. Romantic tension is a given in... just about anything... but maaaaaaan does Eva make it weird. Another expectation, subverted, darkly.
4. Misato is something of a surrogate mother to Shinji. That gets, uh, interesting.
That said, Evangelion is not good just because "it's dark." There are lighthearted moments, and happiness, and some characters grow and become better people. It never feels "dark for the sake of being dark" in the way that some series like Game of Thrones are, where you almost dread the happy moments since those happy moments because they are immediately followed by some sort of gruesome tragedy, as if the viewer themselves is being punished for daring to be happy.
I recall characters often standing on top of telephone or power line poles for dramatic effect, even before NGE. Hopping from pole to pole or walking over powerlines also is a form of fast travel for superpowered or magical characters.
It's not quite the same as simple scenery shots emphasizing the powerlines, but they were significant before too.
Because that's what Japan looks like, duh! Any place in Japan has basically power lines all over the place, even in cities like Tokyo.
And also because it's easy to draw and show for 5 seconds in every anime to save on the precious animation budget because it's super static and goes everywhere. Added bonus it can be added into any decor and you would not notice it's the same pattern imported all over again in between animes.
It is true that it is what Japan looks like but it is still interesting to see how detailed the depiction is.
Compare to the Simpsons for instance. It is set in present day American suburbs, but it doesn't look at all like a photograph. All the small details are missing unless they are relevant to the story.
In the west, even if real life photographs, power lines are commonly seen as a nuisance and avoided, or even edited out.
It is clearly a different approach to animation. I think we can make the parallel the way hands are drawn. 4 fingers for western animation (simplified), 5 for anime (realistic).
The animation budget argument makes sense, and it certainly a good explanation for pylon or railway crossing shots. But I don't think it explains everything, both obscure series and big-budget animation films have their fair share of power lines.
>4 fingers for western animation (simplified), 5 for anime (realistic).
Anime is all about cutting costs, time and work... much of the anime aesthetic evolved from the same cost cutting methods as Disney employed by cutting a few fingers off of Mickey Mouse. The (in)famous elevator scene in Evangelion[0], for instance, was as much about Gainax saving money as it was minimalist storytelling. There's even a word for the rare times anime isn't lazy (sakuga.)
And apparently, Japanese media (anime and games) avoids 4 fingered hands because it implies a connection with the Yakuza or Burakumin. Some Western properties have had to redesign their character models and artwork to add an extra digit when exporting to Japan because of that.
I remember watching Full Metal Panic! ( Which after 10 years is finally getting its ending series this Summer ), there were lots of scene in Hong Kong where, it was exactly the same as in real life, so much that even small details like stairs and windows cover were exactly the same.
Turns out the crew went to Hong Kong for a week and actually filmed everything out as well as taking lots of Photos, before sitting down and draft out the action and anime.
> It is clearly a different approach to animation. I think we can make the parallel the way hands are drawn. 4 fingers for western animation (simplified), 5 for anime (realistic).
According to this video, a large reason for not using 4 fingers is related to a caste system in Japan.
That's exactly their point. The average-to-low-budget (as well as unpopular) anime still has power line shots all over because that's just what they do. On average, our establishing shots in our (Western) cartoons just aren't as detailed. Obviously popularity and quality are not hand in hand, and The Simpsons is one of, if not the most popular cartoon show of all time.
The Simpson has massively better animation than The regular tv anime in Japan. Most animes have very few animated frames and instead revolve on fixed backgrounds, scrolling, voice over and only lips moving now and then. Good animation is expensive to produce and most animes are made with very few resources and time. When a good one makes it, its nothing short of a miracle.
Let me introduce you to a concept called "pencil mileage".
Simply put, for a budget of $x, your crew can draw $y miles of lines. How do you use these to fill out the huge number of images you need to produce?
In the West, the solution has historically been to simplify your drawings as much as humanly possible so that you can have a lot of them; we tend to want to have everything constantly moving and changing. Our characters tend to be the barest collection of broad details to distinguish one from another; we are loathe to drop below shooting "on twos"^1.
In the East, they took a different path: They want complicated drawings. So one drawing will linger on the screen a lot longer, pushing up against the moment where a drawing "goes dead"^2 a lot harder. Often you'll build up to a small handful of lavishly animated scenes, where most of the episode's budget is blown at the climax of the episode.
I was raised in the Western tradition^3, and it took a long time to learn to see the craftsmanship and love in Eastern animation. I'm glad I did; I've seen some really powerful and compelling stories that I wouldn't have seen in Western work.
(There are of course broad generalizations, you can find increasing amounts of Western work that's heavily influenced by Eastern animation, and probably vice-versa as well. You can also find expensive shows and cheap shows all over the world.)
----
1: exposing every drawing twice, for an effective frame rate of 12 (animators still like to think in film's 24fps)
2: If a character is moving, then goes perfectly still, there is this weird moment when your brain stops registering it as "something alive that has stopped moving for a moment" and starts registering it as "a static drawing". It's really creepy to see happen.
3: and even spent most of a decade working in it
I couldn't quickly find a link/reference, but I remember reading a couple years ago that, when shown images/photographs, in the West we spend most of our time looking at the foreground objects, while in the East (might have been Chinese specifically who were tested?), they look at the background more than westerners (which is not to say that they look at the background more than the foreground)
> Any place in Japan has basically power lines all over the place, even in cities
For the record, there is an ongoing debate in Japanese urban centres on whether these lines should be placed underground for good.
They are a function of the astonishingly rapid development Japan underwent in previous decades, when nobody really cared about details like the urban landscape because they had "more important things to worry about". There is an argument that, now that wild development is over, it's time to move on and improve regulations for stuff like this.
The counter-argument is that anything underground in Japan will suffer from continuous earthquake activity; that it has become a distinct characteristic of modern Japanese life (precisely thanks to depictions in all sorts of media); and that it would be extremely expensive and hard to scale, since Japanese density in urban centres is so massive. The current system can look ugly, but it works, it's very flexible and cheap, and it's pretty easy to repair.
Eh, there's a certain argument to be made and considered.
Manhattan only started mandating buried lines back in the telegraph era, because every time it snowed a bunch of lines went down and electrocuted people. Eventually you've got to say enough is enough and cut that shit out.
I assume if Tokyo had the problem to the same degree as Manhattan it would already be fixed. If it doesn't, then you're evaluating a more complicated set of trade-offs.
It's kinda different though. Worst that can happen if a pipe bursts is a lot of water here and there, maybe some subsuming after a long time. Power lines could start fires, or create electrical hazards.
Sewer lines underground can be a complete nightmare and post earthquake Christchurch had an hell of a time with liquefaction.
Having sewage come out the ground with every aftershock is nasty, and the aftershocks lasted well over a year with 10,000+ and hundreds of thousands of tons of silt produced.
Japan has a lot of reclaimed land too and this ground is vastly more prone to the problem.
This is a reasonable hypothesis but it just doesn't hold water. If true you'd expect to see power lines in anime across all generations which we don't. The suddenly become ubiquitous after the Evangelion franchise popped into existence.
I only went to Japan once, but I was struck by the power grid in a way that has made me notice it everywhere ever since. We went out to a ski resort in the summer (Fuji Rock) and even out in the mountains there were giant, modern pylons all over the place. A huge contrast to rural New Jersey.
This - my brother lives in Tokyo and for a time lived on a street that had pylons running down the middle with a little park running underneath them - it was considered a pretty nice place to live due to the park and green space that it had - even though you were bang next to a pylon.
It is not just Japan but also South Korea with power lines everywhere. Yet they mask some of their cell towers to look like trees, mostly saw them closer to the DMZ.
That, plus attention to detail is just part of the Japanese culture. There's a higher density, very little wasted space, and a slightly smaller scale of the built environment there that always strikes me as having a "storybook" feel, for lack of better words. Manga and anime communicate it quite well visually.
[edit] Not directly related but I find it encouraging that the number of houses and carports there with solar panels on the roof is remarkably high and seems to be increasing all the time.
I happens the same with cicadas. People abroad think that they are a kind of anime thing, but the reality is that anywhere you go in Japan in summer you will hear cicadas.
One thing is true however for cicadas (semi in Japan) is that there's a LOT of them in every single tree during summer, which makes them really, really noisy. I have seen cicadas in Provence in France but it was nowhere as noisy as in Japan.
I'm not sure it is. First, that forces you to put a serious effort in perspective. And then you just can't draw black lines, you need to draw the technical devices that they connect to (transformers or whatever). This requires either technical knowledge or ground research.
I assume they are talking animation-wise. While it may be a complicated picture to draw, most of the power line shots are still shots, which means they only have to draw the power lines once. Static pans across a background are a classic way to save the precious precious animation budget.
In addition to the reasons given here, I'd say that as far as bang-for-buck in terms of visual realism goes, power lines are pretty effective. They look complex but are quite fast to draw with line tools or model in a 3d package and usually can be represented with minimal shading. Creating the impression of modern urban landscapes is largely a question of creating very detail-dense images, and power lines are a pretty cheap way to add a lot of small detail.
Lol... I was going to say this exactly. Evangelion and Lain were pretty popular even in the US around the year 2000, so I imagine they were near ubiquitous in Japan. Both were well-animated and the power lines a symbol that was returned to again and again.
Anime/manga also loves to meme/trope things like this because animation studios are cheap and love 30s tracking shots across 2 hand-drawn panel with nothing more to animate than a bit of lens flare. IMO it started as a style thing but quickly became a “this is a cheap way to pad our runtime” thing.
Serial Experiments Lain remains a point of reference for me. Whenever the modern world seems especially surreal, I hear it in my head: "present day, present time!" followed by the mad cackle of laughter. It also deepened my appreciation for the electrical infrastructure when I first visited East Asia.
Yeah, I feel Lain is one of those underrated classics that people really only watched if they were super into anime around 2000-2004. Any later than that and the reaction was kind of "well, duh, of course that's what happens".
I feel the same way about much of the societal commentary in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex -- they totally nailed the way groups like ISIS and the alt-right would spread like wildfire over social media, and the way that "fake news" makes finding the truth an exercise in futility. It was so accurate a decade before any of it happened that anyone who watches it now is unimpressed because it seems so topical as to be trite.
> people really only watched if they were super into anime around 2000-2004
That's me! My friend who got me into anime had watched Lain in fansub, but he took "not for sale or rent" very seriously and taped over it as soon as it got picked up for US distribution. As a result, it's one of the first things I ever watched on DVD instead of VHS.
I remember enjoying Serial Experiments Lain back in the day, good to hear it still holds up.
If you (or anyone else reading this) enjoy cyberpunk anime, I can recommend checking out the UK dub of Cyber City Oedo 808. Very different from Lain, but has a classic 90s anime feel, and has more of an adult-oriented tone without being unnecessarily graphic. The UK dub has a different soundtrack from the Japanese release, has only been released on VHS, but luckily all three episodes are easy to find on YouTube.
I saw Lain this year and... I couldn't understand any of it, even though I tried hard. I found it pretty confusing. Could someone explain to me what were the intended (or unintended, but interesting) messages in that anime?
For me it serves (alongside Weird Al's "It's all about the Pentiums") as a reminder of what an odd time the 90's were. People were just getting onto the Internet, and computers were really slow and expensive and painful to use, but progress was being made rapidly into totally uncharted territory (both socially and technologically) and it seemed like some sort of singularity-ish event was just around the corner.
One thing I learned about anime (from discussing it with Japanese folks) is that "anime Westerners like" and "anime Japanese like" can be way different. Something may come out in Japan that has only niche appeal, only to blow up in the West. Azumanga Daioh --
Mother of a Thousand 4chan Memes -- comes to mind. Likewise, sometimes a title takes off in Japan only to find rocky soil here.
I think Evangelion was well loved on both sides of the pond but I have no idea about Lain. It seemed a closer fit for Western cyberpunk sensibilities though, and I have no recollection of it turning into a media phenomenon the way Macross, Eva, or One Piece did.
I think that's easier now with the Internet, but keep in mind when Lain came out the Internet fansub community was really just getting going. I remember in 2001 being blown away that I could download an entire series in under an hour from a friend at another university (it ran over Internet2 so I could actually saturate my 100mbps ethernet connection with it). This was years before streaming video was even possible outside RealPlayer.
Back then, it didn't really get popular in the US unless it was already popular in Japan. I realize that's changed now, but back in the early days of Internet video there just wasn't the same level of access.
I read an interview with the Lain creator where he was disappointed it was so popular in the US, because he was trying to capture (what he thought was) a uniquely Japanese zeitgeist.
If I recall correctly, Lain was fairly popular both in the West and Japan, largely for similar reasons, although it was less big in the West since at the time it came out anime had not really become A Thing yet.
To your point, Cowboy Bebop can probably be considered to be one of the biggest causes for anime to gain so much traction in the US due to being on Adult Swim and having a killer feel and soundtrack, but its lasting power wasn't nearly as strong in Japan.
IIRC Cowboy Bebop was developed explicitly with western audiences in mind. It’s success informed later shows (in a similar way to how thr Chinese market is influencing Hollywood movies) so it really is a landmark show, even if it wasn’t as well received in Japan.
I mean they made a Movie spinoff from the show, so it was sufficiently popular at the time. It didn't have mass appeal staying power a la Eva or Geass, but the former is an outlier and the latter was made in an era where the production companies became much more sophisticated about fan cultivation and pre planned media mixing.
Oh yeah, I don't mean to suggest it wasn't popular, but it also doesn't seem to have had the same level of sustained popularity that it has here in the West.
The things that were way more popular in the States than in Japan include the Sega Genesis, Nintendo 64, and for anime, I think FLCL takes the crown by a very long margin.
Also in some strange way, Power Rangers as a longer than 1 year thing.
In Lain it was a motif which represented the interconnectedness of modern society. Notice how they called the internet "The Wired". Idk enough about evangelion to comment.
In Evangelion, power represented civilization in various stages of decline. It's post-apocalyptic, so the state of the infrastructure shows you if an area has been abandoned, reclaimed, etc. The Evas (basically giant mecha) have to be tethered to power to work, etc.
The whole theme of the anime centers around the type of arrogance Man (in this case, a single man) would show in the face of annihilation by God, and how a man could resist God's influence and effectively become a god himself. Christian iconography is very prevalent as well (power lines form natural crosses); especially in End of Evangelion. Electric power is then itself a form of rebellion against God.
It's a super symbolically dense anime; in fact they pack in too much symbolism and it causes the show to lose focus toward the end which it never really regains -- the last 2 episodes of the original series are essentially 100% symbolism because the studio ran out of money and had to use recycled animation and stock footage with voice-overs (End of Evangelion replaces those two episodes in the storyline).
There have been many comments from creators to this point.
The christian imagery was primarily to give it an exotic feel; just like many SciFi shows in the US borrow heavily from eastern traditions.
Here's probably the most often quoted interview answer on the subject, from Kazua Tsurumaki:
> There are a lot of giant robot shows in Japan, and we did want our story to have a religious theme to help distinguish us. Because Christianity is an uncommon religion in Japan we thought it would be mysterious. None of the staff who worked on Eva are Christians. There is no actual Christian meaning to the show, we just thought the visual symbols of Christianity look cool. If we had known the show would get distributed in the US and Europe we might have rethought that choice.[1]
It should be noted though that the creators have been historically unreliable about the interpretation of the show, and there is an undercurrent among the fandom that this answer may not be wholly truthful.
Yes the Christianity/Jewish mysticism is in part about exoticism, but the accuracy with which they have deployed some of its concepts and symbols also appears to go beyond mere "spicing up."
I dunno; the biblical imagery is pretty central to the plot (Adam/Eve, Angels, Lance of Longinus, etc.) There's a strong implication that this takes place during "the rapture" and in fact, EoE shows what is basically a textbook version of rapture. It's not used with the same level of reverence it would be in the West (it's treated more of the way we would treat a story about Greek gods) so it may seem hokey to Western viewers, but the imagery is definitely there and used for central plot purposes.
I'm of the camp that says that the Judeo-Christian symbolism is mostly faux symbolism. Window-dressing, basically.
(FWIW I'm writing this as an atheist and a huge fan of Evangelion)
To choose an arbitrary example: Sure, there's a "Spear of Longinus" but there's no real relation to what's in the Bible. In the Bible it's an unremarkable thing, used for a remarkable purpose against a single being, Jesus. Literally any spear (or rock, or whatever) would have accomplished the same thing in the Bible.
In Evangelion... it's no ordinary object. It's a superweapon that serves as a trump card against a variety of beings, none of whom are particularly Christ-like. Oh, and there's more than one. Shinji is somewhat of a reluctant "savior" for the human race, which is vaguely Christ-like, but little else in his story matches up with Jesus' life.
Same with the crosses. In Christianity, crosses mean one thing: they're a reminder of Jesus' sacrifice and the chance for salvation. There is nothing magical about a cross itself; it's just a reminder of events past.
In Evangelion, crosses are over the place. Misato wears a cross, Lilith is nailed to a cross, the Angels make cross-shaped explosions, the Evas are transported on cross-like frames, and people apparently turn into glowy crosses during Instrumentality.
But there's no Christ figure in Evangelion, and nobody seems to be pining for one. They don't even seem to be aware of Christianity for the most part, and are certainly not reverent of it. In fact, it's just the opposite - all the major players in the story seem to be determined to fashion their own fate for man, rather than submitting to a higher power. Ultimately, you could cut and paste out all the crosses and replace them with some other evocative token, and the story would remain unchanged.
The use of christian symbology in evangelion is both meaningless and deep.
like, the use of christian symbology is arbitrary and it poses basically no meaning to the plot, merely being used for texture; but someone with sufficient knowledge of it can use it to predict some short term plot points.
There's a lot of imagery from Jewish traditions as well. (Besides the obvious Lilith connection, there is a giant Tree of Life in the opening credits!).
Probably the most obvious theme of Evangelion is the subjugation of nature to humans (while constantly being contrasted with the futility of doing so). I think it's the very first episode where they get in a car on a hot day and a character turns on the AC while literally commenting on how air conditioning is a crowning achievement of mankind's domination over nature.
Then the wires are shown to be the fragile extensions of people's ability to project power over nature (e.g. the titular giant Mecha only work for a limited time when not tethered to power).
It's definitely a stylistic thing in Serial Experiments Lain. The transformer hums are evocative of Lain's power within the Wired, and the power lines are explicitly everywhere to illustrate how everyone is now connected. It's a great series, and relatively short at 13 episodes, highly recommended as a series to binge sometime.
Eva aired in Japan in 1995, and basically any and all anime fans of the late 90's were using torrents and fansubs to watch shows (including me, since I was living in the states at that point in my life).
In that great documentary "Crumb" cartoonist Robert Crumb shows his notebooks in which he keeps pictures of all sorts of mundane infrastructure that he incorporates into his drawings.
It's really effective in this sequence "A Short History of America":
That's a great expression of how expansion and exploration drive technological progress. Much of the technology in the later video didn't exist when the video started, and was created on the newly-explored continent.
This makes me wonder about how complex is the world we are living today. The large amount of niches humanity created, unceasingly. On our complex societies, even a micro blog about "power lines in anime" have an audience, and got a journalist's attention to create an interesting article.
Even before I read the link, I thought: Serial Experiments Lain.
The power lines are almost an additional character.
Also: I think this is where the X-styled hair tie started. I remember some discussion of it at the time, and so many characters since then have had some reference to it.
Me too :) I loved Serial Experiments Lain's foregrounding of things like power lines... many people might find them unattractive, but good art can change how you see things.
No one mentioned this specifically, but as someone who's dabbled in animation a bit...
Power lines are fantastic for selling depth / perspective. The poles are long and slender vertically as are the wires horizontally. When you parallax, it's a nice way to have a mid-ground layer that doesn't obscure too much of the background and naturally pokes up above shorter foreground elements.
Not saying the other thoughts re: theme etc aren't valid. Just something else to consider.
It isn't just powerlines. Anime -- especially well-done anime -- has a way of focusing on the mundane in order to establish an emotional connection to the setting.
Thr anime movie Your Name is riddled with brief, but sumptuously animated and richly detailed, close-ups of doors opening and closing. These include simple doors on a rustic rural home as well as the automatic sliding doors on a Tokyo railway car.
To quote bitwize from this thread: Well-done anime has a way of focusing on the mundane in order to establish an emotional connection to the setting.
For anyone who wants to understand this aesthetic, I strongly recommend watching The Garden of Words (言の葉の庭), which is only 46 minutes long. There is something breathtakingly beautiful about this film and other ones like it. They engender a strong feeling of longing and gentle sadness (nostalgia?) by bringing focus to the little things in life. It's a sentiment that tugs at the human soul.
Look up mono no aware (物の哀れ), which may be translated as 'a gentle sadness at the transience of things', as well as wabi-sabi (侘寂). Both of these are central to Japanese culture and history.
Edit: I also recommend checking out '5 Centimeters Per Second' and 'Your Name', both directed by Makoto Shinkai. To quote Ronnie Scheib's review:
Shinkai has been hailed as the next Miyazaki, and his dreamy mindscapes often equal or surpass the anime maestro in breadth of detail and depth of emotion. Shinkai extends the innate possibilities of the anime dynamic, reapplying its principles of lush effects, inflated background detail and sometimes undernourished character animation to mirror the interiority of the characters in every nuance of their surroundings.
I propose a more prosaic explanation. Anime artists probably spend a lot of time looking out their windows. Unless they're doing very well for themselves, they probably see a lot of power lines.
So the one thing they look at and study the most, is very likely to be power lines.
I was told that at least in Japan, this is done because it's easier to rebuild after an earthquake than digging up and reburying broken power and communication lines.
Huh, cool. That's a great illustration of the two general ways to achieve reliability. Either you make it rather hard to break in the first place (bury powerlines underground, write software with strong type systems) or embrace the fact that either way, it will break eventually, so maybe it's just better to focus on making it easy to fix (powerlines in the air, write Erlang-style software that reboots quickly in the face of error.)
Asia is not a country. In Chinese news stories about American power failures they usually have to start by explaining that there are actually a lot of power lines above ground even though the U.S. is considered "developed".
I thought that when I visited America. Streets in many towns look like this [0].
In much of Europe, you'd need to be in a very rural area for the power lines to be above ground. It's a bit more common for telephone lines to be above ground, but that's still something seen in villages rather than towns.
Switzerland (the geneve/lausanne area) has a lot of overhead wiring too. I must say, you never appreciate underground wiring until you no longer have it and a storm picks up. I would consistently lose power whenever there was a big storm. Hardly ever happened when I had underground wiring.
That's interesting, since it seems to be the opposite in the US. I always assumed that was because it was cheaper to run lines on poles rather than doing the digging that could be dozens and dozens of miles. What makes it different, I wonder?
Part of it has to be that our infrastructure is among the oldest (presumably the same reason we use a form of power socket with relatively few safety features to prevent electrocution, still have lead pipes in places, etc.).
Are those wires really 80 years old though? [1] (just the abstract) suggests overhead wires need replacement after 50 years. In any case, towns in Europe were electrified at a similar time to America. (Rural areas probably aren't comparable, with the bigger distances in the US being the reason Europe was first for this.)
Probably most of them are not, but I would imagine that the upkeep has been done in a largely piecemeal basis rather than them regularly redoing everything.
It's a beautiful trope that immediately ties you to the location. The shots of trains passing is another - you can tell the train type and company being detected often with a scary level of accuracy.
(fd - haven't lived in Japan since 2008)
I don't see how this is much different from the establishing shots, panoramic shots, still life shots, etc. that exist in other genres as well. That being said, I do see these types of shots less often in modern non-anime film and I appreciate how anime has been carrying this tradition. Lots of classic films also have a taste for the scenic and contemplative, and it's one of the things I love about them.
I think anime's predilection for establishing shots may be due in part to its manga roots...
In "Understanding Comics", Scott McCloud analyzed the transitions made between panels in various works, and he found that sequences of transitions between different views of an environment (what he called "aspect-to-aspect") were common in manga but were nearly absent in American or European comics. I believe he attributed this to the fact that manga typically has higher page counts than other comics, allowing the authors to invest more in setting up scenes.
Not directly related, but this made me think of general role of power lines in art.
When they are drawn or painted, they are valuable: they obviously carry a message, someone took the time to draw them.
On a photograph, they are considered something to avoid, or an eye sore to erase. Perhaps because often photographers want to convey what they perceive, not what they see. I can say that about myself - I tune out all the utilities from a beautiful piece of architecture like banner ads from an interesting website. But when it comes to taking a photograph, they come back with full force, often leaving me hopeless.
I wonder if there exists a way for a photographer to embrace and love the "ugly" signs of civilization. Perhaps give them a compositional role?
The best creators will innovate these sorts of flourishes, picking things that are thematically and tonally consistent and have a real purpose. Then other creators will copy them, as an omage to the original work in order to ground themselves in the artistic movement they wish to belong to. This is how we end up with such a distinct anime aesthetic; a slow accretion of unique elements forming a distinct culture as multiple generations of artists influence each other in blatant and subtle way.
Because that's literally what Japan looks like?
I've been to Tokyo and Kyoto, there are power lines/wires hanging everywhere. I don't know for sure, but I assume they don't have this infrastructure hidden underground because of earthquake concerns.
Ironically, one theme that is becoming quite popular nowadays in manga/anime/light novels is "isekai" (i.e. main character gets transported to another world, typically a medieval fantasy similar to LoTR)
To highlight the location using archaic and outdated infrastructure? I mean, a two-prong 115 V outlet would be kinda hard to see in comparison, no? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Probably because groups of hackers and anime nerds have a fairly large overlap, esp for those who grew up in the 90s/00s. I spent many nights as a teen watching classic anime (Robotech aka macross, etc) on kqed (bay areas pbs station).
For high voltage distribution they are very efficient and change relatively little about the ecosystem. Moving the same power through the earth is not only more expensive (counter-intuitively, buried power cables must have thicker conductors to carry the increased reactive loading due to the cable itself; and you obviously need insulation; and digging trenches is more expensive than erecting a steel tower every few hundred meters or so), but puts quite a lot of heat into the ground, apart from a lot of digging. [1]
(There are actively managed buried cables which are oil or gas filled, but this becomes impractical for longer cables, or extensive networks. It's extremely expensive as well. This technology is mostly used in the catacombs underneath cities, to get 380 or 220 kV to power stations inside [or underneath] cities).
Low or medium voltage distribution is a different story and has been buried in most of central Europe for many decades. I don't recall seeing power lines in any city.
[1] Just to avoid someone from posting it inevitably: No, HVDC does not solve this.
While within the city's all powerlines have been underground for ages, the connections between remote areas and production and consumption area's are usually above-ground, because it's soo much cheaper.
In most of northern Europe, above-land powerlines are considered "old school" and are eliminated to whatever extent possible. Not only does it look bad (not a great business case), they're also vulnerable to the elements, especially in extreme cases with storms causing trees to fall on them. In most cases, you can only see them in rural areas, where the cost of burying them does not make sense.
Sonoma and Napa counties in California recently burned. The official causes are not determined yet, and the litigation has barely started, but there is some evidence that this was caused by improper maintenance of above-ground power lines by PG&E—which has (unsurprisingly) vigorously opposed measures to bury or further shield them for years.
I agree but underground lines are often 2-4 times more expensive than above ground - for that reason alone I don't see them going away in our lifetime.
Many urban areas in the US have them buried. None of the places I've lived in Boston have visible power lines but most of the surrounding areas do. It's nice to not worry about weather being a threat to your electricity even if it's more expensive to maintain under standard circumstances.
100% of new construction where I live in Oregon uses underground power lines. It's easy to do when you're putting in first time infrastructure. Super expensive to do it for existing housing though.
Until their depiction in Neon Genesis Evangelion in 1995, power lines were virtually non-existent in anime. After all, why draw them when they take up more time and effort during a time-packed production schedule? However, Hideaki Anno, the director of the aforementioned anime, began to implement them in backgrounds, bringing in a new kind of mechanical urban aesthetics. Anno has a certain kind of obsession with mechanical structures, such as power lines and rail tracks, as he likes the way they continue into a distance. He continued depicting them in his later works, such as Kare Kano as well as live action features such as Shiki-jitsu, Love and Pop and his recent blockbuster Godzilla Resurgence[1]. Given how Evangelion revolutionized anime, the industry quickly followed its influence including its aesthetics.
Source: I've interviewed him. [Link](http://rickyreports.com/archives/annohideaki/)
[1] Well, it is rather an essential feature to portray destruction within this long-running monster franchise.