Just a quick Question for IronHold ,(or any Aime fan)

Truth be told, I haven't seen Pacific Rim yet; local ticket prices are just too expensive, and so I wait for things to come out for rental.

As it is, "robots fighting monsters" goes back at least as far as the 1970s and is a subset of the larger "Super Robot" genre. "Super Robot", in turn, goes all the way back to the 1950s (give or take) with such series as the original Tetsujin 28 ("Gigantor" in the English dub).

Evangelion was actually supposed to be a deconstruction of said genre*, but the one-two punch of production company Gainax running into financial trouble and series creator Hideki Ano's epic mental health issues resulted in the series being a total cluster foul-up that inadvertently reinforced the very cliches that it was supposed to dispel. In fact, the original idea behind the "Rebuild" series was supposed to have been "What the series would have been like had Ano been in his right mind and the money there to film what he wanted", but the addition of Mari as a character appears to have been an attempt to cover the bases in regards to fetishes** and I understand that changes were made as a direct "Take that!" at the original series.

The end result was that while Ano succeeded in his efforts to push the boundaries of allowable content on broadcast television in Japan, he otherwise failed in most of his other goals; while Eva did spawn a wave of dark & moody anime that tried to deconstruct other cliches, it also spawned a "reconstruction" in which different studios tried to take those same cliches and play them gloriously straight.

So while Eva is a popular (if controversial) series and has its place in anime history, we would need to see specific points of comparison to say that Pacific Rim ripped it off.



*TV Tropes Wiki article on "deconstruction": tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Deconstruction .

**Ano meant for the female characters to represent what would happen if certain cliches that have been fetishized in Japanese media were played out as they would be in real life; for example, the resident "bottle fairy" Misato drinks not because she wants to party but because she's got PTSD due to witnessing the death of her father and is desperately trying to drown the memories. Thing is, Ano's poor mental state at the time led to his fumbling the writing, leading to people thinking that he was playing the cliches straight. With Misato, for example, although Ano wanted to present her as a ball of mental and emotional issues that was largely incapable of functioning while sober, Misato instead came off as "a tragic cutie who just needed a big, strong man to save her from her nightmares".

Reportedly, the realization that people were hot for the female characters despite his best efforts at making them seem unlovable played a large part in causing the mental breakdown that Ano suffered halfway through the series, and it is believed that this breakdown is responsible for his going out of his way to kill off any character who he could not successfully warp into the twisted caricature he was aiming at.

At one point in time Hideki Ano was a respected director; among his resume is the comparatively light & fluffy "Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water".*

This all changed when Ano checked himself into a mental hospital for treatment of both depression and exhaustion. After being released, Ano began work on what would ultimately become Evangelion.** The idea behind Eva was "Show what it would really be like if teenagers were forced to pilot giant robots and fight against aliens in defense of what remains of their post-apocalyptic home." Ano wanted to show how the cliches that generally went along with such series would be shocking and disastrous in the real world, his apparent goal being to make people reconsider what they knew about media & entertainment.

However, Ano didn't quite get the angle he wanted to get, most likely because he was still not quite right. The end result was that the first half of the series came off as a standard super robot series, albeit with 90s Extreeeeme! levels of obscenities, blood, gore, and nudity / sex. Ano suffered a mental breakdown some time around the midway point, likely fueled in no small part by the realization that people were "missing the point" of what he was trying to get at. This led to Ano making the next 11 episodes a parade of depression and destruction as he went to length to force the series as it stood to fit what he intended for it to be. In the eyes of the viewers at home, however, this was originally seen as him running the series off the rails, leading to a fair amount of hate mail. Adding insult to injury, Gainax ran out of money for the series with two final episodes still to go; instead of being able to deliver a two-part finale with an epic final battle, he was forced to use a series of still frames, drawings, and stock footage to depict male lead Shinji engaging in a mental battle with the final - unseen - enemy.

Ano's plan was to wrap up Eva in order to meet the contract he had with the network, then get to work on raising the money he needed to produce a theatrical movie ("End of Evangelion") that would tell the final battle as it would have happened had he the money to properly show it. However, the hate mail had become both highly voluminous and highly caustic at this point, such that Ano was actually receiving death threats from angry fans. This pushed him completely over the edge, and so while End of Evangelion did finish the series off it also wound up making Yoshiyuki "Kill 'Em All" Tomino look like a bright, cheerful pacifist.*** As you can imagine, this did not help either Ano's reputation within the industry or his popularity among the fans.

Although he failed to get people to reconsider just what he was going for in terms of super robot series, Eva did succeed in forcing the various Japanese broadcasters to take a hard look at the "extreme" content that was beginning to appear on the airwaves; the resulting backlash led to a scrubbing aimed at removing anything "excessive", and I understand that it was so thorough "Cowboy Bebop" was briefly cancelled mid-way through its run, only to be restarted a few months later after things had settled down. Ano, meanwhile, had managed to offend and alienate even his own staff at Gainax, who promptly staged a mutiny once the Eva franchise was finished; the staffers unilaterally selected the six episode sci-fi parody series (re: cluster foul-up with a vague plot) "FLCL" as the company's next project, and as part of the mutiny forced Ano to accept the role of voicing a house cat.




*At one point, I recall hearing rumors that Disney ripped off Nadia to make "Atlantis", much like they had confirmably ripped off "Kimba The White Lion" to make "The Lion King". That should tell you what Nadia was supposed to have been like (I still need to see it, tho.)

**As an example of how two things can be similar but not actually related, consider the situation between Evangelion and Vision of Escaflowne. Escaflowne follows a Japanese high school athlete named Hitomi as she is inadvertently transported to the planet Gaia, where her limited ability to see into the future promptly makes her a pawn in the war between a resistance movement led by a knight named Allen Schezar & a fallen prince named Van Filonel, and the military dictatorship that toppled Van's kingdom. Although people on both sides of the Pacific reportedly saw similarities between Eva and Escaflowne - right down to some of the mecha designs - the truth of the matter is that Escaflowne started before Ano even went into the hospital. What happened was that the first concept was scrapped (the mecha transformed into jets instead of dragons, but the jet designs were deemed too similar to a series of Russian prototypes that had just been unveiled) and the second one rejected (a manga series written by Katsu Aki gives a glimpse into what this second version would have been like); by the time concept #3 was approved and work on the series had begun, Eva was already on the air.

***http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshiyuki_Tomino . Tomino reportedly experienced a number of personal problems in the late 1970s and early 1980s that led to him developing severe anger management issues. He infamously chose to vent his frustrations through his work, resulting in series like "Space Runaway Ideon" that were astoundingly bloody even by today's standards, hence his nickname. This is unfortunate, as Tomino would otherwise have gone down in anime history as the man who created the "Gundam" franchise and the man who produced such legendary series as "Aura Battler Dunbine".