Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

> I suspect it started out as limited technical aptitude and/or an "efficiency hack", but has since morphed into an actual stylistic decision that both makes thematic sense[1] and sets NGE apart.

I forget which famous modern composer said it, but there's the wonderful observation that "the artifacts of your medium will become its defining and desired characteristic".

See how we have systems trying to emulate CRT scanlines, or Synthwave style of music that not only reproduces the limitations of early synths but applies those limitations to newer sounds.

Edit: I think it was Brian Eno, though I can't immediately find the quote

I suppose that mechanical compression faithfully evokes what condensed fonts actively try to mitigate: the squeezing and stretching itself, which lends it a sense of emotional stress and tension.

Also, with digital fonts as new as they were when NGE was released, it's likely that compression seems more like a novel way to establish identity, rather than the now ubiquitous ignorant rescaling of fonts.

It means squished as if it was a image, without regard for kerning, weight etc.

Usually a official condensed version of a typeface is adapted more subtly.

Here's a great article why so many Chinese goods are printed with those ugly latin characters: https://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/183/

> proportions of a character don't matter much―they're just strokes in a grid that you can squish without harm to legibility.

I'd say that's even less true than it is for latin letters.

I watched it at least 6 times and still notice new things. The characters are just really well written and the soundtrack is awesome.

If you are a fan of title card sequences check out cowboy bebop.

The first season of Psycho Pass is really good in this regard as well (second season not so much). Some of the best sci-fi I’ve seen in a long time.

Had no idea this landed on Netflix. I've been in search of somewhere to rewatch for years now. This might be enough to get me to resubscribe for a month.

Not to mention the pace killing scenes where nothing happens for minutes at a time. They paid for those incredible fight scenes with interminable shots of the interior of elevators or close ups of Shinji's walkman.

For me, the broken and flawed characters/relationships were what made the show more than just another action anime.

I think that’s kind of part of the story? It’s about kids handed a dying world, a world whose death their parents selfishly brought about, and devolving into madness and nihilism as a result. They’re conscripted into work that has no real purpose other than propping up the existing order and justifying its instrumental, destructive logic.

I watched it again recently and it struck me as incredibly relevant and a prescient warning about the trajectory of contemporary society, especially in the face of climate change. I mean, the entire setting is nearly flooded following a catastrophic event at one of the poles...

>On the other hand, I found most characters downright disgusting (mostly Shinji and Asuka).

Good. That was the intent.

A detail I really like is how they made the user interfaces part of the story telling. The computer screens are displayed clearly and it allows the audience to interpret the information just like the characters.

Seeing the mecha switch from external to internal power and start a five minute countdown is pretty chilling. Jet Alone booting up version 2.2.1c and then reverting back to 2.1.1c without Misato's intervention confirms that it was sabotaged. When Shinji and Asuka's combined synchronization rate with EVA-02 peaks, we know they have won. Episode 13 visually depicts the angel taking over NERV's super computers: one triggers the self-destruct, the other two overrule it and the angel starts invading the other computers. End of Evangelion also revisits this: we know Ritsuko's plan has failed because one of the computers refused to comply.

2001: A Space Odyssey is the earliest example I know of this kind of story telling. The space ship's computer kills the sleeping crew: their vital signs slowly flatline one by one and in a specific order.

https://youtu.be/Z4n3dbPqk58

The famous calligraphers' styles were used in early woodblock printing, but the Song/Ming style you see nowadays are more rightly said to be influenced by the constraints of printing.

A way to think about this is that Western serif typefaces come from unical script, but their present standard forms are more rightly said to be influenced by the limitations of metal type.

file:///home/jhanschoo/Downloads/PJACNS-1(2015)-3-Lin.pdf

https://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/shotai-printed.html

That's sort of how art works, though. You hone your sensibility as an artist, and then you 'know it when you see it'. Anno et al looked at the fonts, and they saw it was good. Explaining why it's good is quite another thing altogether. Artists are always being surprised by how things 'click' or how the viewer notices patterns the artists weren't even (consciously) aware of putting in. (And to a certain degree, if you could adequately explain and convey it in words, why would you bother with the art in the first place?)

I've been using NNs to generate poems and Irish music lately based on pairwise comparison of poems/music (based on https://openai.com/blog/fine-tuning-gpt-2/ ), and it's definitely striking how fast I can make the evaluation of which one is better, but then how long it would take to reread or relisten to them and verbalize what exactly made one better than the other.

It probably wasn’t chose at _random_ even if there wasn’t a lot of thought that went into it. It was still an artistic decision.

When I used to DJ a lot, I would go to the record store and listen to dozens of records over the course of an hour or two and buy a handful of them. If you asked me in the store why I bought them, I might just say, because I liked it. Sometimes I had only listened to 30 seconds of it and that was enough.

But ‘I liked it’ hides a lot of inputs. I might have liked it because it reminded me of another song I liked, or because it had a key change that felt emotional or it had a beat that fit in with another record I liked, and if you asked me to dig into my reasoning for any of them at length, I could have probably come up with a few aspects that fed into why I bought it. In most cases they’re just post hoc rationalizations because when you’re digging through all the new releases you don’t have time to think of that stuff, but that doesn’t mean they’re not legitimate explanations.

But why does it "look cool"?

Most difficult things work like this. The top performers in many complex tasks operate from pure intuition, and backtracking what their choices actually mean is a much more time intensive process.

Doing things quickly and just because the author feels like it's a good move does not necessarily mean the decision is not based on decades of experience and preliminary work.

It was ahead of its time and was during the golden era of anime.

I think that if you read it symbolically it doesn't really matter whether the psychological model is inaccurate. This is why literary critics still use Freud in discussions. It's not about whether the model is accurate; the point is that these symbols provide a set of archetypes that we can then relate other things to. Freudian stuff in art criticism (when used well) is more of a shared vocabulary for discussing things than a reductive framework.

Not sure if that's your gripe. I used to dislike Freudian language/themes for a similar reason but realize now that I was taking it more literally than I now do.

I would recommend anyone who have seen all the material to watch The Curse of Evangelion (39min) [1]

It meta analyzes the series and movies in chronological order. It explains the director's message to the fans about escapism from reality and the dangers of it.

The first EVA series had a massive impact on the anime industry in a bad way; It create more obsessed fans who escape from reality with it and make their lives miserable, even though the series talks about the dangers of it.

Rebuild (released 14 years later) criticizes the impact and how fans misinterpreted the earlier series. He sends a message that you (the obsessed fan) can rebuild your life for the better and stop escaping reality.

As a somewhat obsessed anime watcher it hit pretty close to home. I think the director is sad how early EVA and the impact it had, helped create more hikikomoris[2] instead of less.

I might remembered some stuff wrong above, it was a while ago I saw it.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHIvs0Q-uKI [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori

It's a parody of Gundam and other mecha anime.

It's describing the progression of the plot of the original anime. The anime becomes more of a psychological thriller towards the end in a very fantastic way. I recommend watching it if you haven't.

As someone said in the replies to this, Evangelion is, in a way, to giant-robot anime what Watchmen is to superhero comics.

Happiness ends after episode 13. The next couple episodes are somewhat depressing but everything starts truly falling apart in episode 16 and it only gets worse from there. The characters never recover.

I think it simply means the strokes are pretty densely packed. Kanji is very complex structure wise, bold typefaces such as this needs to utilize space carefully otherwise some strokes will become indistinguishable

Based on this part of the article: The decision to use mechanical compression instead of commissioning a compressed-width variant...

it appears that "mechanical compression" refers to rendering the text in the standard font, and then reducing the horizontal width of the rendered text after-the-fact.

Fonts aren't just images. Characters have certain visual features we rely on to differentiate them from each other. When characters are scaled in size, the scaling is usually not done in a uniform manner - instead, the less significant features are scaled differently than the more visually significant features so as to minimize the loss of legibility.

In this context, "mechanical compression" means that the fonts were stretched and/or squashed as if they were mere images - without concern to whether the typographic features would be preserved.

In this case, changing the width but not the height of the text. Scaling in a way that doesn't maintain the aspect ratio.

Anno isn't an idiot.

This comment, while oft repeated, is simply not true. There is plenty of symbolism going on in the show. There is a lot of PoMo "mask on top of a mask" stuff going on with the biblical references, but some stuff is more on the nose. There are plenty of articles on this, including this one: https://reelrundown.com/animation/Symbolism-in-Neon-Genesis-...

> Judeo-Christian dogma is “foreign and cool“ and the writers eventually admit it

Any reference?

NGE asked a lot of interesting questions about the nature of reality and humanity’s relationship to itself, but I think it intentionally left the answers up to the audience’s interpretation.

Not a bad way to go, but personally I felt was unsatisfying because I was a bit spoiled in having first seen Gurren Lagann, which I felt was far more concrete about the message it was trying to convey, and definitively answered one of the central questions asked by NGE: when a young person is forced into a desperate life-and-death situation, and comes to believe in the self that believes in them, what happens next?

The use of Christian symbolism as nothing more than an aesthetic is somewhat common is Japanese fiction. I wouldn’t say it made no sense though.

The bad guys say humanity is fundamentally incapable of opening up to each other. Shinji proves that it can be done and is worth pursuing, although it is fundamentally difficult. He discovers acceptance of himself through his connections with his peers. He acknowledges that everyone must go through life at a pace they don’t get to choose, and that the inevitably of death doesn’t erase the meaning of existence.

>writers eventually admit

Excuse me sir, do you have a moment to talk about or lord and saviour, Death of the Author?

Much of the Christian symbolism is just there for the sake of aesthetics, but this is less so true for the Jewish (and especially Kabbalistic) imagery - there's actually a lot of overlap between the plot of Evangelion and themes from Lurianic Kabbalah (especially the notion of the ein sof and the traditional interpretation of tikkun olam, which is reflected in the Human Instrumentality Project), so the visual/aesthetic nods to it are a nice touch.

It was a Japanese show for a Japanese audience and Christian symbolism means something very different to them than it does to us. He might not have used the symbolism in the way that a western audience would have, but the connection between Christian symbolism and the West and in particular America would not have been lost on a country which had within living memory had a couple of atomic bombs dropped on them by a foreign army bringing Christian symbolism with them.

It’s almost impossible to understand any 80s or 90s anime without the context of Hiroshima and the occupation.

not sure Westerners are in a place to criticize given that we love to thoughtlessly appropriate Hindu/Buddhist imagery all over the place in our culture

personally I love this aspect of Evangelion because it makes me examine my own orientalist biases

> the symbolism has no point whatsoever but Judeo-Christian dogma is “foreign and cool“

All those wasted hours in Geocities pages during the late 90s looking for interpretations and explanations...