O eu em guerra em Neon Genesis Evangelion

Abstract

When watching the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), in a free translation “Creation of a new era”, we are faced with a post-apocalyptic world, in which a great global disaster called “second impact” takes place in the 2000s. In 15 years humanity has risen, presenting us with a city called Tokyo 3. In this context we are introduced to Shinji Ikari, a 14-year old boy born shortly after the second impact, who has just been summoned by his father, Gendou Ikari, to pilot the giant robot EVA 01. The anime of robots and war takes us to a plot of characters, relationships and affections. In line with Japan's war history and its worldwide performance since the country's opening to the world in the Meiji era (1868- 1912), public and military opinion towards surrender was quite negative. By this point in the war, military strength was seen as insufficient to continue, yet when surrender was finally signed, the national reaction was of disbelief and shame. From the 1970s, anime focuses on scripts based on post-apocalyptic worlds, with interference from technology in a scenario of dystopian futures, but with repetition in a story that tells a people in the reconstruction phase after a tragedy of great scale. Here we have the recurring reference to Japanese history and culture in our object of study, the construction of a scenario where the survivors have little left but to rebuild with what remains, the insistence here on renaming the city as it refers to the unification of Japan in rebuilding as a country. The narrative of a great disaster and the need to recover appears with pertinent constancy in Japanese animations, but here the author uses this familiar point to demonstrate the burden, of survival and existence, the post-war scenario that inscribes as essential the need to retell our hero's story from what represents a fissure in Japanese history.