Deep plots

What are some of the deepest plots in film?

Captain America: Civil War

Inception

literally anything by joss whedon

Beyond the Black Rainbow

...

>"deep" plot

do you mean complex or ?

I think he means DEEP

I hate to be that guy, but...

Neon Genesis Evangelion

I hate to be THAT guy, but...

Space Runaway Ideon

>shinji can't pilot the fucking robot
>causes the apocalypes because he can't handle life but then can't even commit to that
>random christian symbolism thrown everywhere because it's foreign and interesting to japans

>deep

"no"

To be fair he's actually pretty good at piloting the robot when he can mentally bring himself to the task.

I just read the plot "summary" on Wikipedia and I'm none the wiser as to what it's about other than giant mecha fights and fights and then spirits.

>Shinji can't pilot the robot

1. Yes he can
2. It's not a robot.

>Causes the apocalypse

1. No, he doesn't cause it, he fails to stop Seele from causing it.
2. Technically, two potential apocalypses are set in motion about the same time: the merge of Adam and Lillith into Giant Naked Rei initiated by Gendo, and the artificial 3rd impact attempted by Seele using the brainless Evas and Unit 01, which also contains both the Seed of Life and the Seed of Knowledge. Shinji could only have prevented the 2nd apocalypse, the first would have gone ahead in any case.
3. What he does do is, by virtue of his unique position, choose the manner in which 3rd Impact is implemented by Giant Naked Rei.

>Random christian symbolism thrown everywhere

1.Majority of religious references and imagery are derived from the Jewish Kabbalah and Gnosticism and are not random
2. It is true that the cruciform explosions and othe r cross imagery are just there to look cool, though

On paper it's an incredibly simple concept but the execution is very interesting. Evangelion gets praised for its 'deconstruction' of the genre all the time but what many people don't know is that mecha anime was actually incredibly self-aware by the early 80s.

What Ideon did was it took the typical structure of one of these types of shows, what's called 'monster of the week' where every week the protagonists are getting along in their greater journey but get held up by new big bad guy who they fight and overcome before getting on their way. What Ideon did was it took this but added human factors to the experience.

The show is about a group of refugee colonists being mercilessly pursued by humanoid aliens across unfriendly space and constantly having to fight to the death to defend themselves. At first it just seems like a setup for fun robot fights but the tone gets increasingly grim and anxious as it goes on. The director's aim was to really show that the constant fear and fighting was destroying the cast, turning them on each other, breaking them down one at a time.

For its time this was quite clever stuff and it still holds up quite well today. And the movie that caps it all off is amazing. While maybe not quite 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture' tier it's definitely close up there.

nothing you just explained makes evangelion 'deep'

And nothing he said suggested that :^)

I'll do it. I'm the Ideon guy but I don't think the other user was quite doing the show justice.

What really makes Evangelion stand out is that it's an auteur's piece. Something quite rare for tv. There are very few shows around that bear the mark of their creator on them quite like Evangelion.

And I don't just mean style. The writer/director Hideaki Anno really poured himself into this project. When he made the show he was in a very frustrated and uncertain place, both personally and professionally. He was unhappy with himself, his career and the industry after his last tv project, 'Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water,' was poorly received.

From these negative feelings we got Evangelion. A show which is equal parts an expression of the creator's frustration and neurosis, a love-letter to everything he loves about pop-culture and a heartfelt message towards his fans and others out there feeling like him.

The show's action content is a slick and very well executed combination of toku, /m/echa and kaiju which on its own is enough to impress anybody who knows their stuff. But then the plot and characters are where the show really made its mark.

Evangelion takes inspiration from Ideon, and both may in turn have taken inspiration from America's weird science-fiction authors such as Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe in their approach to storytelling. Evangelion has a perfectly coherent and thought out underlying plot. However, this plot isn't given to you. Information that a conventional storyteller would consider vital subtext is left by the wayside for observant viewers to piece together if they so please. This isn't just a gimmick to make people scratch their heads in awe, the style has a very tangible effect on the viewing experience.

What it does is it lends the whole story a sense of uncertain dread. Enough information is given to make it clear that SOMETHING awful is coming down the road, but early on it's impossible to piece together enough to know what

Sorry fampire, I hit the character limit there. If anybody cares enough to hear the rest I'll keep writing. Just let me know. I think from that though it should at least be clear that there's more to this than 'akshyually Shinji does get in the robot and the Abrahamic nonsense is totally there for a reason'

Guardians of the Galaxy

A plot is a series of events. There's no such thing as a deep plot. You can have deep visuals like 2001 yes, fuck off or maybe a deep line that the actor gives a lot of weight to, but I've never seen a plot that was more than what met the eye.

I once watched the second half of this movie. Do they ever explain why the grey and red guy is such an autist?

see

I couldn't have put it better myself.
You can genuinely feel Anno when you're watching Eva.
The show is like an emotional outcry from a man on the edge of a cliff.
It's no wonder he can't make anything good now that he's rich and not depressed anymore.

He swore of metaphors after his wife was murdered.

M8 'Love & Pop' might just have been his masterpiece and I'll fight you if you disagree.

Not even memeing I fucking love that movie. I've never felt so uncomfortably intimate with fictional characters before.

I don't even know how to respond to that.

Here's an example of thematic depth in NGE: it's deconstruction of the military-industrial hypermasculinism often seen in both Japanese mecha animations and Western action blockbusters. In movies like Top Gun, for example, climbing into the cockpit of a plane and flying into battle is depicted as a hypermasculine endeavour, linked to freedom, courage, battle and sexual prowess. NGE seems initially to project the same power fantasy but in fact subverts every aspect of the trope: piloting an Eva is in fact a (literal) retreat into the womb, an act of cowardice and rejection of the harsh reality outside ( as evinced by Shinji's eventual dissolution inside unit 01). The giant male-looking robots are in fact female, biological organisms. The power fantasy constrained by the ever-present umbilical connections without which the Evas are useless, signifying the dependence of all military hardware on a complex chain of logistics and bureaucracy.

>and the Abrahamic nonsense is totally there for a reason'

Anno already said it himself that he'd thrown bunch of judaist stuff in there because 'it looks cool' and the story doesn't really mean anything. He baited you with a puddle and you kept digging for 'deep symbolic meaning behind imagery' & 'depression' shit

>i-it's a deconstruction!
The first argument of the clueless

I loved Love and Pop but eva had far more personal relevance to me.
He's claimed shit like that for countless of his creations despite it being completely untrue. . Either way, it doesn't matter. death of the author and all that

This is why so many people struggle to take anime seriously. Why do you do this?

I didn't mean to say that there was substance to the Abrahamic stuff. That part of the post was a joke about the usual defenses of Evangelion, which I often disagree with quite strongly. See for an example of what I mean.

And I think that there's more than absolutely nothing to the Abrahamic/Gnostic stuff. Anno's not a happy or proud man and he puts himself down a lot.

Something the average Sup Forums poster wouldn't pick up on is that Hideaki Anno is a Go Nagai fan. And one of Nagai's most famous works is 'Devilman.' Devilman is a story about Satan conspiring to wipe out humanity in the 20th century. This story was written with a surprising amount of faithfulness towards traditional theology and Abrahamic lore and it wouldn't at all surprise me if a significant amount of Devilman rubbed off on Anno.

And really, if nothing else Gnosticism is pretty appropriate for just about any story dealing with depression. Just look at True Detective.

>death of the author
stop that

So what you're saying is that people don't take anime seriously when other people approach it as a serious subject worth analysing? That seems ass-backward?

Refute my analysis

In the Mouth of Madness

I'm saying that people don't take anime seriously when other people do a pathetic job of approaching in as a serious subject worth analysing.

I'm not the other guy but let's see.

>it's a deconstruction of the military-industrial hypermasculinism
I highly doubt this. Anno is Japanese. Japan doesn't have a 'MUH MUHREENS, MUH FREEDOMS, KILL THE TURRURISTS FOR MUH FREEDOMS, KILL THE COMMIES' culture going on.

>often seen in both Japanese mecha animation and Western action blockbusters
As I said already in this thread. Mecha had been self aware and self-critical for over a decade before Evangelion was made. Amuro Ray, THE mecha protagonist, made a big deal out of refusing to get into the robot. I won't deny that this stuff isn't present in American media (not western, just America), but I do question why Anno would care enough to make a show about it.

>In movies like Top Gun, for example, climbing into the cockpit of a plane and flying into battle is depicted as a hypermasculine endeavour, linked to freedom, courage, battle and sexual prowess
>NGE seems initially to project the same power fantasy but in fact subverts every aspect of the trope: piloting an Eva is in fact a (literal) retreat into the womb, an act of cowardice and rejection of the harsh reality outside
These are true but I don't see much of a link. Shinji was coerced into getting into the robot, with his main motivations being guilt and shame. I'd say that the moments where Shinji actually gets into the robots are the moments when he temporarily stops retreating from the outside world. When he retreats he catches a train out of town. By getting into the robot he's confronting both physical peril as well as dealing with Asuka, Rei and Gendo, three people who frighten him to varying degrees.

character limit forces a stop here

>I highly doubt this. Anno is Japanese. Japan doesn't have a 'MUH MUHREENS, MUH FREEDOMS, KILL THE TURRURISTS FOR MUH FREEDOMS, KILL THE COMMIES' culture going on.

Stopped reading right here. Military otakus are some of the biggest specialty consumer groups in japan.

>specialty consumer group
That seems like an odd niche to target. If they're really so significant in the anime industry where else do they have influence? The closest answer I could see would be maybe in Takahashi's work, but even he was getting quite meta well before Evangelion.

Military surplus makes a shit ton of money in japan. It's actually crazy.
The military otakus are sometimes also anime and manga otaku, but not all of them.
I spend a lot of time in tokyo and people who work in retail tell me that military stuff sells extremely well.

Even if military stuff is a popular hobby in Japan I still have a hard time believing that it's a core theme of Evangelion. The show is called Evangelion, it seems odd that the EVA units, the show's namesake, would exist as a commentary on military otaku culture. It still doesn't add up to me.

>You think weapons make you strong, but it's all still escapism
Doesn't seem in line with the rest of what the show's going for. It feels like a very better and personal interpretation of a show that's mostly sympathetic and general.

Military otaku tend to romanticize war and they think if they were dropped into their favorite mecha setting that their meta knowledge would let them kick ass. Most of them would be utter mental wrecks like shiji. It's not a stretch. It's not exactly commentary on military otaku but the post war culture that has produced neets who fantasize about imperial days and don't keep their impotent fantasies in check. It's nowhere near the biggest thing, but evangelion tackles a lot of issues with post war japanese culture.

Shinji's a teenager with no passion for violence or romanticised ideas of war or battle. Kensuke is a military otaku, I can buy that, but he's portrayed as more innocent and naive than anything else. I don't feel like this trait of his was a statement towards anything really, just another thing for Shinji to think about.