I hate to admit it, but I actually have never seen this uber-popular series, which was released way back in 2001, and was hailed by many as being inferior/superior to Evangelion. Thus, I decided to watch the entire shebang in a weekend. Kabitzin, eat your heart out.
In the end, I was left with mixed feelings. It started out great – intriguing premise and execution. Halfway into the series I was still loving it – conspiracies, romance, dark secrets, hot mecha action, and a superb cast of characters. Three fourths of the way in I was still hooked, though a bit wary since there wasn’t much time left, and so many unanswered questions. At the end, I was a bit disgruntled due to the rather vague explanations (or lack thereof). But, after a little bit of investigation on the net to clarify things, and a bit of enlightenment from the Movie, I was a happy camper.
I think the producers tried to bite off more than they could handle in this one; they introduced too many intriguing but unfulfilled threads, implied too much going on in the background, and ran out of screen time. Hey, at least they didn’t run out of money *cough Gainax cough* – the level of animation throughout the entire series was bust-an-artery fantastic, courtesy of Bones studio.
Then comes the Rahxephon Movie. It’s basically a remake of the series, crammed into a couple hours. I think maybe the producers realized how maddeningly difficult their plot was to comprehend, so they laid it out nice and clear for us in their retelling. It was nice to finally understand all the details of the main plot, for sure. Unfortunately, most of the sinister sub-plots, emotional backstories, character development, and all the other things that made the series great were thrown out the window due to the obvious time limitation.
So, on one hand we’re left with a series that’s all-around great but leaves us guessing as to the main plotline, and a movie that has a strong plotline but nothing else. I’d recommend watching the movie after the series as an answer to the WTF feeling you’ll probably have.
On a side note, I feel that Evangelion and Rahxephon are quite disparate, regardless of their numerous parallels. Eva draws heavily from religious sources as its guiding structure, and focuses largely on Shinji’s struggle to find himself. Rahxephon contains some of the identity crisis issues, but leans more heavily towards the question of what reality vs. perception. The movie really drives home this point, whereas the series kind of tippytoes around it.
But all that aside, I personally loved it, and that’s all that counts.
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Ender – who has written 219 posts on Sea Slugs! Anime Blog.
One of the original founders, and the first to attempt a coups d'état.
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By all that is good and holy in this world…
You are insane!
Whoa. 26 episodes and a movie compressed into less than five hundred words.
Kabitzin is sooo right (^_^)
Personally, I liked Evangelion more than Raphexon because it seemed more fresh/unique/more controvertial than its latter counterpart. And, to be honest, I’m a sucker for biblical allusions
I liked rahxephon over evangelion (yess! cry eva clergs). It’s just that I found Eva interesting only at the few last episodes. All the other shit about mechas and angels was simply uninteresting for me. On the other hand Rahxephon progress all the time and hooks you to the screen.
I still haven’t seen beyond the first six episodes of Rah. This coming from someone who came on the Net roughly every hour after the first episode aired to see whether there were any clips etc. available to download (they announced that Maaya Sakamoto was doing the theme song about three months before it aired – I had to be there…) I keep almost ordering the DVDs and then never quite managing it…
I’m tempted to pick up the Movie box that’s coming out this month, but I know I’ll watch the film before I watch the actual show then, and that would be a bad move. ADV’s certain to release a bundle eventually anyway, alas.