@Citizengeek: I’m hoping the licence is picked up sooner rather than later. It will happen of course but I’d like to see a limited cinema run within the next few months and a DVD/Blu-ray release announced before the year is out too. I’ll wager the likes of ADV and Manga Ent are putting their bids into motion already.

@Beyoz XXI: if there’s one series I wish were finished properly, Kare Kano would be it. I doubt Tsuda would let Anno near it again though, and of course the Gainax staff have moved onto other things. The original manga is superb by the way.

I like what they’ve done, it’s very polished, but I wonder if the story makes sense to people who have never seen Evangelion before?

@Hige: it’s a good update visually but yeah, I wondered if I had downloaded the Platinum by mistake (which I already have on DVD) or whether the entire storyboards had been recycled! I guess that, to put it crudely, this is merely foreplay and the real headf*** happens later. Point taken on Misato though - I could probably devote an entire post to explaining why she’s such a great character, but I’m not sure who’d want to read that sort of fanboy rave!

As for Misato, she seems to be one of the three core female characters that embodies the mother/sister/lover triad most comprehensively. Asuka and Rei violently fluctuate between them throughout the series but only Misato strides between them with any subtly. Granted she isn’t at the centre of Rei’s particular mother-related bombshell, nor is she the object of Shinji’s lust like Asuka, but she feels like a true realisation of one of Anno’s big female-related themes. She has the benefit of being apart from Shinji’s pubescent urges, too, which saves her from his clumsy attempts to compartmentalise her in his life. If anything the show concentrates on how he fits into her life. That alone makes her special.

Rebuild is a curiosity in how its awareness of its own material’s ubiquity liberates it and allows for more subtly, too. The lack of Shinji’s famous catchphrase demonstrates this – he doesn’t say ‘I mustn’t run away’ as much because the viewer implicitly knows that’s what’s he thinking from prior experience. I thought this gave the film much more weight, allowing more room to breathe and concentrate on other things.

To be honest though, I found the whole experience a bit hit and miss, and found myself with about an equal number of good and bad points when I ‘Blogged about it. The animation is much improved, there are some brilliant new scenes which really add something, but I found some of the visual changes a little over the top to the point of being distracting, and I really felt that they messed up the pace of the whole battle against Ramiel.

Despite all that, I still ended up buying the Japanese limited edition release, complete with original film cell.