The body urges members to avoid the streaming release over its new translation and dropped theme song.
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Lazia, 2 July 2019 — The Mahusetan Institute of Anime and Manga has advised its members against watching Netflix’s newly licensed international release of Neon Genesis Evangelion, judging it inferior to other, in some cases legally dubious, ways of watching the 1995 series.
Anyone with an interest in anime will at least have heard of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Conceived by its creator and director, Hideaki Anno, as a postmodern turn on the giant-robot genre, it follows Shinji Ikari, a fourteen-year-old conscripted to pilot a vast, ominously humanoid machine against the destructive beings known as the “Angels”, only to discover that the task of saving humanity exacts a ruinous toll on his mind. Since its Japanese debut in 1995 the series has earned a reputation as a psychologically complex and difficult work — a cult classic whose standing, its admirers argue, bears comparison with that of Twin Peaks or 2001: A Space Odyssey. It can be grim, and it does not always make perfect logical sense, but it is fascinating television all the same.
For much of the past decade the series was out of print, its English-language licensee, ADV Films, having folded in the late 2000s and left pirated copies and bootleg DVDs as the only ready means of watching it. Netflix’s acquisition of global streaming rights to both the television series and the films — in a deal estimated to have cost upwards of $3 million — was meant to be a triumph for the company and the fandom alike. Instead the streaming debut was met with fierce backlash from a vocal section of the show’s admirers.
Much of the objection concerns Netflix’s new English translation, which replaced both the dub and the subtitles ADV had released more than fifteen years earlier. Fans complain that the new version translates more literally, often at the expense of the series’ themes. The most contested change comes in an emotional exchange between Shinji and the character Kaworu Nagisa, long read as carrying heavy homoerotic subtext: where the earlier dub had Kaworu tell Shinji “I love you”, the Netflix version has him say “I like you” — a rendering critics say drains a homosexual reading from a scene that turns on Shinji’s sense that he is unworthy of love. The concepts differ in Japanese and English, and while “like” may be closer to the source, the change has been read as recasting a romance as a friendship.
It is not the only line to draw complaint. The new dub has Misato describe herself as an “international civil servant” rather than a “government official”, refers to the pilots as the “first children” and “second children” in place of the singular, and pronounces the name of the secret agency Nerv inconsistently throughout. The series was also recast, to the dismay of the original English-language cast: Casey Mongillo, Ryan Bartley, Stephanie McKeon and Carrie Keranen took over the roles of Shinji, Rei Ayanami, Asuka Langley Soryu and Misato Katsuragi respectively, replacing Spike Spencer, Amanda Winn-Lee, Tiffany Grant and Allison Keith.
To the further dismay of admirers of its closing titles, Netflix’s release also drops the series’ celebrated, karaoke-style renditions of Bart Howard’s “Fly Me to the Moon” — some thirty-one variations performed across the episodes — in favour of a piano piece from the soundtrack. Citing these changes, the Institute of Anime and Manga has advised its members against the Netflix release, holding it inferior to the alternatives, and has recommended the use of browser plug-ins that recreate something closer to the original.
Edited for the relaunch of the Courant van Lazia.
