Weaving a Story 2: oral stage

"Weaving a Story 2: oral stage"
Neon Genesis Evangelion episode
Shinji's pilot suit expelled by Eva-01, resembling a spontaneous abortion. Academic Osamu Tsukihashi noted how Shinji is depicted with a school uniform into Eva-01 in the previous episode. Critic Akio Nagatomi criticized this incongruity, while Film School Rejects mentioned the shot among the "perfect shots of Neon Genesis Evangelion".
Episode no.	Episode 20
Directed by	Masahiko Otsuka
Written by	Hideaki Anno
Original air date	February 14, 1996 (1996-02-14)
Running time	22 minutes

"Weaving a Story 2: oral stage" is the twentieth episode of the Japanese anime television series Neon Genesis Evangelion, which was created by Gainax. Hideaki Anno wrote the episode, which animator Masahiko Otsuka directed. The series' protagonist is Shinji Ikari, a teenage boy whose father Gendo recruited him to the special military organization Nerv to pilot a gigantic, bio-mechanical mecha named Evangelion into combat with beings called Angels. In the course of the episode, Eva-01 absorbs Shinji inside its cockpit. Trapped inside the mecha devoid of a physical form, Shinji reflects on his life and past battles; meanwhile, Nerv implements a plan to rescue Shinji.

"Weaving a Story 2: oral stage" echoes the title and pattern of the fourteenth episode of the series, reusing frames and situations from previous installments. Production of the episode was marked by the series' production schedule, which was close to collapse, and took place in about a week. The installment focuses on the theme of motherhood and masculinity, referring to various scientific and psychological concepts; the title itself refers to the psychoanalytic concept of the same name postulated by Sigmund Freud and to the oral personality, typical of individuals in need of attention and linkable to Shinji's characterization.

"Weaving a Story 2: oral stage" was first broadcast on February 14, 1996, and drew a 7.4% audience share on Japanese television. Critics gave the episode an ambivalent reception. The last scene, depicting an implied sex scene between the characters of Misato Katsuragi and Ryoji Kaji, became a source of criticism and controversy upon airing on TV Tokyo. Some critics criticized the recycling of previously used animation and continuity errors; while others appreciated the use of previous footage, Anno's writing, the final scene, and Misato's voice actress Kotono Mitsuishi's performance.

Plot

After the massive fight against the Angel Zeruel, Shinji Ikari, pilot of the mecha Eva-01, becomes trapped inside its cockpit, losing his physical form and dissolving into it. Nerv therefore devises a plan to recover the pilot. Nerv after a month implements the recovery project, but Shinji refuses to return to reality; the pressure in the cockpit increases, rejecting its contents, including Shinji's pilot suit. In the meantime, Shinji's consciousness goes on an introspective odyssey to relive his life and the people he has known, such as Nerv Major Misato Katsuragi and his fellow pilots Asuka Langley Soryu and Rei Ayanami, reflecting on why he boards the Eva. He also wonders what the Angels, the enemies of the series, are, comparing them to Gendo Ikari, his father, with whom he has an adversarial and detached relationship. While floating in a naked sea, Shinji feels the presence of his mother, Yui, whose soul is kept inside Eva-01, and decides to return to the real world where he has emerged from Unit 01's exposed core. Misato, after Shinji's recovery, meets with her lover Ryoji Kaji; while they resume their love affair in bed, Kaji gives her a capsule, saying it may be his last present.

Production

Neon Genesis Evangelion director Hideaki Anno

In 1993, Neon Genesis Evangelion studio Gainax drew up an early draft of the series in the pipeline, in which in the twentieth episode of the series, titled "The Birth of Nerv", Unit Eva-05 was to be shipped to Nerv from Germany. In the same episode there was to be a flashback to Gendo's story and an incident in which fifteen years before the events of the series the Dead Sea was to have evaporated. The series staff then changed the original scenario of the series, merging the plot of the episode into the twenty-first. Hideaki Anno, director and main screenwriter of Neon Genesis Evangelion, wrote the "Weaving a Story 2" episode, working together with Kazuya Tsurumaki on the storyboards; Tsurumaki also served as chief animator. This makes "Weaving a Story 2" one of the few episodes in the series written by Anno alone. Masahiko Otsuka worked as director instead. Production also involved other studios beside Gainax, including Studio Cockpit, Production I.G, and Tatsunoko Color Center.

As the English episode title "Weaving A Story 2" indicates, this episode is a summary like fourteen installment, "Weaving a Story"; it is made largely centered around the reuse of already existing material, but still telling a new story. The installment is marked by the use of several frames from previous episodes of the series in scenes focusing on Shinji's character introspection; the staff added the scenes while inserting minor changes, such as in the backgrounds. In addition to these, Gainax also included a short sequence of a child Shinji inside the laboratory as foreshadowing of an event presented in the following episode. According to writer Dennis Redmond, the introspective sequences create "a vibrant visual rhythm which matches the subtle techno loop of the sound-track". Images of trains and newspaper headlines are also visible, along with shots of a seashore, and kanji characters in various fonts.

In one of the scenes, moreover, the Eva-01's empty cockpit is framed, with only Shinji's suit floating inside. As noted by Japanese architect and academic Osamu Tsukihashi, however, in the previous episode, "Introjection", Shinji was depicted aboard the Eva-01 in his school uniform instead. In the following scenes, Nerv's scientist Ritsuko Akagi's claims that Shinji, absorbed by the Eva-01, shows his image through his pilot suit, which represents his essence. The explanation is absent in the storyboard stage. According to Tsukihashi, Ritsuko's explanation results in strength, but it may also have been inserted by the episode staff to emphasize Shinji's physical absence. Tsukihashi traced the discontinuity between the two episodes to Evangelion production history; Anno himself said that he did not follow a defined blueprint in the process, but instead chose fragmentary images that flashed through his mind and added them to the story as he went along, like "a live performance". With the lack of time due to the schedule, and despite "Weaving a Story 2" was conceived as a recap episode, the production for the installment took about one week. According to chief animator Kazuya Tsurumaki, the schedule was a "disaster" at the time, with constant time pressures that prevented the staff from working quietly. He himself said that he felt exhausted at that time; despite this, especially from "Weaving a Story 2" onward, he felt a pleasant sensation, and although he felt "dead tired", he experienced the feeling of using his natural abilities to their fullest potential.

The final scene features an implied sex scene between Misato and Kaji, consisting only of very close-ups, with no explicit images, designed for airing in the protected time slot. The sequence lasts almost two minutes, with only the very close-ups of the characters' faces partially cut. According to writer José Andrés Santiago Iglesias, this peculiar interrelation of shots is reminiscent of panel transitions in manga, and the "pillow-shots" in Japanese classic cinema, a term borrowed from Japanese poetry first coined by film theorist Noël Burch referring to scenes composed of apparently random shots, depicting aspects secondary to the main action taking place. Such panel transitions are used to define the overall mood or a place in a given scene, and "rather than acting as a bridge between separate moments", the Evangelion viewer "must assemble a single moment using scattered fragments". Misato's words were left up to Kotono Mitsuishi, her voice actress; the script had only Anno's direction that reads, "Mitsuishi, I look forward to working with you". Because of the schedule, the staff also concluded episodes at the last minute, and TV Tokyo, the series' Japanese broadcaster, did not have enough time to check them before airing. Toshimichi Ōtsuki, a representative of King Records and producer of the series, did not see the final sex scene between Kaji and Misato, and in an interview stated that if he had known in advance what Anno had done, he would have stopped it. The staff felt so tired due to the production schedule to want to show a close-up of human genitalia, so as to cancel the show. Anno, on his side, said he had been "under pressure" because of restrictions, and it was a "tough battle" for him. He defended the inclusion of Misato's sex scene, arguing how sex and violence are integral parts of human life, and therefore these scenes were necessary for the unravelling of the plot and "understanding life"; according to the director, such topics, usually kept away from children, should instead be shown in all their rawness, as a "poison" with which to then become immune to illness and prepare children for real life.

As the closing theme song, the staff used a version of Bart Howard's "Fly Me to the Moon" entitled B-22 A-Type, later replaced by a version called B-4 piano in subsequent home video editions of the series.

Cultural references

Ritsuko and other characters in "Weaving a Story 2" name the concept of the "ego boundary", a limit within which the ego recognizes its body as "Self" and which if crossed leads to the dissolution of its body into a "quantum state", that is, a state in which the body is formed not by mere atoms, but by quanta alone. In this case, the term ego refers to Sigmund Freud's psychic apparatus model, in which the ego mediates between the instinct of the id and the censure of the superego. Nerv's operators specifically compare the composition of the liquid inside Eva-01's cockpit in which Shinji dissolved to a "soup of life", the primordial soup from which, according to some theories, terrestrial life arose in prehistory, following the model proposed by Alexander Oparin and J. B. S. Haldane. Evangelion Chronicle, an official encyclopedia about the series, and the book Evangelion Glossary (エヴァンゲリオン用語事典, Evangerion Yougo Jiten), edited by Yahata Shoten, likened this detail to the RNA world theory and the theory of chemical evolution, according to which organic substances formed from inorganic substances located in the oceans; this term is later taken up for the LCL sea presented in the movie The End of Evangelion (1997).

Other scientific or psychological terms are named during the episode, including apoptosis, Hayflick's limit, the trigonometric concept of tangent, addiction, alienation, and compensation. During Shinji's retrieval operation, a Nerv's operator says that the boy's "ego boundary results in being fixed in an indefinite loop", and Ritsuko claims that the emitted signals remain imprisoned in "Klein's space". It refers to Klein bottle, a three-dimensional version of the Möbius strip, a bottle in which the outer side cannot be distinguished from the inner side. Shinji's monologue, in particular, mentions internalization, a process through which the superego is formed, repression, identification, and symbiosis, a form of mutual dependence between two living beings. As pointed out by writer Virginie Nebbia, the whole challenge of the series is to succeed in leaving the mother figure, to whom the characters return thanks to the Evangelion units, to free themselves from their addictions and attempt the adventure of an adult and responsible life. According to Nebbia, in fact, the series does not make "an idyllic and unclouded portrait of mothers facing contemptuous fathers". The benevolent mother figure stands alongside the overprotective mother, also symbolizing "otaku's fear of women". Other psychological terms appear on Nerv's monitors; on a graph called Psychic Essence Threshold Signal the negative axes appear as destrudo, the positive axes as libido. They refer to the two concepts in Edoardo Weiss's psychoanalysis, linked with the Freudian Eros and Thanatos; they denote the life and expansion drive and the death and retraction drive, respectively. During the rescue operation there is a death, or destrudo reaction, and the term cathexis, which in Freudian psychology indicates libidinal investment toward an object, is named.

In Shinji's inner monologue, he hears a dialogue between Gendo and his mother Yui saying that if they had a boy they would have called him Shinji, while if they had a girl they would have called her Rei; Yui repeats "Shinji ... Rei " multiple times. According to Evangelion Chronicle, the scene is key to the relationship between the two. As noted by academic Taro Igarashi, this can be linked to the high compatibility Shinji showed with Rei in the series, acting as a backup pilot for her. Writer and researcher Fabio Bartoli connected Yui's phrase, "Shinji ... Rei", to the shinjinrui (新人類, lit. "new human race"), the young people who grew up in the 1970s perceived to be completely different from the different generations; he therefore described Evangelion as a gospel directed to the shinjirui. During the process, Shinji also hears his mother Yui saying that "Anywhere can be heaven if you have the desire to live", which writer Dennis Redmond interpreted as a reference to Akira Kurosawa's 1956 movie Ikiru. Mechademia writer Mariana Ortega noted how Yui repeats the same words in the finale of The End of Evangelion.

Themes

"Weaving a Story 2: oral stage" represents a turning point within Neon Genesis Evangelion; from this point on, the series relies more on the mysteries and emotional bonds of the characters than on the action elements. According to Hideaki Anno, with the installment the third and last arc of the anime begins, so the story becomes more "abstract". Shinji, absorbed by Eva-01 after the battle in the previous episode, finds himself in his own inner world and questions his life and his reasons for piloting the Evangelion 01, coming to the conclusion that he boards the Eva to gain the approval of others. He finds himself in a closed and cozy world where he seeks the innermost aspirations, and dreams of what his own ego desires. Searching tentatively for the meaning of his own existence, it becomes clear how he desires affection and care from the people around him. He thinks back to past battles and ponders the meaning of war. In his spiritual world, moreover, he remembers that he had already met the Eva before he even arrived at Nerv, fleeing from his mother and father. According to an official booklet about the series, Shinji ran away from that site, and that incident is what planted a "compulsive idea" that he must not run away in him. Academic Giuseppe Gatto, in particular, noted how the theme of "postbiotic" fusion is linked to "forms of narrative diradiation and confusion" that intensify as the relationship between Shinji and the Eva-01 becomes more complex and the boundary "between reality and virtuality, intention and action, me-ness and we-ness becomes indistinguishable".

Yūichirō Oguro, the editor of supplemental materials included in the Japanese edition of the series, noted how the episode deals with the theme of masculinity. As the battle against Angel Leliel in "Splitting of the Breast", Shinji declares himself to be a man, but he's punished by his mother and trapped inside Eva-01's womb-like cockpit. For Japanese academic Kotani Mari, winning the fight against Angel Zeruel in "Introjection", "the hero is also incorporated into the cyborg feminized matrix" of Evangelion-01; according to Mari, this reflects the fact that Shinji over the course of Evangelion becomes increasingly "feminized". According to Cristopher Smith, Shinji confronts the fact that others treat him kindly only because he performs hegemonic machista masculine violence: performing violence for society, in other words, is a precondition for being cared for by others or even allowed to exist; "men with queer masculinities that cannot perform hegemonic masculine violence have no place in society, and therefore no right to exist". However, in the same dream Misato tells him that he is the person he is now because he piloted the Eva and performed violence. She also tells him that he must decide what he should do from now on, telling him that there is a choice, "that he can let hegemonic violent masculinity define him, or he can choose something else".

During Shinji's monologue, a childlike Rei chases the boy as he flees; an alter ego of Shinji himself and the image of his father standing in his way are also visible. Shinji also links the image of the "enemy", the Angels, to his father Gendo. Academic Susan Joliffe Napier, noting the Angels are explicitly associated with Gendo, described the Angel themselves as father figures. As noted by Dennis Redmond, Rei takes on the role of Shinji's internalized conscience, "the arbiter of a complex set of Oedipal conflicts and psychological ambivalences". During the last dream-sequence, there is also a scene is a rewriting of Shinji's farewell to Misato at the train station before Zeruel's attack in "Introjection". In his dream, Misato tells him that only he can decide his future; as noted by Redmond, Shinji finally grasps what Misato really said: "that she would always care about him, regardless of whether he was a pilot or not". Meanwhile, in the real world, Ritsuko talks about a failed recovery plan happened ten years before, foreshadowing Yui's contact experiment with Eva-01 seen later in the series.

In another part of the monologue, Shinji sees Misato, Rei and Asuka proposing him to becoming one with him. According to Redmond, the scene quotes erotic manga, hentai. Misato's role is evidently that of the motherly provider, while Rei addresses Shinji by his last name, Ikari, a formal reference to the realm of family ties or bonds. Only Asuka is genuinely seductive, airily tossing her hair, flashing her eyes, and urging him to actually do something instead of bemoaning his fate. According to Mariana Ortega, "melding with Misato, Rei and Asuka, Shinji ceases to be who he is, and they cease to be themselves, becoming part of an asexual, impersonal, and immaterial bliss that exists outside time and space". Ortega noted how this also prefigures the Instrumentality seen in The End of Evangelion; writer Bounthavy Suvilay similarly noted how the scene is reprised in the last episode of the series. Furthermore, as noted by Japanese writer Shoko Fukuya, the whole scenario of Shinji dissolved into Eva-01 resembles the Instrumentality showed in the finale. According to Anno, the scene with Misato, Rei and Asuka represents Shinji's mother voice, and in the end his mother returns Shinji to Misato. For Ortega, this represents Shinji's encounter with a sort of "eternal feminine" that is traced back to the mother "not as an individual but as a state of being"; this event also represents a "portrayal of sexual anxiety", and an equivalent myth can be found in the Jewish Lilith, "killer of children and oneiric temptress".

Motherhood

During Shinji's inner monologue, an image of him as an infant being breastfed appears. According to animator Yūichirō Oguro, this means that Shinji returns to his mother breast, resolving his oral-stage fixation.

The title, "Weaving a Story 2: oral stage", refers to Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the same name; in Freudian theory, it is the first stage of the child's psychosexual development, in which pleasure is mainly from sucking on the mother's breast and the main erogenous zone is the mouth. In the opening scenes, moreover, during Nerv's preparation for Shinji's rescue, there is a close-up of Misato's mouth as she argues with Ritsuko, a foreshadowing of the theme. Shinji asks others to be kind to him, showing that he possesses a passive and dependent personality; he thus literally regresses to the oral phase, a period in which the Self and others are undifferentiated.

In the final scenes, Ritsuko and Misato hear a radio program in the car in which a DJ speaker talks about a reader's companion, explicitly naming the oral phase. In this case, the term refers to the concept of fixation or oral personality, exhibited by individuals who were inadequately nurtured during childhood and who therefore present a personality in need of attention, seeing others solely as objects of their own pleasure. Hideaki Anno stated in an interview that he felt like Shinji, since he acts like a "melancholic oral-dependent type". The director then reused the Freudian theory of the oral phase in the last episode of the series, in which Shinji sees both the good side and the bad, hidden side of other people, like the child who realizes in the oral phase that his mother is not split into "good mother" and "bad mother", understanding instead that positive and negative aspects can coexist in a single individual.

In his inner monologue Shinji sees the image of his mother's breast feeding him as a child, another reference to the Freudian oral stage, curling up in the fetal position in the process. The image led Ortega to describe Yui as a "benign Madonna", more balanced than the other mothers in the series, Naoko Akagi and Kyoko Zeppelin Soryu. Unlike Naoko and Kyoko, who committed sucide, were characterized and even died by their "woman" aspect in fits of jealousy and guilt, Yui simply disappeared into Eva-01 and became "all-mother". According to Ortega, "unlike the vampiric Naoko and Kyoko, Yui/Eva01/Rei/Lilith ultimately acts as the force of development and engenderment", and she acts as protectress and salve against the demiurgic Gendo, who plays the role of a "paternal tyrant". For Ortega, Yui's nature becomes the final sacrifice which allows "the 'new genesis' promised in the title to come into being".

During the rescue operation, Shinji seems to refuse to go home, and his pilot suit is forcibly ejected from the cockpit; the image is reminiscent of that of a miscarriage. Shinji also remembers his mother's smell and swimming in a sea of amniotic fluid he sees a flickering light in front of him; the light is reminiscent of the image of the outside world as seen through the eyes of a baby in the womb and the religious concept of the soul, which Nerv treats as a concrete entity. According to Oguro, the image of the mother's breast can be interpreted as a metaphor to Shinji going back in time drinking his mother's milk, resolving his fixation. Regressing to the oral stage allows him to re-establish a trusting relationship with his mother, and thus to resolve his oral personality. He then hears a dialogue between Gendo and Yui before his birth; the scene was probably never really heard by Shinji, but it still marks the boy's rebirth as a human being. Shinji choose by his own will to return to real world and, touched by his mother's feelings, appears before Unit 01's lit up core naked, the image brings to mind that of childbirth.

Reception

"Weaving a Story 2: oral stage" was first broadcast on 14 February, 1996, and drew a 7.4% audience share on Japanese television. In 1996, it ranked eighteenth among the best anime episodes of the Anime Grand Prix, a large annual poll made by Animage magazine, with 93 votes. In July 2020, Comic Book Resources reported an 8.6/10 rating for the installment on IMDb, making it seventh among the highest-rated Evangelion episodes. Merchandise based on the episode, including a line of official tee-shirts, has been released.

"Weaving a Story 2: oral stage" proved controversial. According to Nikkei Business Publications and writers Kazuhisa Fujie and Martin Foster, the final sex scene between Kaji and Misato, while it contains no explicit images, was criticized as being "inappropriate" on an anime show that is viewed by children. GameFan defended the series from the critics, describing the sex scene as "tastefully-done".

The episode received a mixed repection from anime critics. The Anime Café's Akio Nagatomi criticized "Weaving a Story 2: oral stage"; while appreciating the introspective exploration of the human ego and "some fine acting" by "a most distraught" Kotono Mitsuishi in the ending scene, Nagatomi said that the effect is utterly destroyed by the way Shinji is recovered with a deus ex machina, as the "writer buried the plot so deeply, there was no means to extricate it". He also criticized the continuity error in showing Shinji's suit instead of his school uniform and the use of long dialog pieces over single-scene shots and flashbacks. Film School Rejects' Max Covill ranked among the worst Neon Genesis Evangelion episodes, similarly criticizing the use of flashbacks to fill in the run time as in the fourteenth installment, and writing: "Shinji does eventually come back to the physical world, but the lack of animation is painful in this episode". Despite his criticism for the recap of previous episodes, he praised a shot depicting Shinji's suit expelled from Eva-01 cockpit, citing it among the "perfect shots of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Other critics have been more appreciative. Writer Dennis Redmond praised two shots of Eva-01 swatched in white bandages, describing them as "extraordinary". Digitally Obsessed's Joel Cunningham gave a positive review of "Weaving a Story 2: oral stage", saying that it can't be missed and also praising its "great ending". According to Cunningham, "This episode is also a series highlight, once again exhibiting how much can be done with simple animation and suggestion/repetition". Analysing the episode, Japanese academic Osamu Tsukihashi noted how Anno's script leads the viewer to connect and stitch together seemingly disconnected parts; Anno's work do not represent a coherent overall picture, and the viewer is driven by the desire to create a coherence of the work as a whole. According to Tsukihashi, this is a system in which the incoherence of the work enhances the work itself.

References

Bibliography

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• Santiago Iglesias, José Andrés (2021). "Not Just Immobile: Moving Drawings and Visual Synecdoches in Neon Genesis Evangelion". In Santiago Iglesias, José Andrés; Soler Baena, Ana (eds.). Anime Studies: Media-Specific Approaches to Neon Genesis Evangelion. Stockholm University Press. doi:10.16993/bbp. ISBN 978-91-7635-164-2. S2CID 245093477.
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External links

• "Weaving a Story 2: oral stage" at IMDb