I attended Fanime over the Memorial Day weekend; aside from the registration process (clearly designed for a con half the size) it seemed to run well enough, and I’d certainly consider returning for a 3rd year. One of the events I attended was the screening of Evangelion 3.0 or 3.33 or whatever the official number is supposed to be – “You Can [Not] Redo” is the subtitle. Fansubbed, of course – Fanime actually has a video room openly labelled as the Fansub Room, right down a short hallway from the Industry Video Room. The movie itself was fine – I liked it when I saw it with my (small) anime club, and I still liked it. But there were a few issues watching it at the con:

• The video was prefaced by the Giant God Warrior Appears in Tokyo short from the Japanese Blu-ray release. However, that hadn’t been subbed along with the movie, and nobody in the room (including the person in charge of running the show) seemed to know what was going on; that lead to fiddling with movie settings early on trying to enable non-existent subs.
• We were right across the hall from the Karaoke room, so there really wasn’t any such thing as a quiet moment (but you could at least tell when the movie was aiming for that, and everything important was audible)
• The movie wasn’t in a huge video room, which means it started off packed and there wasn’t space for a light trap at the entrance; people kept leaving only for more people to file in and take up the space. I suspect this only bothered those of us at the back of the room.

All these nits aside, I did have one significant complaint about watching Eva 3 with this crowd. See, when Shinji and Kaworu have their meet cute and their subsequent interactions, the audience went crazy for all the subtext there. Which is great: I remember the premier of the Gundam Wing movie at AX 2000, and fangirl screaming at that one brought enough energy to make up for a movie that was otherwise not worth the time. The Eva audience did even better in that cheering for innuendo was apparently just as popular with men as women. And they went wild for every little bit of it, even stretching to find innuendo where I really don’t think any was intended.

And – seriously – that’s all fantastic; it’s great that the fans were such an active audience during those parts. But that’s also why it’s such a bummer that they weren’t as active throughout the rest of the movie – not just being quiet (Eva 3 is almost intensely hushed at points, so that’s actually what I’d hope for), but just…passive. They didn’t seem to be trying to read into the film, and that impression was only reinforced when the showing let out and the collective impression I heard afterward was “?”. Of course, to some degree that movies have set themselves up for this – I heard people opining on Shinji as action-movie-hero based on movie 2, and I spoke to at least one person who hadn’t watched the first 2 movies on the mistaken impression that they were just straightforward remakes of an early part of the TV show (reasonably accurate for movie 1, dead wrong for movie 2). But even setting those aside, even when we discard the significance of Eva otaku details like the track numbers as played on the Ikari family Walkman, I feel there should’ve been some engagement with the images in that movie. Because it communicates a lot visually (seriously, the shot of Shinji curled up on that bed, back up against the wall; huddled on a white square in a sea of red, his Walkman the only barrier between himself and reality…barriers everywhere throughout the movie…Kaworu descending to the scene of near-3rd impact dressed normally as Shinji follows tentatively in some sort of Apollo-era spacesuit…Misato and Gendo wearing the same strange wraparound glasses…), so much so that while I understand people coming out of that movie confused I don’t understand people who react to the movie as merely incomprehensible, as if it wasn’t stuffed full of undeniable (if cryptic) visual messaging.

So that’s the disappointing part I guess: a movie that begs for interpretation only seems to get it from the fans in the scenes that already meshes with their expectations; as soon as it goes off the reservation they appear to lose focus. That’s probably related to sequelitis – once we as an audience have seen a movie we develop expectations of it, unconsciously taking at least partial ownership of it; and any piece which fails to conform to our internal fanfiction outline is wrong or suspect or just uninteresting. It’s the sort of problem that makes me wish I could show the Evangelion movies to people fresh, without having them watch the TV series…but of course the movies are significantly meant as reactions to the original show and don’t really work the same if you don’t know how all that went down well enough to be struck by the differences. “It’s the curse of Eva,” I suppose.