Makz Overthinks Things - Blog Posts

Hideaki Anno in Reality, an Illusion

The other day, the Youtube algorithm supplied me with this amazing short film of Hideaki Anno's. It features him at a telephone club, talking with several women.

The first caller gives him some life advice. The second talks to him about his own work and agrees to meet with him later. The last call is a reprise of the first, in which Anno is unable to think of anything to say and ends the call early.

The way the last call is a reprise of the first reminds me heavily of the Eva Rebuilds, and, in any case, I think the message of the short film itself is brilliant, so I'd like to talk about it a bit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTR0rRkrF8s

(Please don't be put off by the video title. Anno doesn't seem to have titled it that way himself.)

This short film is amazing to me for a number of reasons.

To start with, I want to briefly explain where Anno is filming from. Telephone clubs, which were prominent in Japan in the 80s and 90s, were basically like phone speed dating. Men would pay to enter these small booths with a phone. The phone would ring, and the woman on the other end would chat with their customer before deciding if they wanted to meet up somewhere later.

The extent to which they were used for prostitution is unknown—at the very least, there was plausible deniability on the part of the telephone club owners. And, importantly, the women made the choice of who to meet with and whether to meet at all.

The uploader and the commenters on Youtube are all playing along with the conceit that this is a candidly shot real event which actually happened exactly like this. Anno happened to decide to film this footage, and events happened to play out in this way. A woman just so happened to naturally bring up Evangelion to its director without knowing the identity of the person on the other end of the phone. However, there's no chance that this is actually the case.

Because of the grey space telephone clubs operate in terms of whether or not they could be considered brothels, and to protect the women who call their phone lines, I highly doubt there were any telephone clubs that would allow recording equipment to be openly used in their booths. This is a scripted short.

That's one layer of illusion—the illusion that this is candidly shot footage.

The second layer of illusion is the setting itself. Telephone clubs promote illusionary closeness between the patrons and the callers.

The third layer of illusion is the world of anime production, which Anno speaks about with the second woman on the phone. Making anime is about selling illusions to viewers.

The purpose of all of these illusions is to talk about reality in a way that would be difficult to do directly. The first caller, within the structure of illusionary camaraderie, is able to speak to Anno like he's her friend. "You should put your books away and air out your futon once a week." It's common sense advice, but it's not how you'd counsel a stranger. Normally, if told something like, "I live in this really unsustainable way in my home life," the correct response when you're not very close is to kind of shrug that off, rather than give real advice.

The home life Anno is talking about is reality. The illusion is the gateway to confront that reality.

The second caller talks about Evangelion. Anno describes the difficulty in coming in to work, knowing that he's made something that's good and successful and pretty close to his heart, and work on other things while knowing that he's not going to capture that same level of success with every project. The woman reassures him that society doesn't expect us to give our best output every day. Sometimes it's okay to just show up and do what we're capable of doing at any given time.

She asks if Anno wants to meet up, and they make plans to do so. He leaves the telephone club, the illusionary world, to wait to meet with her in the outside world of reality. We see him waiting, but we never see them actually meet.

The final call seems to be with the same woman he spoke with in the beginning. He says that it's his first time at one of these places, but he can't think of anything to say, and they end the call instead of trying to have a conversation.

If we take the sequence of events literally, he's lying about it being the first time he's come to one of these places. But what if he's not lying?

What if this sequence of illusions is three branching paths of an imagined event? Anno never went to a telephone club at all, but imagined three ways events might go if he were to do such a thing. Another illusion.

I think the most interesting thing in this short is that we see him waiting in "reality," but don't see a real interaction with another person outside of "illusion." As a creator of illusions, Anno can't show us reality. The most he can do is give us a representation of something that's deeply real on a personal level and hope that we can take something of that out into our own realities.

The most a creator can do is hope that their work sparks something within the viewer, which then becomes a part of the reality of their world. That's what I got from this short film.

At the end of the final Rebuild film, the characters meet up in a train station, ready to set out to various destinations. The camera pans out, and the footage shifts from animation to live footage. We have left the illusion and are ready to go out into reality.

What reality are you living, and did you bring anything from the anime you watched in your youth with you?

As for me, the first time I realized I didn't have to follow the adults' orders, the first time I realized I could make decisions for myself, the first time I realized that my self-concept didn't need to match what others thought of me, the first time I gained the courage to say that I didn't want to do what others wanted from me—those times were all times that Evangelion was there with me in my reality.

This short made me think all of those things. Maybe it's just that I'm getting older and more nostalgic and sentimental, but I think that Anno's three level illusion is a great way to inspire us in reality. We don't really need to do that much. Society doesn't expect us to constantly be at our best. But it's good if we can find the strength to put our books away and air out the futon once a week.