[EVA] Death and Rebirth Review [no Spoilers]

[Peter Svensson]

About five years ago, I was one of the first people in America to see Death 
and Rebirth. My first post to this ML was to inform people that a copy of 
Death and Rebirth would be showing at Fanime Con.

Today, I have finished watching the film, and now give my comments.

First off, I have to nitpick it to death.

The subtitles need work. Nothing major, nothing on the scale of, say the 
first volume of Gunbuster, but there are a few errors.

The dialog in the first scene of Death only translates one conversation. 
Now, the commentary track has them discussing how they worked on that scene, 
so it makes me think that the error was in the subtitling/timing phase.

Soul Refrain is not translated at all.

There is a pretty nasty error in Misato's speech to Shinji that while it 
doesn't affect the flow of the story, it does screw over the series 
mythology. Manga NEEDS to fix this for EoE. Now, upon listening to the 
commentary, it seems as if Manga wasn't given a script to go off of, but had 
to translate by listening to the scene, which would explain this error. It's 
the only way I can see that they screwed this up.

In speaking of screwing, I had no problem with the translation of Shinji's 
line in Rebirth.

And the worst offender was the consistant mispelling of Kaworu everywhere 
save the extras section. Not to mention that Amanda Winn Lee has a very odd 
idea of how Kaworu should be pronounced. "Kwa-ruu" as opposed to "Ka-oh-ru." 
The dub is inconsistant about how they pronounce it, half the actors using 
Amanda's pronounciation, the other half using close to a correct 
pronunciation.

The commentary track was interesting. Having spoken with Talesin, he does 
treat the show seriously. However, he spends more time on the mythological 
and psychological sides of EVA, and gets some of the show info wrong. (The 
EVA aren't based on Babylonian Gods, they are based on the Oni...) There's 
more errors in his commentary, but the commentary was informative, 
especially about the dub. The one problem I had was that they just cut off 
the commentary track at the end of Rebirth, no explanation. I know that they 
reused the same commentary for Rebirth as for EoE, but at least a "to be 
continued on End of Evangelion" would have been nice.

However, I am going to do one of my own. I felt that there is a lot that 
should have been said, and wasn't. Stuff about the production, etc. Cool 
freeze frames that weren't pointed out. Stuff from the liner notes.

The Mokuji feature was not worth it. If that was the reason for it being 
double sided, then I'm upset. I'm okay with the info being there, but I 
personally would have preferred a pop-up video mode, ala ADV's work with 
Excel Saga.

There were also some factual errors and odd phrasing there. (Because they 
had Dummy Plugs, they are from SEELE!) As well as the Gainax Vagueness that 
plagues all Gainax fact sheets...

Oh, and kudos Brendan for being listed in the credits. I wonder what for...

I recommend it though. It still is Death and Rebirth, though really we 
should call it Death(true^2) & Rebirth(true). I also enjoyed the "This is 
how Evangerion (sic): Death was meant to be shown." caption.

I'll post this for now. I'll respond later with more.

Peter Svensson | http://www.comicboards.com/manga


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