Twenty-One
In the climactic moments of “Mind, Matching, Moment,” Shinji and Asuka finally come together in perfect harmonization. They had been at each other’s throats for almost the entire episode, following an embarrassing defeat by the Sixth Angel, Israfel. Asuka’s angry with Shinji for failing to meet the expectations she barely defined for herself while Shinji’s frustrated with her need to constantly prove her worth rather than follow directions. Their sync rates were terrible and, despite Misato’s best efforts to get them working together, from dressing them in similar clothes to making them sleep in the same room to enduring them to hours of Dance Dance Revolution, they simply will not gel.
But then something clicks.
They flip, they twirl, they spin through Tokyo-3 in a decisive ballet. For 62 seconds, the sound drops out and the edit clips by almost too fast for us to process what’s happening, forcing us into the rhythm and the movement of this operation. Shirō Sagisu’s score kicks in and elevates a weird Three’s Company-like episode into something far more memborable.
“Both of You, Dance Like You Want to Win!” Starts off with a rolling solo piano, skipping across all 88 keys on the board to wait with a trill until the rest of the orchestra catches up. They launch together, the piano pounding out the main melody while the orchestra hovers in wait. On screen, the Evangelion units loom over Israfel, suspended in air. When Unit-01 and Unit-02 land, the strings take over, the Evas arming themselves and launching their attack. The orchestra and piano call and respond in short, fast notes when the Evas go on the defensive. The situation seems close to falling into cacophony with Israfel’s counterattack and the UN’s intervention, ripe with missiles and explosions until, finally, Unit-01 and Unit-02 literally come together to straight up wail on the Angel. The strings and piano both take over the melody and it’s loud and pounding and triumphant right till the final blow.
That moment, that exultant instant when Shinji and Asuka merge hangs over the rest of the episode, a fading chord drowned out when they resume bickering. And it’s just one scene, among many, elevated by Sagisu’s work.
Sagisu had been active in the Japanese music industry since the late ’70s, namely as a producer and composer for a lot of pop acts. He gained his greatest renown for his film and television scores, providing the music for Battle Royale High SchoolI and Attacku You! Sagisu joined Gainax for Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and Hideaki Anno brought him over for Neon Genesis Evangelion. (Sagisu would go on to score the Rebuild of Evangelion movies and Shin Godzilla with Anno. He was also subsequently responsible for the music in Attack on Titan and Bleach.)
Sagisu bears a deep knowledge of film music and film music history. His scores are wrapped in elements of classic Westerns, techno-thrillers, psychological horrors, and science fiction adventures, thrown in with of Les Baxter for good measure, none of it more evident than in Evangelion.
Evangelion’s music is a conversation with the styles and themes and motifs that preceded it, delivered in a percussive tenor and grand scope. The instrumentation and arrangements might be modest but the sound, the delivery, and the performances are resounding. The music fills in the gaps left by animation shortcuts.
For the record: for this discussion, I’m going to use song titles from the official soundtracks. As with all scores, these pieces recorded for the CD are not necessarily the recordings we hear in the show. Often, in film scoring, tracks are recorded specifically for picture and then later the composure and music producer create a new arrangement to put on a record, something that flows more like an actual composition rather than the fragments and stings they use for the film. Therefore, there may be slight variations in a given scene from what I have available through the album stream.
Twenty-Two
There’s a retro vibe and energy through Evangelion, like it’s a show that exists so firmly in a technologically advanced post-apocalyptic reality it cannot help but constantly look to the past. That vibe and energy carry through Sagisu’s soundtrack, which rarely, if ever, veers into electronic music or synthesized sounds. It probably helps Eva’s music was composed at t time when melody was still allowed to be in a score, before Hans Zimmer and his ilk took the post-Inception Neo-minimalism that’s come to dominate the film industry to the extreme and, time after time, has provided forgettable tones rather than actual musical pieces. (Zimmer is one of the worst modern film composers and you could put any one of his scores under any movie he’s assigned with little issue.)
Continued belowPieces like “Barefoot in the Park” have a “Girl from Impana” feeling: relaxing, soothing, like a leisurely stroll. The composition only appeared a couple times in the series, at a dinner between Misato, Ritsuko, and Kaji, and in the opening episode, when an N2 mine knocks Misato’s car off its axels; she subsequently falls into an internal monologue about what that’s going to mean for her now.
Then there’s the NERV theme, with its conquistador horns and strings screaming in swirling arpeggios. The tone is overwhelming, the melody implies lots of secrets. Anno and company actually only use it once in full, when Unit-01 charges Jet Jaguar — a triumphant moment for NERV — but its rhythm and aspects of its melody appear sporadically throughout the series, especially the moments NERV needs to prove itself. We get a hint of it, for instance, when Mista tells Shinji and Asuka her plan to make them synchronize in “Mind, Matching, Moment.”
“Tokyo-3,” is the quietest of the bunch, a composition filled with awe and wonder. For good reason, it takes place when Shinji sees the city towers rise from their underground shelters. It’s a wide-eyed piece with gentle horns calling out to each other across vast distances while a choir illuminates the area.
Perhaps the most important themes Sagisu creates, the one that encompasses the show’s stated thesis, is “Hedgehog’s Dilemma.” The hedgehog’s dilemma, or porcupine’s dilemma depending on who’s asking, claims hedgehogs have a difficult time getting close because otherwise they’ll get hurt on each other’s spikes and spines. People are the same, avoiding intimacy and contact. Sagisu explores these ideas in a song that sounds like it came from a piano bar. The piano starts off on its own, with minimal accompaniment. The swelling orchestra tries to join in, but it’s rejected, the piano shifting the tune, avoiding the orchestra’s embrace. Eventually, they find a way to gel together, through never in perfect harmony or precision.
They could probably use some more Dance Dance Revolution.
Twenty-Three
Sagisu goes wild when it’s time for the battle music. This is horrifying stuff, the orchestra as percussion, with pounding notes that punctuate each beat as they climb up the scale, horns mounting a last defense, strings cutting in to take over. In “Angel Attack,” Sagisu builds tension by keeping the pace and dynamic relentless. Instruments burst in with shocking new revelations . . . a wailing electric guitar here, a desperate French horn cry there.
“Angel Attack” is one of the motifs that occurs with the most frequency, a signal of impending danger and doom. Even when it does offer a moment of relief, a chance to catch your breath, the main section quickly rears back in with double the force. A looming threat.
Only to be answered by “Decisive Battle,” a minor-key countermeasure introduced by a quarter note timpani that pounds out the rhythm. The arrangement is frantic, the instrumentation looking for solutions to the Angel’s problems, whose attack motifs linger just below the surface. We also get hints of NERV’s conquistador horns. The energy rises.
It all turns to a tense standoff, “Marking Time, Waiting for Death.” A piano strikes a chord on the high end, a tickling clock, relentless, inevitable. The music holds us, and even the addition of a piano trill offers no relief. If anything, its grip hardens as a violin enters, sounding like the violinist is striking their bow against the strings. Sagisu repeats this pattern and repeats this pattern until —
— that quarter note arpeggio returns. Muted horns launch their attack, although everything sound pained, like it’s suffering. The makes the final offensive and eventual victory, a chord struck by the entire orchestra, feel not so much triumphant as shocked, not comprehending it just escaped with its life.
Continued belowAgain, these are themes that appear in some variation throughout Evangelion. They gear us up, they prepare us, they quickly throw us into action. The more I watch this series, the more I notice all the tiny cheats used to get the thing to come together in such a short production time. Even if the images don’t convey the tension and suspense, those driving rhythms more than compensate.
Twenty-Four
Nothing in this series is wilder, more inspiring, terrifying, and recognizable as Evangelion Unit-01. It embodies all Eva’s themes and questions, fears and triumphs. Therefore, Shirō Sagisu greets it with Star Trek-like soundscapes — exploratory, grandiose, and awed. Unit-01 is a call to adventure, a wide-eyed, open-mouthed spectacle. Saigsu takes a similar approach for Unit-02, though with more bravado and power, where the horns scream louder and there’s an electric guitar to give it that NAS boost into action.
We learned throughout Neon Genesis Evangelion that the Eva units are extensions of their pilots, that they have these direct and profound connections to Asuka and Shinji, are so entwined in their history neither can operate for the other. The music represents the best of both of them: confident, assured, curious. Running beneath it all, however, is a counter-melody hinting at imminent danger and destruction.
And then you have Unit-00. Rei’s Evangelion. The prototype. Sagisu builds Unit-00’s themes on sharp strings that kick with the inevitability of a time bomb. When they relent, there’s no release, only a new tension brought out through a wailing guitar. The rest of the orchestra pounds through chords, unable to escape.
There’s an element of the unknown to Unit-00’s theme: it’s pained, it’s angry, it’s focused. It’s no small thing Sagisu uses the same melodies in “The Beast,” with its faster tempo and final countdown instrumentation.
Evangelion Unit-00 serves as a reminder of the horror and brutality involved in making these giant robots. The pilots, the people at NERV are always so close to losing control, of allowing the Evas to go berserk or shut down altogether.
And since the Evas are so closely tied to their pilots, we get more understanding of these kids. Of Asuka’s brazen confidence and Shinji’s desperate need to please the people around him and Rei’s dispassionate horrors. Sagisu hints at this more in the music, but you can hear elements of the pilots’ themes in their individual scores. Which we might as well talk about now.
Twenty-Five
I have no idea how much of Neon Genesis Evangelion Hideaki Anno planned out when he started the series, not to mention how much he told Shirō Sagisu beforehand. Nonetheless, the themes for our adolescent pilots do well to map out where the series takes them. Whether it be how far Asuka falls by the end of End of Evangelion to Shinki, so desperate to be left alone and ignored, finally has to stand alone.
Sagisu recalls the same genre for Shinji and Asuka’s scores: the Western. It’s no secret Japanese filmmakers were obsessed with American Westerns, replacing six-shooters with samurai swords (just like it’s no secret American filmmakers eventually replaced samurai swords with lightsabers), a tradition that became so ingrained in their pop culture it spread like long tendrils.
Asuka’s theme has swagger and grit, a bright exterior with a twangy guitar and shuffling beat. The fiddle that carried the melody clips away, dominating and overpowering. It’s played a step lower, flatter, than the rest of the arrangement, almost like it could fall apart from the music at any moment. It’s full of flourish and shows off its talents, and unless you’re looking for it, the piece seems like it has it all together.
“I, Shinji” borrows more from the Morrisone spaghetti Western. A muted horn. An aged piano. The orchestra harmonizes in triplets. You can feel it attempting to charge up, gear itself up, pulling itself together for that final moment, gaining more confidence as more instruments enter. The muted horn melody gets absorbed by the rest of the orchestra near the end, but it does so willingly, all too happy to disappear and become something else entirely.
Continued belowWhile much of Shinji and Asuka’s characterizations are hidden in the music, Sagisu performs a feat of misdirection when it comes to Misato and Ritsuko. “Misato’s” a pop song, chapter, sunny, something you could snap your finger with or dance to, somewhat messy but overall fun.
“Ritsuko” has a power ballad energy, the piano casually shifting between chords, breezy, easy, knowing exactly where it’s going and in no rush to get there. Both these themes never change or shift, act as almost a distraction and relief from everything else in their environment.
Mixed up in all this, somewhere in-between the grandiose declarations of Shinji and Asuka and the repetitive sensibilities from Misato and Ritsuko, sits Rei. Well, both Reis since, spoiler, we eventually learn Rei is a clone and several versions of her have been running around this whole time.
For “Rei I,” Sagisu uses a mysterious solo piano, with quiet strings cutting through the melody, muted horns offering texture in the background. The music is simultaneously desperate and terrified, but never allows those emotions to push pas the surface until they’re finally subdued and dismissed. “Rei II” maintains the same melody, but the piano has been replaced with strings, although it continues to strike chords buried somewhere in the mix, a reminder of what it once was while it’s shifted into something else.
Netflix uses Rei’s theme for their end credit music, suggesting more revelations to come. It might not carry the same weight as the various renditions of “Fly Me to the Moon,” but it’s not inappropriate.
Evangelion’s score carries so much weight and power it serves as a key to our understanding of the series. That and Sagisu’s score slaps.
Of course, we haven’t made it to the most recognizable parts of the soundtrack, the opening song, one of the most famous anime openers of all time, and the closing numbers. All this means is that we’re just going to have to continue this later.
