Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth

"Death and Rebirth" is a well-done recap of the Evangelion franchise, focusing on Shinji, Rei, Asuka, and Kaworu attending a rehearsal of Pachebel's "Kanon in D-dur." The movie is split into two halves, with the first half, "Death," being essentially a recap. The recaps are well-done, with new footage and narration added to make the events clearer. The story is retelling from various personal perspectives, with the classical music used to great effect, lending it an elegance that the series often lacks. The recaps cherry-pick key moments from the series and remove unnecessary padding, making it easier to connect the dots in the story and giving "Death" a greater intensity and urgency compared to the series. This highlights the greatness that people often talk about when discussing Evangelion. Despite its flaws, "Death and Rebirth" is a must-watch for fans of the Evangelion franchise.

The series itself is a true masterpiece, I spoiled it by watching "The End of Evagelion" first, do NOT do that. "Death & Rebirth" is a good re-cap if you've seen all but the last 2 eps. It's a bit back and fourth but overall it erases any confusion. Again, this series is beautiful, it's not just 'robots' fighting monsters it's SO much more...they are NOT robots... DO NOT pass this series up! It's an experience.

I would like to preface this review by saying that I absolutely love the original series of NGE. It has aged astonishingly well, and I think it's truly timeless. However, this film occupies a bit of a strange spot in the franchise. About an hour is recapping the series, and the final half-hour is a "sneak-peek" at the next film in the franchise, "End of Evangelion" (which I have not seen at the time of writing). This begs the question - if your intent is to follow the storyline of the franchise from start to finish, what point does this film play? You could watch the series and (I'm assuming) go straight to End of Evangelion and you wouldn't have missed anything. It's a bit like having a "previously on evangelion" segment, then a half-hour trailer for something you're probably going to watch afterwards anyway. I will admit, the recapping of the series did make me view some of the themes in a different light by juxtaposing scenes I didn't connect thematically before, so it's got that going for it. But it hasn't got a lot else I'd recommend it for other than that, or for revising the story so far if you haven't seen the series in a while. It's not bad. There's just not much reason for it existing.

"Evangelion - Death & Rebirth" is, obviously, a film of two parts. "Death" is a futile attempt to stuff the content of the first 24 episodes of the "Evangelion" TV series into a running time of just under an hour. It succeeds in getting the very bare-bones of the plot in, but leaves out all of the subtler moments, the moments of psychological drama, and the fully-realized character developments that helped to make the TV series so popular to begin with. The few minutes of animation made help fill up this immense loss fails miserably.

But it does its job. And its job is to promote "The End of Evangelion". It is virtually impossible to watch "EoE" without some significant background knowledge of the TV series, and that is exactly what "Death" does.

"Rebirth" is, essentially, the first few minutes of "EoE", there for the sole purpose of whetting the appetites of audiences all over Japan for the initial release of "EoE". But since "EoE" has since been released, what's the point of keeping "Rebirth" around, anyway?

As far as promotional packages go, this is one brilliant piece of marketing. But viewers expecting to be thoroughly blown away by "Evangelion" are best off watching the TV series and then "EoE" (all in one sitting is NOT recommended, due to the sheer length of it all). "Death & Rebirth" has served its purpose, and now is no longer needed.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death and Rebirth is a 1997 film that acts as both a recap of the original series Neon Genesis Evangelion and a preview for the at-the-time upcoming film The End of Evangelion. The Death and Rebirth in the title refers to the two segments of the film; Death being the recap, and Rebirth being the first half an hour of EoE.

At the time of the film's release, the film was supposed to act as an alternative to watching the original 26 episode series, most likely to draw in non-fans to come and see End of Evangelion. In my opinion however, the film isn't a very good alternative to watching the original series. It's organised out of chronological order and forgoes a lot of the plot to give brief outlines of the main character's personalities, which could lead to a fair amount of confusion. Most of the animation in the "Death" segment is just reused footage from the series. The only parts of the film that are not reused are scenes where the three main leads practice classical music, which are more or less purposeless and really only serve as an excuse to listen to nice music. If you had not seen the original series before watching this, I would guess that you would be rather confused.

However if you are a fan of this franchise (like me), you'll probably quite enjoy it. Though the recap is strangely organised, it's still Evangelion, which is inherently pretty cool if you love the show. The organisation can be seen as an interesting new way to experience the show, and it can also act as a nice refresher on the events of the series. While The End of Evangelion segment is kind of pointless, it's still the End of Evangelion, which, in my opinion, is one of the best animated films ever made, so watching a bit of it is hardly a bad thing.

Still, the film only really functions as a curiosity piece for super fans. If you are not super invested in the franchise already, you probably don't even know it exists, and if you do, you probably don't care.