Neon Genesis Evangelion: Genesis Reborn (DVD)

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Before watching this disc, I had forgotten the power this series has to move me. As abstruse as the TV series finale was, it makes enough sense to convey what Hideaki Anno, the show´s writer and director, wanted to say about the main character, Ikari Shinji. I urge any fan of "Evangelion" to give this disc a look.

Video:
The video aspect ratio is 1.33:1 (full-screen on 4:3 monitors). As was mentioned before, color and contrast levels have been changed from the original TV episodes, to help clean and sharpen up different scenes that needed it. Although a lot of the jittering was fixed, there´s still some of it left in the director´s cut episodes. However, it´s nowhere near as bad as the original DVDs, which were so bad in parts that I frankly thought the DVDs´ encoding had been severely botched when I first viewed them.

Audio:
You can watch the show in Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo Japanese with English subtitles. I watched it in Japanese with English subtitles. As far as I could tell, little was done to the audio. There isn´t anything negative about the audio, except that it´s only two channel. The original voice actors returned to record the new footage, so there aren´t any odd sounding lines constructed from component phonemes or anything.

Extras:
Like the original TV series DVD release, there are sadly no extras to write home about. There are clean opening and closing animation sequences. In case you´re curious, out of the twenty or so different versions, the version of "Fly Me to the Moon" in the closing is the original version.

ADV has included a misnamed extra, a live action "Evangelion" movie sneak preview. Considering that the film is still in its conceptual stage, it´s not much of a sneak peak. There´s about five and a half minutes of close-ups and full shots of various concept sketches. Some of the sketches looked interesting, and some I hope don´t actually make it into the movie. I´m still not really onboard with the idea of remaking "Evangelion", which spans about fourteen hours of TV episodes and movies combined, into a single movie. The story needed that much time to build and develop properly. Still, ADV might be able to pull a decent script out of its hat.

--Miscellaneous--
The DVD comes with a single-page, colored insert with chapters listings on it.

Film Value:
There´s no question of the importance of "Evangelion". Love it or hate it, its impact on the animation world cannot be denied. While a few try to dismiss the series as a pointless mind screw, most viewers can at least appreciate, if not fully plumb, the depth of the plot. The director´s cuts fill in several essential pieces of the puzzle via the new footage. This disc is a definite must-have in any "Evangelion" fan´s collection.

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