Live data from Hacker News

Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

fontsinuse.com

51–60 of 114 posts

Re: Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

#52

Typography is such an art I watched End of Evangelion for the first time in 15 years Still entertaining, great animation that stands the test of time, but wow I wish I can go tell my teenage self that it actually doesnt make sense, the symbolism has no point whatsoever but Judeo-Christian dogma is “foreign and cool“ and the writers eventually admit it and everyone had a good time making it

not sure Westerners are in a place to criticize given that we love to thoughtlessly appropriate Hindu/Buddhist imagery all over the place in our culture

personally I love this aspect of Evangelion because it makes me examine my own orientalist biases

Re: Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

#53
post #50
post #48

> After starting out as a typical mechanical-robot (“mecha”) anime, Evangelion gradually evolved into an existentialist deconstruction of its own genre, immediately winning critical acclaim. What does that mean?

It's describing the progression of the plot of the original anime. The anime becomes more of a psychological thriller towards the end in a very fantastic way. I recommend watching it if you haven't.

Will do, I see it's on Netflix...

Re: Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

#55
post #51

For me, NGE was both the best and the worst anime had to offer. On one hand, the music, art style and the fights were amazing. On the other hand, I found most characters downright disgusting (mostly Shinji and Asuka).

Not to mention the pace killing scenes where nothing happens for minutes at a time. They paid for those incredible fight scenes with interminable shots of the interior of elevators or close ups of Shinji's walkman.

Re: Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

#56
post #47
post #44

Regarding mechanical compression: it's probably not 100% so, but afaik in kanji/hanzi and likely many other SEA scripts, proportions of a character don't matter much―they're just strokes in a grid that you can squish without harm to legibility. That's why labels on cheap Chinese goods often had deformed quasi-monospace Latin type: the author just had no idea anything is wrong. It's likely less true of sorta-calligrap…

Here's a great article why so many Chinese goods are printed with those ugly latin characters: https://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/183/

The answer seems to be that the only company that makes Chinese fonts just doesn't give a fuck about the latin characters.

Re: Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

#57
post #48

> After starting out as a typical mechanical-robot (“mecha”) anime, Evangelion gradually evolved into an existentialist deconstruction of its own genre, immediately winning critical acclaim. What does that mean?

It's a parody of Gundam and other mecha anime.

Not so much a parody as a deconstruction of the genre. It did to mecha anime what Watchmen did to superhero comics.

Re: Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

#58

Typography is such an art I watched End of Evangelion for the first time in 15 years Still entertaining, great animation that stands the test of time, but wow I wish I can go tell my teenage self that it actually doesnt make sense, the symbolism has no point whatsoever but Judeo-Christian dogma is “foreign and cool“ and the writers eventually admit it and everyone had a good time making it

> the symbolism has no point whatsoever but Judeo-Christian dogma is “foreign and cool“

All those wasted hours in Geocities pages during the late 90s looking for interpretations and explanations...

Re: Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

#59
post #23
post #12

Or maybe, just like all the symbolism, it was chosen at random because it looked cool. More work went into this analyses than the original font selection process.

That's sort of how art works, though. You hone your sensibility as an artist, and then you 'know it when you see it'. Anno et al looked at the fonts, and they saw it was good. Explaining why it's good is quite another thing altogether. Artists are always being surprised by how things 'click' or how the viewer notices patterns the artists weren't even (consciously) aware of putting in. (And to a certain degree, if you…

Apparently Anno is particularly passionate about Matisse EB. He uses it so many other places outside of NGE that it's become not just a "NGE font" but also a "Hideaki Anno font".

Re: Typography of Neon Genesis Evangelion

#60
post #48

> After starting out as a typical mechanical-robot (“mecha”) anime, Evangelion gradually evolved into an existentialist deconstruction of its own genre, immediately winning critical acclaim. What does that mean?

It's a parody of Gundam and other mecha anime.

A parody is something like Dual! Parallel Trouble Saga.
Post reply on HN