EVANGELION VS STEVEN UNIVERSE

THE ART OF RISING THE STAKES

Steven Universe is a wonderful, delightful and very entertaining piece of animation. It was beautiful and emotional to watch. The animation here in in service of a bigger and deeper story which transcends the plot. In this sense it's perfect. It's hard to point out mistakes in this case, because something so well writen directed and performed doesn't have many, but there's something I deem extremely important in a series this ambitious: stakes.

This brings me to what many may consider an unfair compairison: Evangelion, arguably the best animated series of all time. Although very different in public and treatment of the topics, actually both series handle the same problems: growing up, our problematic relationship with our bodies, sexuality, trusting others... I would actually say that they are, actually, the very same: Evangelion is meant for an older public, Steven Universe is meant for children, and this changes the way those topics are handled. Evangelion is hard, rough, violent and sometimes an animated nightmare, and the plot, sometimes, not easy to follow, which means a need of reviewing the series in order to have a better picture of what's going on. Steven Universe on the other hard is quite the opposite in many ways: the plot, though as serious as Evangelion's, is easier to understand and follow, the violence is usually transformed into something less graphic and more emotional, the message is, in the end, quite optimistic.

The way the topic is handled wouldn't mean anything in terms of one being better that the other: the public you aim at and your own artictic goals determine these kind of things, but Seteven Universe, notwithstanding what it has achieved, lacks, to my judgement, something which elevates Evangelion  to perfection: the stakes.

The dynamic the Steven Universe series is well stablished in the first two seasons, but then becomes more or less predictable: the final season's main villain becomes a new friend, a new adition to the very lovable group of people in Beach City. This creates a problem: if the series becomes predictible, there's no tension. So in order to add tension, the creators had to make the threat bigger: each season the main villain is bigger than the last one. This leads of course, in the final season, to the diamonds, which were kind of dissapointing: one could foresee what was going to happen.

Evangelion has the same problem. The dynamics of the series is pretty similar: the main villain comes, creates a mess and the good guys stop it, with no redemption. But let's look at how Hideaki Anno deals with this: every chapter the threat becomes smaller, more inperceptible, more intimate, closer to the protagonist, and yet, more and more dangerous. This is the art of rising the stakes: Steven Universe makes the threats look bigger and further away (actually, in the last season they even go to other planet), while Evengalion makes them more subtle, lethal, closer, more intimate. The last and more lethal enemy of the series takes of form of a young harmless boy (Tabris), with whom the protagonist felt truly emotionally attached. On the other hand, the last enemies of Steven Universe are giants, and action scenes involve the collosal diamonds (Blue vs Yellow, for example).

This makes a diffence: in Evangelion the stakes are higher being the threat closer to the protagonist, smaller in size. The stakes are, in Steven Universe, also higher than ever by the end, but the way they handled it was, in my opinion, too basic: making it bigger doesn't mean better. They kind of redeem the series with Steven's mother and the whole thing of him undoing the wrongs of his mother, that's actually something that elevates the whole thing, even more than the treatment of such a serious topics as sex, sexuality and gender.

And although Evangelion is totally outdated in things like sexuality (it's very sexist, like... very very sexist, as most of the stuff from Japan), it's just better. But it's worth watching them together, and both of the are real pieces of art.