Top 5 Anime Episodes: #1.

The list of my favorite anime episodes so far:

#5: Eureka Seven episode 48.

#4: Ergo Proxy episode 15.

#3: Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water episode 39.

#2: Cowboy Bebop episode 26.

This post will only have moderate spoilers, nothing that would ruin anyone's viewing of the series.

My all-time favorite anime episode is...

Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 22: “Don't Be”.

“After the television broadcast finished, I became worse and worse, and went to see a doctor. I even seriously contemplated death. It's like I was empty, with no meaning to my existence. Without the slightest exaggeration, I had put everything I had into Evangelion. Really. After that finished I realized that there was nothing left inside of me. … In order to determine whether or not I really wanted to die, I went up to the rooftop of this building (the GAINAX building) and stuck my foot out, waiting to lose my balance and fall forward. I did it to personally determine whether I wanted to live or die, thinking, if I really want to die, I should die here, and if I don't want to die, I'll step back. Well, it didn't lead to my death, and so I'm here.”

Hideaki Anno, 1996.

I'm going to say something very weird now.

Evangelion means something to me. It's not my favorite anime just because I like it a lot – it's my favorite anime because it's one of the few works of fiction that has, to some extent, affected me on a personal level. I don't want to downplay this because of some misbegotten sense of embarrassment. The truth is that I've never found anything quite as inspiring.

I want you to read the quote by the show's director I provided again; read it and think about it. How does it make you feel? That's not a rhetorical question. I would genuinely like to know, so feel free to answer me. Does it amuse you? Do you find it pathetic? Does it strike you as melodramatic or angsty or “emo?” Personally, I find it disturbing and sad.

Evangelion tends to be called melodramatic or angsty or emo fairly frequently, and there's few viewpoints I find more exasperating. Nothing about it is affected or trivial; it deals with real issues in a striking and relateable way. It's an exploration of loneliness and mental illness by a lonely, mentally ill man. I think Evangelion is well-crafted even in its most superficial aspects, but its greatest triumph is its emotional relevance. I could go on forever about the sincerity of Evangelion's content, the idealistic underpinnings of its message and how self-expression is one of the foundations of art, but that's not really the point. The point is this: Anno poured every bit of how awful he felt into the story he was telling, and nowhere does it pay off as much as in episode 22.

“Don't Be” is all about feeling awful. Asuka starts out the episode feeling down in the dumps, and finishes it up in a state of devastation. It represents a climax and turning point in her character arc, which can pretty accurately be summed up in one word – failure. Over the preceding episodes, we've already seen Asuka withdraw and lash out due the withering effect her successive failures have had on her fragile ego. By episode 22, it's very obvious that she's nearing a breaking point, that her ability to function – not just as an Eva pilot, but as a human being – is getting stretched thin. We expect her to be pushed over the edge... but we don't expect her to be so utterly traumatized that she would later attempt suicide.

This episode makes Asuka. It provides a context for basically everything she's done up until this point and enables everything that came for her later on. (Though it's important to keep in mind “Don't Be” didn't create something from nothing. It's only the top of the pyramid, built on top of a strong foundation of characterization and foreshadowing.) A lot of people who don't like her suddenly find themselves liking her after this episode. Me, I already liked her plenty, and “Don't Be” effectively made her my favorite anime character ever. The revelations about her backstory are both heart-breaking and illuminating, and I would have a hard time respecting someone that doesn't feel even the slightest bit of sympathy towards her afterward.

The first half of the episode has so many great scenes – the flashbacks, the interaction in the kitchen, the awkward stand-off in the elevator, the breakdown in the bathroom – but it's the angel attack in the second half that elevates it beyond “great.” The experimental style of the mind rape sequence does an incredible job at visually depicting an alien being dissecting the fractured and chaotic mind of what is really just a scared little girl. Symbolic imagery and text are used to great effect here. (According to rumor, the crayon drawings that appear here were drawn by actual abused children.) The quick, overwhelming cuts flashing on the screen viscerally demonstrate the barrage of unpleasant thoughts and memories on Asuka. Asuka's confrontation with her doll-self is flat-out creepy. The viewer quite literally gets to peek into a mental breakdown from the inside. Can you imagine how dull and meaningless these scenes would have been if they had been handled without “pretension?”

The best part is that even with such a direct method of character exploration, the show doesn't forsake subtlety. The episode makes a great many points about Asuka's personality, but it does so without spelling things out too overtly. Take, for instance, the scene where she struggles against an amorphous flow of faceless people with her own features, literally “getting lost in the crowd.” There's also the repeated “This isn't really me!” scene, which the English dub painfully messed up by failing to include the voice actors of the show's other female characters, muddling up the point about Asuka's anxiety over personal identity as a result. At every point, Asuka is confronted with her fears, and oddly enough, the prospect of Shinji being in her thoughts is one of the things that makes her most distraught.

There are people who find the use of Handel's Messiah inappropriate and inadvertently funny. Popular culture seems to use the piece for comedic effect relatively often, so I suppose I can understand the notion. On my part though, I never felt that way at all. This whole sequence, to me, is... well, disturbing and sad. Evangelion is a tragedy, after all. I can't think of another anime episode that does “disturbing and sad” this well. There's a reason for that.