is the twentieth episode of the Japanese anime television series Neon Genesis Evangelion, created by animation studio Gainax. Hideaki Anno wrote the episode and animator Masahiko Otsuka directed it. The series follows Shinji Ikari, a teenage boy whose father Gendo recruited him to the special military organization Nerv to pilot a gigantic biomechanical mecha called Evangelion against mysterious beings called Angels. In this episode, Eva-01 absorbs Shinji inside its cockpit. Trapped inside the mecha and without a physical body, Shinji reflects on his life and past battles while Nerv carries out a plan to rescue him.
The episode echoes the title and structure of the fourteenth episode of the series, reusing shots and situations from previous installments. The staff completed production in about a week, amid a schedule that had nearly collapsed. The story explores the themes of motherhood and masculinity, referring to scientific and psychological concepts; the title itself refers to Sigmund Freud's eponymous psychoanalytic concept.
"Weaving a Story 2: oral stage" premiered on February 14, 1996, drawing a 7.4% audience share on Japanese television. Reviewers gave the episode a mixed reception; the last scene, which depicts implied sex between the characters Misato Katsuragi and Ryoji Kaji, was criticized and became controversial upon airing on TV Tokyo. Some reviewers criticized the recycling of previously used animation and continuity errors, while others appreciated the use of previous footage, Anno's writing, the final scene, and the performance of Misato's voice actress, Kotono Mitsuishi.
Plot After the massive fight against Angel Zeruel, Shinji Ikari, pilot of the mecha Eva-01, becomes trapped inside its cockpit, losing his physical form and dissolving into it. Nerv devises a plan to recover Shinji. After a month, Nerv implements the recovery project, but Shinji refuses to return to reality; the pressure in the cockpit increases, rejecting its contents, including Shinji's pilot suit. Shinji's consciousness relives his life and the people he has known, such as Nerv Major Misato Katsuragi, and his fellow pilots Asuka Langley Soryu and Rei Ayanami, and reflects on his reasons for boarding the Eva. He also contemplates the nature of the series' enemies, known as the Angels, comparing them to his father, Gendo Ikari, with whom he has an adversarial and detached relationship. While floating naked in the sea of consciousness, Shinji feels the presence of his mother Yui, whose soul is kept inside Eva-01. Shinji decides to return to the real world and emerges from Unit 01's exposed core. After Shinji's recovery, Misato meets with her lover Ryoji Kaji; while they have sex in a bed, Kaji gives Misato a capsule, saying it may be his last gift to her.
Production Neon Genesis Evangelion director and main screenwriter Hideaki Anno wrote "Weaving a Story 2: oral stage", and worked with the series' assistant director Kazuya Tsurumaki on the storyboards.. Tsurumaki also served as the episode's chief animation director. This makes "Weaving a Story 2" one of the few episodes in the series written by Anno alone. Masahiko Otsuka directed the episode. Production involved other studios besides Gainax, including Studio Cockpit, Production I.G, and Tatsunoko Color Center. Production I.G previously worked on animation for the thirteenth episode, which included a microscopic Angel called Iruel, and "Ambivalence". The company also worked on computer-generated imagery (CGI) for The End of Evangelion (1997). According to the Red Cross Book, the official booklet on The End of Evangelion, the series makes extensive use of CGI, which was processed in a flat, two-dimensional manner like computer screens. At first, Production I.G. was supposed to produce the whole anime, and the company president, Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, was willing to do so; for various reasons, including Mamoru Oshii's apparent refusal, the original plans were changed, so Production I.G. only took care of "Weaving a Story 2: oral stage" and other individual episodes.
Gainax originally wanted the twentieth episode of the series to be titled "The Birth of Nerv". In the original scenario, Unit Eva-05 was to be shipped to Nerv from Germany. The same episode was to include a flashback to Gendo's story and an incident in which the Dead Sea evaporated fifteen years before the events of the series. Staff later changed their plans and conceived "Weaving A Story 2: oral stage", like the fourteenth installment "Weaving a Story", as a summary that is largely centered around the reuse of already existing material. During the planning stages, staff also considered the title for the episode. The original script contains several differences from the version broadcast on TV. For example, Misato would have referred to only two berserk incidents involving Eva-01 instead of three, while Ritsuko would have explained that the Unit's core had "appeared" and that the Unit itself had begun to develop a will and an ego. Misato would also have reflected on humanity's desire to wield a tool endowed with divine power; furthermore, in her final scene with Kaji, she would have discussed the Angels' origin, saying: .
Gainax used several frames from previous episodes of the series in the scenes focusing on Shinji's introspection; the staff added the scenes and made only minor changes, such as the backgrounds. Gainax also included a short sequence of a child Shinji inside the laboratory as foreshadowing of an event that occurs in the following episode. According to writer and movie critic Dennis Redmond, the introspective sequences create "a vibrant visual rhythm which matches the subtle techno loop of the soundtrack". Images of trains and newspaper headlines are visible, along with shots of a seashore and kanji characters in various fonts. Scholar Philip Brophy described the episode editing as a "synapse-shredding peak", as it reaches 75 images in 10 seconds and 85 images in 11 seconds. Writer River Seager noted Anno showed an interest in trains since his short film At the Bus Stop (1980) and Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack (1988); the symbol of the train then returns in Anno's next work, Love & Pop (1998). Seager argued that trains have fused the themes of death and modernity in Japanese media since Kenji Miyazawa's novel Night on the Galactic Railroad, which was adapted into an anime film by Gisaburō Sugii and possibly influenced Galaxy Express 999. Trains thus became a site of isolation, loneliness, and the desire to run away; however, in Anno's cinematography, train stations also offer the hope for growth and change, as in the final scene of "Hedgehog's Dilemma".
In one of the scenes of Shinji's inner monologue, Eva-01's empty cockpit is shown with only Shinji's pilot suit floating inside. Japanese architect and academic Osamu Tsukihashi noted that, in the previous episode, "Introjection", Shinji is depicted aboard the Eva-01 in his school uniform instead. In the following scenes, Nerv's scientist Ritsuko Akagi claims Shinji, absorbed by the Eva-01, shows his image through his pilot suit, which represents his essence. The explanation was absent at the storyboard stage. According to Tsukihashi, Ritsuko's explanation is weak, but it may have been inserted by the episode staff to emphasize Shinji's physical absence. Tsukihashi traced the discontinuity between the two episodes to Evangelion production history; Anno said he did not follow a defined blueprint but chose fragmentary images that flashed through his mind and added them to the story as he worked, like "a live performance". Production also suffered from a lack of time due to the schedule. Gainax had completed only twelve episodes by the time the series began airing after nearly two years of production, leaving the staff to produce the remaining fourteen in just six months—roughly one-third of the time they had spent on the first twelve. Despite "Weaving a Story 2" being conceived as a recap episode, the production for the installment took about one week. According to chief animator Kazuya Tsurumaki, the schedule was a "disaster" at the time, with constant time pressures that prevented the staff from working quietly. He said that he felt exhausted at that time; despite this, especially from "Weaving a Story 2" onward, he experienced a pleasant sensation, and although he felt "dead tired", he experienced the feeling of using his natural abilities to their fullest potential.
As the episode's closing theme, the staff chose a version of Bart Howard's song "Fly Me to the Moon" entitled "B-22 A-Type", which was later replaced with a version of the same song called "B-4 piano" in later home-video editions of the series.
Final scene The final scene, consisting only of close-ups and no explicit images, is an implied sex scene between Misato and Kaji and was designed for airing in a protected time slot. The sequence lasts almost two minutes, with partly cut close-ups of the characters' faces. According to academic José Andrés Santiago Iglesias, this peculiar interrelation of shots is reminiscent of panel transitions in manga, and "pillow-shots" in Japanese classic cinema, a term which was borrowed from Japanese poetry and was first coined by film theorist Noël Burch to refer to scenes composed of apparently random shots, depicting events that are secondary to the main action. Panel transitions are used to define the overall mood or a place in a given scene, and "rather than acting as a bridge between separate moments", the Evangelion viewer "must assemble a single moment using scattered fragments". Misato's words were left up to Kotono Mitsuishi, her voice actress; the script had only Anno's direction that said: "Mitsuishi, I look forward to working with you".
Because of the schedule, the staff concluded production of episodes just before the deadline, and TV Tokyo, the series' Japanese broadcaster, did not have enough time to check them. According to writer Alexandre Marine, these production delays allowed Anno to insert a risky sex scene. Toshimichi Ōtsuki, a representative of King Records and producer of the series, did not see the episode's final scene before the airing; he stated that if he had known in advance what Anno had done, he would have stopped it. After the first few episodes, Anno largely stopped involving Ōtsuki in the series' production; only after the controversy over the implied sex scene did he bring him back in to help manage the fallout. Staff members felt so tired due to the production schedule that they wanted to show a close-up of human genitalia, so the show would be canceled at some point. Anno said he had been "under pressure" because of TV restrictions. He defended the inclusion of Misato's sex scene, saying sex and violence are integral parts of human life, and that these scenes were necessary for the unraveling of the plot and "understanding life". According to Anno, such topics, which are usually kept away from children, should be shown in all their rawness, as a "poison" with which to immunize children and prepare them for real life. Writer Vrai Kaiser noted that Misato and Kaji's "loving, consensual" sex conversation obscures their bodies despite having previously shown more on screen, so "nudity is primarily a mark not of intimacy but of vulnerability, and the naked body is indeed actively disassociated from sex more often than not" in the series.
Cultural references