The End Of Evangelion Should Never Have Been Removed From Letterboxd’s Lists

The point of any list, in theory, is to cross everything off it. You write a shopping list with the aim of buying everything on that list when you go shopping. You write a bucket list with the aim of doing everything on it before kicking the bucket. And you write a watchlist for movies with the aim of watching every movie on the list. It’s a very simple idea. But actually, you aren’t meant to watch every movie on your watchlist. You’re supposed to keep adding new experiences to it. Unfortunately, completionist thinking has taken over, and is starting to rob people of that pleasure: just ask Letterboxd and The End of Evangelion.

The End of Evangelion sits at 4.5/5 on Letterboxd, with over 150,000 awarding it 5/5 (50k gave it 4.5 and 59k gave it 4). This would put it somewhere between tenth and 29th on the overall list of 250 Narrative Movies, Letterboxd’s most prestigious list, as all these movies (spanning The Godfather to Woman in the Dunes, with Ran, The Dark Knight, and The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly all in there) also scored 4.5/5. It would also put it in a three-way tie for first on the 100 Animation list with Grave of the Fireflies and Spirited Away. However, it is no longer considered eligible for either of them.

The End Of Evangelion Is Bigger Than A TV Show Finale

The reason for this is because The End of Evangelion is supposed to be watched, as the title would suggest, at the end of Evangelion. It is the finale of the first, and only, series of Neon Genesis Evangelion, following on from the preceding 26 episodes. The movie is actually set after the 24th episode, but most fans (myself included) would urge you to watch the TV series in order, then the movie, as it’s basically an alternate ending. However, this advice has gotten it banned from Letterboxd eligibility.

Because The End of Evangelion requires watching an entire TV series ahead of it, it has been cut from consideration for both lists. The removal from the 100 Animation list happened a couple of months ago, and caused controversy then, but this week’s removal of Evangelion from the 250 Narrative list has seen the issue blow up.

The End of Evangelion is a full, feature-length movie. It was released in cinemas and was made for the cinematic environment. It is a movie, a very popular and revered one that deserves its place in both lists. Letterboxd does have an inflation issue with some movies (movies based on TV shows are sometimes used as a proxy for fans to rate the show itself as 5/5, just as concert films tend to be rated exclusively by fans and mostly score 5/5), but that was not the case with The End of Evangelion. It is simply a fantastic, must-see movie like no other, and the vast majority of the people awarding 5/5 did so out of appreciation for the movie, not as a placeholder for liking Neon Genesis Evangelion as a concept.

Adding to the confusion, the Rebuild movies remain eligible, with Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon A Time 11th in the 100 Animation list. These four movies, released between 2007 and 2021, retell the story of Neon Genesis Evangelion, though they get more distant from the original plot as they go on and by the third, tell completely different stories. This leads to the fourth movie, the aforementioned 3.0+1.0, which brings the strands back together and uses scenes from both the original show and The End of Evangelion itself. While it’s true that you can watch these four movies and follow the narrative without any prior knowledge, thematically they require you to have seen the series and The End of Evangelion to understand how and why these deviations happen.

Film Is Not Something You Can Complete

Now, does any of this matter? Well, it matters as much as you want it to. If you’re a major Evangelion fan who is indignant that your movie doesn’t count when Fire Walk With Me, which continues on from the Twin Peaks TV show, has not been officially banned, then I would say it probably doesn’t matter. Fire Walk With Me is too low to make the cut at a still impressive 4.2, and a movie not appearing on a list somewhere doesn’t change your enjoyment of it.

However, if a young budding cinephile wanted to explore great cinema in a medium they were already comfortable in (say, animation), and they end up missing out on Evangelion because of these rules (or worse, watching Rebuild first), I would suggest the list is not fit for purpose. Anyone who claims to have watched all the great animated works of cinema yet has not watched The End of Evangelion has not watched all the great animated works of cinema. But then, has anyone?

If you finish this list, is that your cinematic journey complete? The Boy and the Heron is currently number 100, and would be knocked off were The End of Evangelion here. To suggest you don’t need to watch such a film, in which animated master Hayao Miyazaki explores his own legacy, to have ‘completed’ animation is foolish. These lists should be there to open the doors to new experiences, not to help us close them.

I have had this completionist mindset before, which is why this decision irks me. I watched every entry on the AFI 100 list, and let me tell you, they’re not all great. Yankee Doodle Dandy, you suck man. Rinsing the filmography of my favourite performers has unearthed some stinkers, along with some fantastic movies I would never have seen. I have aims to go through varying lists of Oscar winners, or lists curated for reasons I find intriguing or by people I respect. But I have learned to take my time and see each film as a work of art, not as a carton of milk to be plonked into a basket so my list can get another strikethrough. I watch fewer films now, but I like them more.

It’s less that I’m concerned about The End of Evangelion being robbed of its rightful place because really, what is a Letterboxd list to tell you which movies are worth watching? Celebrate the things you love. It’s more that I’ve always thought of Letterboxd as a cinephile-driven platform where loving movies was the draw and making lists was a bonus. But if we decide movies are not movies because they require extra work, where do we stop? How many sequels is too many? What of autobiographical tales that become deeper with knowledge of the director’s lifetime of work? When we start deciding films take too much work to watch, it feels like we no longer care about those movies at all.