Ruriko Midorikawa is perhaps the best case for this. His kindness is often touted by others as a weakness, a liability, but it's also the single most influential force in the film - Hongo's pure unfettered moral goodness pierces just about every character in the movie.and when they reject it, they eat a Rider Kick for their troubles. For all of his monstrous strength and abilities, his consistently strongest weapon is his heart. Happiness and pain are frequently touted within the film as being two sides of the same coin, a disconnect that most of the characters inherently reject, but it's something Hongo accepts. College student and motorcycle enthusiast turned half-bug monster by the evil Shocker. Everyone wants to achieve it, take control of it, but none of them really understand what it is. There's a shared internal conflict across all characters in the film, from protagonists to the villains, of the struggle to understand happiness, whatever that is. 3.0 + 1.0 is that same creator learning to let go, and now Shin Kamen Rider is a postmortem of Hideaki Anno re-examining his past personal struggles that ultimately becomes a re-affirmation of his ability to beat it all and come out on top - Kamen Rider, the ultimate hero, is the literal personification of Anno's newfound love of life, of hope, and of humanity. Eva was born out of a young creator's struggle with depression. Shin KR is, even moreso than Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0, the perfect post-Evangelion Anno work. There's such a myriad of ways to interpret Shin Kamen Rider on a thematic level either as an update of the original '71 classic to combat and address modern cynicism, a conclusion and culmination of the Shin trilogy's modern themes, as a standalone character study on what makes a hero.but where Shin KR finally got me.and hit me in the heart, is as a wholesale metaphor for Hideaki Anno's personal struggles and where he is as a person now. and now, Shin Kamen Rider has its protagonist's humanity forcibly taken away from him, forcibly turned into a monster himself, but despite tragedy, hope perseveres, he makes a choice to turn his newfound abilities against his creators to become a hero of his own accord. Shin Ultraman starred a being that toed the line between extraterrestrial and human, an impossibly optimistic entity that believed in not just hope, but the inherent goodness of life and humanity a beacon of heroism and selflessness. Shin Godzilla focused on a monster for whom existence itself is pain, the folly and failure of mankind. And although the source material consists of otherwise disparate, disconnected media only linked through history, Anno and Higuchi commit to a throughline that connects them altogether into a thematic trilogy that's greater than the sum of its parts. Extreme personal hype aside, this film is also the culmination of Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi's "Shin" trilogy, a series of vaguely connected modern reboots of classic tokusatsu works starting with Godzilla, then Ultraman, and now Kamen Rider. Extreme personal hype aside, this film is also the culmination of Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi's "Shin" trilogy, a series of vaguely connected modern reboots of classic tokusatsu works starting with In no small words, this is kind of the movie I've been waiting to see for my whole life. In no small words, this is kind of the movie I've been waiting to see for my whole life.
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