Love & Pop: Hideaki Anno’s Evangelion Follow-Up Rewrote Cinematic Language

Love & Pop, Hideaki Anno’s first live-action movie, just had its North American theatrical premiere at the IFC Center in New York, with plans to expand to more theaters in the coming weeks. This 1998 film previously received a US DVD release in 2004. This is more than can be said for Anno’s second live-action feature, the technically Ghibli-produced Shiki-Jitsu. But compared to the anime juggernaut of Neon Genesis Evangelion and the blockbuster success of Shin Godzilla, Love & Pop remains an obscurity amidst Anno’s filmography.

An experimental film following four high school girls wrapped up in the world of enjo kosai (“compensated dating,” wherein older men pay for their company), Love & Pop is disturbing viewing. What else would you expect from an adaptation of a novel by Ryu Murakami, whose work also inspired Takashi Miike’s Audition? Anno directed the film right after The End of Evangelion—it takes place on July 19, 1997, the day of End of EVA’s release. Love & Pop occupies a similarly dark psychological space without any giant robots to provide a shield of fantasy.

On the technical side of things, Love & Pop is quietly one of the most revolutionary films of the ‘90s, fortelling an enormous shift in how movies would be made in the coming century. During End of EVA’s production, Anno became obsessed with the camcorders used to film the behind-the-scenes footage. He decided that he would use them to make his next movie.  Digital video was commonplace for pornography and skate videos, but using it to make a serious drama was unheard of. There was nothing else that looked like Love & Pop in 1998. Even in 2025, when more advanced digital video has long supplanted celluloid as the most common method of moviemaking, Love & Pop remains utterly unique. While it has become a retro time capsule, the boldness of Anno’s direction amidst its technical limitations still feels like the future.

The Early History of Digital Cinematography

Based on its Japanese release date of January 9, 1998, Love & Pop appears by my research to be the first ever movie shot primarily on digital video to play in theaters. Paul Wagner’s Windhorse, an American drama filmed in Tibet and Nepal, and Neil Johnson’s Australian horror film The Demons in My Head have both made claim to having the first digital movie shoots in 1996. But the former wouldn’t premiere until September 16, 1998 at the Toronto International Film Festival. The latter went direct to video.

Most Western critical analysis of digital cinema starts with Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration and Lars Von Trier’s The Idiots, the first two Dogme 95 movies from Denmark. Both premiered in May 1998 at the Cannes Film Festival. The Dogme 95 movement followed stringent rules, or “Vows of Chastity” – including prohibitions on sets, props, artificial lighting, and sound editing – as a rejection of Hollywood artifice. Digital video cameras weren’t required by these rules, but became associated with the movement because they made it easier to follow the requirement for handheld cinematography.

Love & Pop’s dizzying handheld shots sometimes resemble those in The Celebration, but it uses digital cinematography for opposite ends. Where Dogme 95 enforced minimalism, Anno’s movie went for maximalism – between the two, you get the full spectrum of the budding technology’s possibilities. Cinematographer Takahide Shibanushi placed cameras on heads for first-person shots, under skirts, atop model trains, inside drinking glasses, spinning on bicycle wheels, anywhere you can imagine. Hiroshi Okuda’s editing pushes the filmmaking style to further extremities; some shots last only a split-second, while others are merged in overlays or repeated in split-screens to the point of abstraction.

Dogme 95 was, in theory, an anti-auteurist movement. The 10th Vow of Chastity prohibited director credits and pleaded for filmmakers to “refrain from personal taste.” (The Dogme films of iconoclastic directors like Lars von Trier and Harmony Korine, though, are often still analyzed within the context of their filmographies.) Love & Pop would violate almost all the vows, but this one perhaps the most. Anyone who knows Anno’s work could clock this as one of his movies even if he wasn’t credited. The only recent films that have as many weird camera angles as  Love & Pop would be Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s Shin Godzilla and Shin Ultraman. Not to mention that Love & Pop’s surreal inner monologue climax about learning to love yourself and recognize that other people care about you plays like yet another ending of Evangelion. As Hayao Miyazaki put it, Anno’s greatest strength is “being honest” – his “personal taste” enters every aspect of his work.

The Innovative Filmmaking Reflected Anno’s Curious Perspective

While Love & Pop is a product of Anno’s personal taste, it can’t possibly be as personal as his soul-bearing work in Evangelion. EVA turned out the way it did due to the creator’s own psychological crises during production. In light of this, the “Making Of Love & Pop” documentary actively sought to film “Anno breaking down.” But no such big breakdowns occurred. Anno’s own thought process remained fairly secretive and seemingly indecisive throughout the production. He wasn’t sure whether or not to frame the story as a fake documentary until filming began. Then he changed the original idea for the ending, the one part of the movie presented on traditional 35mm film, at the last minute.

Where Shinji served as Anno’s self-insert in Evangelion, the director has no direct analogue within the cast of Love & Pop. He can empathize with the ennui of his teen girl protagonists, getting into the head of the main girl Hiromi Yoshii (Asumi Miwa) in particular. He even did extensive research into the experiences of real call girls. But he did not have those life experiences himself. Anno might see his otaku qualities reflected in the film’s adult male characters, but he does not want to be them. The movie’s wandering, constantly shifting camera fits Anno’s approach to the material: sometimes deeply empathetic and sometimes awkwardly leering, sometimes distant and sometimes uncomfortably close, but always trying for understanding from every possible angle.

To watch Love & Pop in 2025 is to be stunned by how much Hideaki Anno pulled off with so little. It’s simultaneously ugly and beautiful, with so many incredible compositions captured on the worst quality video. The style matches the intensity of the narrative: sometimes difficult to watch, yet impossible to look away from. This is not a movie recommended for all viewers— seriously, heed the content warnings. But mature fans of Anno’s other anime and live-action work, as well as cinephiles with an interest in the medium’s history and a taste for the experimental, will find it a powerful and unforgettable experience.

Article Editor: Adam Wescott