The secret method for making Evangelion plugsuit anime noises has been revealed (and preserved)

Studio Khara shows, literally, how Eva’s creators made the sounds that the anime’s iconic pilot suits made.

Part of what makes anime such a compelling artistic statement is that since it’s not being filmed in the real world, every little bit of the visual design has to be crafted by the creators. The precise arrangement of bolts in a plate of Gundam or Valkyrie armor? The specific shade of blue for a mysterious heroine’s hair color? The number of crumbs that go flying from the piece of toast that was dangling from a protagonist’s mouth when they crash into their future love interest while running to school? All things that the artists involved had to decide on.

But it’s easy to forget that the built-from-scratch aspect applies not just to how anime looks, but how it sounds too. For example, the design work for Evangelion’s iconic plugsuits, as the series’ mecha pilot outfits are called, didn’t stop when the visuals were set. The studio then had to decide on, and craft, the audio aspects for when characters were moving around in them.

▼ You can hear some plugsuit sounds at the point cued up in the video here as Asuka changes into hers.

The exact material of the plugsuits isn’t mentioned within the anime, but the sturdy, shiny, form-fitting substance looks like leather or vinyl, and so the sound team decided that it should make a slippery, squeaky noise. So how did they go about making it? With a handbag, specifically the handbag shown in the photo below, shared by current Evangelion studio and rightsholder Khara.

https://twitter.com/khara_inc2/status/1889247152360308788

And to be clear, the photo shows not just the model that was used to create Evangelion’s plugsuit sounds, but the exact bag itself. In other words, for scenes where the Eva pilots were moving around in their plugsuits, it was somebody’s job to go bend, scrunch, and stroke the bag above to produce the required sound effects.

This type of bag, popularly called a “Madison bag” in Japan, saw a boom in sales in the 1970s. Originally produced by request from a Tokyo department store, the Madison bags were sold by Japanese bag company Ace, combining the functionality of a Boston bag with an enamel athletic club aesthetic that evoked the name of New York’s most famous sports venue for a jaunty, cosmopolitan feel. However, Ace appears to no longer produce the bags, and the lack of the Ace logo on the one used for Evangelion suggests the plugsuit sounds might have come from a similarly styled bag made by another company.

The simple and clever solution for how to make the plugsuit sounds harkens back to the student days of Evangelion director Hideaki Anno and his cohorts from Gainax (the anime series’ original studio), when they made names for themselves as passionate and talented artists who produced jaw-dropping short anime on shoestring budgets. For longtime fans of the franchise it’s good to know that a piece of anime-making history has been preserved and is available should the need ever arise to make new plugsuit sounds, just like we now know how to make Gundam Newtype noises.

Source: Twitter/@khara_inc2 via Hachima Kiko
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