Ask Lemmy

90s parody movies lean way too hard into deconstruction, and aren't very good at it. They're trying to say "here's how that would really go" but lack the patience to be clever. E.g. Scary Movie 3 having a character square off against the scary girl from The Ring. That's not a fully-formed joke. That's a three-second cutaway gag in Family Guy.

The clearest line between deconstruction and reconstruction might be Neon Genesis Evangelion versus Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.

Eva takes the cynicism and plausible physics of real-robot shows like Mobile Suit Gundam, and applies them to children piloting skyscraper-sized combat vehicles in monster-of-the-week battles. It doesn't kill off characters left and right, and the action is rarely gory or played for shock value, but there's a level of emotional violence that is unmatched outside of surrealism. It has an audience-insert protagonist specifically to go "this is you, and that is bad." The last few episodes are infamously a sharp left turn into abstract philosophy and, like... giving characters therapy. On some level Neon Genesis Evangelion is a mecha anime series that actively despises its audience for enjoying mecha anime.

Gurren went "yeah that's nice" and wrote a love letter to joyously stupid mecha anime. The universe literally runs on whatever sounds awesome. It is unselfconsciously goofy in a way that wraps back around to being cool as fuck. Now: it's not unaware of criticism. It was made by the same studio as Evangelion. But the key figures would eventually split off into Studio Trigger, whose output is primarily reconstructions - shows rooted in asking "how would this insane premise really work?" and then building a fun story within that universe.