Neon Genesis Evangelion

• 1. Introduction

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  Neon Genesis Evangelion arrived on TV Tokyo in October 1995 and left viewers arguing, confused, and deeply moved in ways that animated series rarely managed. The show ran through March 1996, set in a future Tokyo rebuilt as a fortified city called Tokyo-3, fifteen years after a global disaster known as the Second Impact. At its center sat a fourteen-year-old boy named Shinji Ikari, pressed by his estranged father into climbing inside a giant biomechanical weapon and fighting monstrous beings called Angels. On the surface it looked like a robot action series. It was not.

  By the time it ended, Neon Genesis Evangelion had sparked a national debate in Japan, sold merchandise worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and prompted one prominent cultural commentator to write to the Yomiuri Shimbun in protest. Its final two episodes were unlike anything that had aired before: abstract, introspective, drawn partly in still images and simple line work. Director Hideaki Anno called the whole project a metaphor for his own four-year depression.

  What kind of show begins with giant-robot combat and ends inside the mind of a boy who tells himself "I mustn't run away"? What drove Anno to build something so personal out of such unlikely materials? And how did a series made with only three dedicated in-house staff members become one of the most influential works of animation ever produced?

• 2. A Depression's Blueprint

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  Hideaki Anno had fallen into a serious depression after completing work on the anime series Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water. A sequel project he was attached to, a film called Uru in Blue, failed in 1992. According to Gainax co-founder Yasuhiro Takeda, it was over drinks with King Records representative Toshimichi Otsuki that Anno agreed to develop something new. King Records guaranteed him a time slot for, as Takeda put it, "something, anything".

  Anno began developing the new series in 1993. The core idea came directly from Uru in Blue: the theme of not running away. He wanted a protagonist who habitually avoided responsibility and found himself forced to confront it. Early in development he stated publicly that he wanted Evangelion to grow the number of anime fans, attract new audiences to the medium, and inject fresh energy into the mecha genre. Several formats were considered: a film, a television series, an original video animation. The producers chose television because it was the most widely accessible medium in Japan at the time.

  Anno also originally proposed titling the series Alcion, but this was rejected for lacking hard consonant sounds. He conceived of Evangelion as a direct channel for his own emotional state: he tried to imprint his feelings into the work. A friend lent him a book on mental illness partway through production, and this sparked a growing interest in psychology that would eventually redirect the entire show's second half.

  The production ran close to deadlines throughout. By episode thirteen, the series had deviated so significantly from the original story that the initial plan was abandoned. The number of Angels was cut from twenty-eight to seventeen. Anno later stated that Gainax, despite being the lead studio, had inadequate materials and staff; only three Gainax employees worked on the series at any given time. Most production was outsourced to Tatsunoko Production.

• 3. Shinji, Rei, Asuka

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  Anno designed every major character to reflect a piece of his own personality. Shinji Ikari, the series protagonist, witnessed his mother Yui Ikari's death as a child and was then abandoned by his father. Anno described him as a boy who "shrinks from human contact" and has "convinced himself that he is a completely unnecessary person." Shinji repeats the phrase "I mustn't run away" as a kind of internal command throughout the series, though he frequently does run away, particularly after witnessing harm come to people close to him.

  Rei Ayanami, the pilot of Evangelion Unit-00, is revealed over the course of the series to be a clone created from the salvaged remains of Yui Ikari. She carries a negative sense of self-worth rooted in knowing she is replaceable, and her close relationship with Gendo Ikari initially makes her hostile toward Shinji. Character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto later described her design as becoming so commercially powerful that the media called her "Premium Girl" due to the high sales of books featuring her on the cover.

  Asuka Langley Soryu, the German-Japanese-American pilot of Unit-02, is a child prodigy whose fierce pride masks a childhood trauma: she discovered her mother's body shortly after her suicide and resolved never to cry again. Her relationship with Shinji was initially modeled on the one between Jean and Nadia in Anno's earlier series Nadia. Sadamoto designed all the characters so their personalities could, in his words, "be understood more or less at a glance."

  The commanding officer overseeing the pilots, Misato Katsuragi, embodies a split between her competent professional persona at Nerv and a self-described carefree irresponsibility at home. Anno described Shinji and Misato together as people "afraid of being hurt" and "unsuitable for what people call heroes of an adventure."

• 4. Sacred Symbols, Borrowed Myths

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  Sachiel, the first Angel Shinji faces, shares its name with a figure from Jewish religious tradition. That naming choice is not incidental. The series draws extensively from Midrashic literature, Kabbalistic imagery from the Zohar, and elements derived from the Book of Genesis, weaving them into a new Evangelion-specific mythology. The Angels as a group include Sandalphon and Ramiel alongside Sachiel, all names with roots in the religious tradition.

  Assistant director Kazuya Tsurumaki said directly that the religious visual references were intended to make the series more interesting and exotic for a Japanese audience. He denied any deeper religious meaning behind the Christian symbols. Anno himself described the approach in terms of layering: "as the symbols are mixed together, for the first time something like an interrelationship or a meaning emerges."

  Writer Patrick Drazen identified substantial allusions to the Kojiki and the Nihongi, the foundational texts of Shinto cosmology, alongside references to the mythical lances of the Shinto deities Izanagi and Izanami. The Lance of Longinus, borrowed from Christian tradition, also appears in the series. The Human Instrumentality Project, in which all human souls are merged into one, has been compared by commentators to the Kabbalistic concept of tikkun olam. The Evangelion units themselves have been likened to the golem of Jewish folklore, while their visual design draws from the traditional depiction of oni, the demons or ogres of Japanese myth.

  Anno drew on psychoanalytic frameworks with equal deliberateness. He stated that Rei represents Shinji's unconscious and exhibits schizophrenic qualities. Shinji carries an Oedipus complex and what Anno described as a libido-destrudo conflict. The scientist Ritsuko Akagi has an Electra complex, directed toward Gendo as a father substitute. Anno identified Kaworu Nagisa, the final Angel, as his own Jungian shadow. Shinji's entry into Unit-01 has been interpreted as a Freudian return to the womb.

• 5. The Contested Finale

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  Starting with episode sixteen, titled "Splitting of the Breast," the series abandoned its grand narrative of preventing catastrophe in favor of a sustained examination of the pilots' interior lives. This shift coincided with Anno's deepening interest in psychology after reading that book on mental illness. The final two episodes were filmed entirely from an introspective perspective, using abstract animation, flashbacks, simple line drawings, photographs, still image sequences, and voice-over dialogue.

  Necessity forced the change as much as artistic choice. Anno had to abandon the script for episode twenty-five and build a new one. Toshio Okada said that the unconventional choices were not simply the result of budget shortfalls: Anno "couldn't decide the ending until the time came. That's his style." Critics speculated widely about budget cuts; Okada rejected that framing as incomplete.

  The response was fierce. The Mainichi Times reported that after the penultimate episode aired, "nearly all viewers felt betrayed." When commentator Eiji Otsuka sent a letter to the Yomiuri Shimbun criticizing the ending, the debate spread nationwide. English voice actors later admitted they also struggled to understand the conclusion. Opinion split between viewers who found the episodes successfully introspective and those who felt the meaning was, as one faction put it, "more apparent than real."

  Anno stood by his choices. In 1997, Gainax released two films responding to the controversy. Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death and Rebirth, released on the 15th of March 1997, consisted of recap footage and the first thirty minutes of a new ending, cut short by production issues. The End of Evangelion, which premiered on the 19th of July 1997, delivered the complete alternate resolution. Rather than staging the climax inside the characters' minds, it provided a more conventional action-based ending. The film won multiple awards and grossed 1.45 billion yen within six months of release.

• 6. Commercial Force

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  Ten months before the television broadcast, character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto published the first installment of a manga adaptation in the February issue of Shonen Ace in December 1994. Several publishers had concerns about commissioning Sadamoto, viewing him as too out of fashion to be commercially viable. Those concerns proved spectacularly wrong. The first ten volumes sold over 15 million copies. The eleventh volume reached number one on the Tohan charts, with an additional two million copies sold. The manga ran for eighteen years, with its final installment published in June 2013.

  Merchandise revenue exceeded 400 million dollars within two years of the series' release. At the time of the 1997 films, estimated sales of Evangelion-related goods had already topped 300 million dollars, with 70 percent of that figure derived from video and laser disc sales, soundtrack and single CDs, computer software, and the three-volume manga. Toy companies had initially resisted licensing the Evangelion units, calling the stylized mecha designs too difficult to manufacture and predicting that models "would never sell." Sega eventually agreed to license all toy and video game sales.

  The home video release history reflects the scale of the audience. ADV Films distributed the series in North America and Europe beginning in August 1996. The Platinum Edition DVD series, released between July 2004 and April 2005, went through multiple reconfigurations including a Platinum Complete Edition in November 2005 and a Platinum Perfect Collection tin case in November 2007. Netflix acquired worldwide streaming rights in November 2018. Following Gainax's bankruptcy and closure between May and June 2024, Anno's current studio, Khara, gained full copyright over the franchise.

  By 2015, more than two million Evangelion pachinko and pachislot machines had been sold. The opening theme, "A Cruel Angel's Thesis" performed by Yoko Takahashi, won JASRAC's annual award fifteen years after its release for the royalties it continued to generate from pachinko, karaoke, and other venues.

• 7. Reshaping the Medium

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  In the mid-1990s, the Japanese animation industry was in decline. The economic crash of the preceding years had reduced production, and a creative stagnation had followed. Evangelion aired into that vacuum. CNET reviewer Tim Hornyak credits it specifically with transforming the giant mecha genre. TV Tokyo's Keisuke Iwata has said that Evangelion caused the global spread of Japanese animation to expand dramatically.

  Roland Kelts, writing on Japanese popular culture, argued that the series' success made anime more accessible to international youth audiences. John Lynden linked its popularity to a wider boom in readership of books about the Dead Sea Scrolls, Kabbalah, and Christianity. Japanese critic Manabu Tsuribe called Evangelion "extremely interior and lacking in sociality, so that it seems to reflect pathology of the times."

  Character Rei Ayanami's design and personality traits were directly emulated in multiple late-1990s anime characters: Ruri Hoshino in Nadesico, Lain Iwakura in Serial Experiments Lain, Anthy Himemiya in Revolutionary Girl Utena, and others. Manga artist Nobuhiro Watsuki designed several characters in Rurouni Kenshin based on Evangelion characters. Makoto Shinkai and Gege Akutami, creator of Jujutsu Kaisen, both cited the series as an influence.

  The series won first place in the Anime Grand Prix "Best Loved Series" category in both 1996 and 1997. The End of Evangelion won first place in 1998, making Evangelion the first anime franchise to win three consecutive Anime Grand Prix first-place awards. A 2006 survey of 80,000 attendees at the Japan Media Arts Festival ranked it the most popular anime of all time. The Rebuild of Evangelion film series, a four-part retelling with a new ending, ran from September 2007 through March 2021, with the final film Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time released on the 8th of March 2021 after two delays.