Neon Genesis Evangelion (franchise)

• 1. Introduction

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  Neon Genesis Evangelion first aired on TV Tokyo in October 1995, looking for all the world like another giant-robot action show. Teenagers piloting mecha. Monsters from the sky. The familiar furniture of the genre. But by the time the final episode ran in March 1996, viewers were left with something far stranger: a series that had turned its own genre inside out and asked its audience to sit with questions about identity, trauma, and the nature of existence. Critics reached for the word "controversial" almost continuously, then added "complex" and kept writing. How did a studio-bound anime television series become one of the most discussed works in its medium? What drove its creator, Hideaki Anno, to layer Jewish mysticism and Freudian psychology into a show about giant robots? And why, decades after that original broadcast, does the franchise keep expanding into new films, manga, theme park attractions, and now a newly announced anime series?

• 2. The World After Second Impact

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  A cataclysmic explosion in Antarctica in the year 2000 is the event that shapes everything in the franchise's fictional universe. That disaster, called the Second Impact, killed billions of people and knocked the Earth off its axis. Fifteen years later, the story begins. Mysterious beings called Angels start appearing and pose an existential threat to what remains of humanity. The paramilitary agency NERV, operating under the authority of the United Nations, is tasked with fighting them. Its weapon of choice is the Evangelion, a giant bio-mechanical warrior. The pilots who operate these machines are not soldiers. They are children, selected teenagers, with focus falling on Shinji Ikari, Rei Ayanami, and Asuka Langley Soryu. As the battles unfold, the series peels back the layers of the world it has built. The true nature of Rei, the Evangelions themselves, and the Angels all shift under examination. The shadowy organization SEELE, operating in the background alongside NERV, pursues a secret objective called the Human Instrumentality Project, in which human souls are merged into a single divine entity. The precise outcome of that project differs across the anime, the films, the manga, and the video games, making the franchise's central mystery a living, contested thing rather than a fixed answer.

• 3. Religious and Psychological Depths

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  Shinto cosmology sits alongside Jewish and Christian mystical traditions in the series, including Midrashic tales and Kabbalah. Adam and Lilith appear as figures of cosmic significance. The Dead Sea Scrolls are invoked as a source of forbidden knowledge. Running beneath all of it is the psychoanalytic work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, whose theories of human behavior the series draws on explicitly. This layering was not accidental or decorative. The Human Instrumentality Project, the secret goal shared by NERV and SEELE, is the mechanism through which these philosophical and psychological threads are pulled tightest. Shinji Ikari's inner life is not backdrop; it is subject matter. The series was widely understood to be a deconstruction of the mecha genre, using the conventions of robot anime to examine what drives people to fight, to withdraw, and to seek connection. In 1997, the Japan Media Arts Festival awarded the series its Excellence Award, a formal recognition that the cultural establishment had registered what the show was doing.

• 4. Controversy and the Films That Followed

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  The ending of the original television series generated significant controversy, and the response to that controversy was direct: two films offered an alternate conclusion. Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth arrived in March 1997. Death is a sixty-minute summary of the first twenty-four episodes of the TV series, with new scenes added to prepare the audience for Rebirth, which retells the final two episodes of the series. Death was reworked multiple times after its initial release: once as Death(true), in which those new scenes were removed, and then as Death(true)2, which added Adam's embryo to Gendo's hand and made further edits. Death(true)2 became the version included in Revival of Evangelion. The End of Evangelion, released on the 19th of July 1997, completed what Death & Rebirth had started. Written and directed by Hideaki Anno with co-direction by Kazuya Tsurumaki, and animated by Gainax alongside Production I.G, the film followed SEELE's assault on NERV and the initiation of the Third Impact. It featured the voice actors of the original series, including Megumi Ogata as Shinji, Yuko Miyamura as Asuka, and Megumi Hayashibara as Rei. The film grossed ¥2.47 billion at the Japanese box office and won the 1997 Animage Anime Grand Prix, the Animation Kobe award, and the "Most Popular Film" prize at the Awards of the Japanese Academy. Some reviewers praised its violence, direction, and emotional power while others took issue with its oblique religious symbolism.

• 5. Manga, Novels, and Print

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  Before a single episode of the anime had aired, the manga was already running. Series character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto began serializing the official Neon Genesis Evangelion manga in February 1995, eight months before the show's premiere, explicitly to build interest in the upcoming broadcast. That serialization ran for nineteen years, ending in November 2014. Seven other manga followed, covering a wide range of tones and genres: a shoujo romance called Angelic Days by Fumino Hayashi, a shonen comedy called Shinji Ikari Raising Project by Takahashi Osamu, a self-parody titled It's A Miraculous Win by Koume Yoshida, a mystery series called Campus Apocalypse by Min Min, a detective story called The Shinji Ikari Detective Diary, and a gamer-themed parody subtitled Legend of the Piko-Piko Middle School Students. The light novel series Neon Genesis Evangelion: ANIMA, serialized from 2008 to 2013 in Dengeki Hobby Magazine, was written by the series' mechanical designer Ikuto Yamashita. Set in an alternate future diverging from the anime, it begins three years after the Human Instrumentality Project, with three clones of Rei Ayanami placed inside Eva units and sent into space to locate and destroy surviving mass-produced Evangelion units. Art books also became a significant part of the print footprint. Yoshiyuki Sadamoto's two German-titled volumes, Der Mond and Die Sterne, collect concept art, character designs, and commentary, and include selections from his work on other projects such as Nadia and Fatal Fury 2.

• 6. Rebuild of Evangelion

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  Studio Khara, the company Hideaki Anno founded after departing Gainax, produced a tetralogy of films known as Rebuild of Evangelion. Anno served as writer and general manager; Kazuya Tsurumaki and Masayuki directed the films themselves. Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Ikuto Yamashita, and Shiro Sagisu returned to provide character designs, mechanical designs, and music. The first film, Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone, was released in Japan on the 1st of September 2007. Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance followed on the 27th of June 2009, and Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo was released on the 17th of November 2012. The fourth and final film, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, arrived on the 8th of March 2021. The tetralogy used digital ink and paint as well as some CG animation. Its stated aim was to be more accessible to viewers who had no familiarity with the original series. The Rebuild films present an alternate retelling of episodes 1-19 of the television series, introducing new scenes, settings, and characters before arriving at a completely new conclusion. On the 8th of March 2023, the home media release of Thrice Upon a Time included two new original video animations: Evangelion: 3.0 (-46h) and Evangelion: 3.0 (-120min).

• 7. Music, Games, and Pachinko

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  Shiro Sagisu composed most of the music for Neon Genesis Evangelion across three original soundtrack albums for the television series. His work earned him the 1997 Kobe Animation award for Best Music Score. King Records and their label Starchild distributed most of the albums, singles, and box sets. The opening theme, "A Cruel Angel's Thesis," was performed by Yoko Takahashi. The ending theme drew on "Fly Me to the Moon," originally composed by Bart Howard, performed here by various members of the anime's voice cast. A classical music series called Evangelion Classic ran to four volumes, each featuring works by a different composer: Beethoven, Verdi, Handel, and J.S. Bach. Video games extended the franchise into action, fighting, visual novel, and rhythm game formats. The Nintendo 64 adaptation and its PlayStation 2 sequel, the fighting game Battle Orchestra, and the visual novels Girlfriend of Steel and Girlfriend of Steel 2nd all drew on the franchise's characters and setting. Evangelion characters also appeared in the Super Robot Wars series by Banpresto and in collaborative events with Monster Strike by Mixi and The Battle Cats. The pachinko and pachislot market proved substantial: by 2015, more than two million Evangelion pachinko and pachislot machines had been sold, generating ¥700 billion in revenue.

• 8. Live-Action, Theme Parks, and What Came Next

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  At the Cannes Film Festival on the 21st of May 2003, Gainax, Weta Workshop, and ADV Films announced a live-action film adaptation. ADV had raised roughly half of an estimated $100-120 million production budget, and Weta Workshop had produced some concept art. ADV founders Matt Greenfield and John Ledford later said, at Anime Expo 2008, that they had hired producer John Woo and pitched the project to Jerry Bruckheimer and Steven Spielberg. The collapse and asset sale of A.D. Vision in September 2009 raised questions about whether the project could survive. In August 2011, ADV filed suit against Gainax, claiming Gainax's refusal to accept an option payment for the live-action rights was a breach of contract. Gainax returned the $100,000 payment and rejected the claim. By 2019, Tiffany Grant, who voiced Asuka in the ADV localization, told Polygon the project had never had a shooting script or any signed crew or cast. Anno himself has been consistently resistant to the concept, stating that Evangelion was conceived as animation and made with a Japanese audience in mind, and that he believes Eva could not be properly expressed in live-action. On the physical side, Fuji-Q Highland opened a section devoted to Evangelion on the 22nd of July 2010, spanning 1,460 square meters and featuring a lifesize entry plug, an approximately 3-meter titanium Lance of Longinus, and a 1:1 bust of Eva Unit-01. The Godzilla vs. Evangelion: The Real 4-D attraction ran at Universal Studios Japan from the 31st of May to the 25th of August 2019. In February 2026, following the 30th Anniversary festival at Yokohama Arena, a new anime series was announced, to be produced by CloverWorks and Khara and directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki and Toko Yatabe, with scripts by Yoko Taro and music by Keiichi Okabe.