The End of Evangelion

• 1. Introduction

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  The End of Evangelion, a 1997 Japanese animated film, carried a startling line on its poster: "Wouldn't it be nice if everyone would just die?" Japanese media seized on the contrast with the poster for Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke, which said "Live!" Both films dealt in mature and violent themes, yet they pointed in opposite directions.

  Hideaki Anno and Kazuya Tsurumaki directed the film, Anno wrote it, and the studios Gainax and Production I.G animated it. It is an alternate ending to the television series Neon Genesis Evangelion, which aired from 1995 to 1996.

  Why did a series that had already finished need a second ending? What state was its director in when he made it? Why did the people behind the project talk about burying their own creation? And what did the film have to say to the very fans who had demanded it? The answers begin with an audience that was not satisfied.

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• 2. After the Finale

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  On the 26th of April 1996, about a month after the final episode aired, the magazine Monthly Shonen Ace announced a remake of the last two episodes and a feature-length film. The announcement answered a storm of discussion. Many viewers of Neon Genesis Evangelion felt let down by how the series ended.

  According to staff statements, schedule problems, production delays and some indecision on the part of Anno led to the abandonment of the original script for the penultimate episode. For the final episode, titled "Take care of yourself", Anno said in an interview that he had roughly followed the original plan.

  The last two episodes turned inward, filled with long inner monologues from the protagonists. Gainax staff felt they met expectations. Many fans disagreed. The finale resolved the series' main psychological themes but abandoned its main plot. The argument spread across Japan and only raised the series' already-high popularity. Fans demanded a new ending, or at least answers to the open questions.

  Anno took the reaction badly. He felt people accused him of being sloppy and negligent. He also read online discussions in which some people argued about the best way to kill him. He no longer wanted to work in animation and contemplated suicide. His friend, the director Hayao Miyazaki, advised him to take a break, and Anno rested for a few months.

  The project itself changed shape along the way. It was first meant as an original video animation for the home-video market. The series' success persuaded a Japanese consortium to fund it so generously that it became a theatrical film. The backers included Imagica, a film post-production company, and fashion companies such as Fiorucci, Americanino and Edwin.

  Character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto suggested setting the film in winter, in contrast to the eternal summer that traps Japan in the series. Anno liked the idea. He wanted to stage Evangelion battles on snow-covered mountains, however hard that would be to animate. Early plans described an almost destroyed Earth, with humans sheltering inside a zone protected by an AT field barrier. Angels would attack the only bridge linking that zone to the outside world.

  The plan called for a first feature, Death & Rebirth, to conclude the story, and a second feature with a completely different setting. Release was aimed at mid-1997. Then the work on Rebirth ran late. So much material was produced that it had to be split into two releases. Some staff felt reluctant and harassed by the schedule, and the second film with new material was postponed indefinitely.

  In March 1997, Death and Rebirth reached theaters in two segments, one of sixty minutes and one of twenty-five. Death was a montage of the first twenty-four episodes, with some unreleased sequences. Rebirth showed the first twenty minutes of the alternate ending, stopping where Eva-02 begins its confrontation with the Eva Series. Gainax then announced a second concluding film that would tell the same ending from a new perspective.

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• 3. Two Episodes, Two Directors

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  Production on the film version officially began on the 8th of November 1996. Kazuya Tsurumaki, who had been an assistant director on the television series, took charge of the first segment, "Air". Anno directed the second, "Sincerely Yours". Masayuki and Shinji Higuchi worked on storyboards with Tsurumaki, while Higuchi and Junichi Sato assisted Anno. According to producer Toshimichi Otsuki, the staff began before the series had even finished broadcasting and worked until the last minute.

  The film replaces the series' last two episodes with two segments called "Episode 25'" and "Episode 26'". It opens with Shinji Ikari, a high schooler who pilots Evangelion Unit-01, one of several giant cyborgs built to fight supernatural enemies called Angels. He is distraught after being forced to kill his friend Kaworu Nagisa, who revealed himself as an Angel in human form.

  The paramilitary organization Nerv, which controls the Evangelions, answers to a secret committee called Seele. Seele wants to trigger the Third Impact, an apocalyptic event that will unite human consciousness. Shinji's father, Gendo Ikari, commands Nerv and plans his own version of this Human Instrumentality Project. He hopes to reunite with his dead wife, Yui, whose soul resides in Unit-01.

  Seele sends the Japanese military to seize Nerv and execute its staff. Major Misato Katsuragi is mortally shot while rescuing Shinji, and she begs him to pilot Unit-01 before she dies. Asuka Langley Soryu learns that her dead mother's soul is inside Unit-02. She destroys the military forces, but Seele's mass-produced Evangelions reanimate and tear her unit apart.

  In the second segment, Rei Ayanami betrays Gendo and merges with the Angel Lilith, who grows to gigantic size. Shinji concludes that he is alone and that everyone should die. Lilith answers by starting the Third Impact. Human bodies dissolve into a primordial fluid called LCL, and their souls merge into one consciousness. Shinji weighs reality, individuality and happiness, then decides that life means pain as well as joy. He rejects the merged state, and humanity's souls are set free.

  Gainax first proposed the title Evangelion: Rebirth 2. It was changed during production. The makers wanted to hold a funeral and bury Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Anno chose The End of Evangelion to mark the project's metaphorical death. He preferred to kill it with his own hands rather than watch its popularity slowly fade. Unlike Death and Rebirth, the film had no special advertising campaign, and promotion was minimal.

  The segment titles carry their own references. "Air" had at first echoed a 1957 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein. The staff settled on "Love is Destructive" or "Air", a word that means both atmosphere and music. Gainax had a tradition of naming a final episode after an existing story or film. "Sincerely Yours" honors Charly, the 1968 film based on Daniel Keyes's novel Flowers for Algernon, which reached Japan under the same title.

  The script for "Air" grew out of the unused script for the series' twenty-fifth episode, "Do you love me?" Anno wrote it to sit as close as possible to the ending the authors first intended. For "Sincerely Yours", he added several narrative lines that deepened the themes of the television finale. The two endings were meant to be conceptually identical. Where the series stayed inside the characters' minds, the film looked at Instrumentality from the outside.

  The mood of the exhausted staff leaked into the writing. Shinji's temperament shifted from the series' twenty-fifth episode, which created inconsistencies. Tsurumaki found the film unnecessary until the end. Anno also asked trusted colleagues for ideas on how events could be closed, including Higuchi, Sadamoto and mecha designer Ikuto Yamashita.

  Yamashita imagined an unmade feature in which Eva-01 attacks the German branch of Nerv, which holds a weapon called the "Dead God Spine". Strange rays of light would turn people into werewolf-like creatures. Shinji would run with the wolfmen and be hailed as their king, while Rei would coldly kill one, saying she hates animals.

  Other plans fell away too. An opening scene would have shown Shinji saying goodbye to his friends Kensuke Aida and Toji Suzuhara at their Tokyo-3 middle school. A planned triangle of Lilith and the nine Eva Series units became a horizontal Tree of Life instead. The film's last scene, in which Shinji strangles Asuka until she caresses his face, came from something that happened to an acquaintance of Anno. A malicious man once strangled her, and as she was about to be killed, she caressed him.

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• 4. Voices, Wires, and Cameras

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  Anno asked the voice cast to record the film from scratch, with detailed instructions for almost every scene. All the series actors returned, except for characters cut during writing, such as Toji and Kensuke. He wanted the actors to perform as if for live action rather than in the usual animated style. To let the dialogue breathe, he sometimes pointed the camera from behind, or kept characters off-screen or distant, so lip-synching and faces would not distract the recording.

  Megumi Ogata, who voices Shinji, found screaming hard. In the final scene, Yuko Miyamura could not produce a convincing strangulation sound as Asuka, so she asked Ogata for help. Ogata actually gripped her colleague's neck, and in her agitation held too tightly, which risked ruining her own voice and almost stopped her from finishing her lines. The scene lasts only a few minutes, yet recording took about ninety minutes.

  Anno also pushed Miyamura on Asuka's last line. He was dissatisfied with a cold delivery of "I can't stand the idea of being killed by someone like you". He asked her to imagine a disturbing scenario involving a stranger who sneaks into her room, and to say what she would do on waking. Miyamura was disgusted and answered him honestly. Anno later changed the line.

  Other performers struggled in their own ways. Kotono Mitsuishi found it hard to voice Misato, who has trouble speaking about her true feelings. Fumihiko Tachiki found Gendo difficult to understand, and his sessions took about two days, with Anno and the sound director guiding him step by step. Akira Ishida, who voices Kaworu, called the role "very difficult" and felt "a lot of pressure", which grew when he learned there would be two features.

  The film looked different from the series as well. The television show was produced on 16mm film, but the movie used 35mm. Kazuchika Kise of Production I.G and Takeshi Honda directed the animation and mecha design. Tsurumaki was called in at the last minute to help with coloring. Masayuki supervised the sequences with water or waves, usually considered the hardest animation to draw.

  Computer graphics added depth. Omnibus Japan, which had worked on Patlabor 2: The Movie and Ghost in the Shell, made the most important contribution. Production I.G handled 3D scenes that were nearly impossible by traditional methods, such as the introduction of the nine Eva Series units. Gainax made the 2D computer scenes, such as screens. Most of the computer graphics came at the start of the Human Instrumentality and Third Impact scenes, where cruciform lights sprinkle the globe. Short watercolor frames were also inserted into the Instrumentality sequence.

  Sound effects went to Toru Noguchi, who had worked with Anno on Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water. Anno demanded maximum realism. For the Evangelions he wanted the noise that bundles of wires would make if they contracted like muscles, so he avoided the sounds typical of mecha anime. He asked for a World War II machine gun and the sounds of particular historical ships. The Prog-Knife got the reworked metallic noise of a real cutter. Even the background cicadas were modulated to harmonize with the soundtrack.

  For "Sincerely Yours", the makers added live-action footage to portray Shinji's inner universe. It shows street lamps, trains, graffiti and the three main female voice actors, Megumi Hayashibara, Kotono Mitsuishi and Yuko Miyamura, all optically distorted. Work began on the 19th of January 1997 in the snowy city of Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture, with more filming in Kofu. The cinema scene was shot on the 14th of March at the premiere of Death and Rebirth. On the 8th of May the crew filmed three dummies of Rei, Asuka and Misato on a city street, and on the 10th they finished at a playground.

  The segment ends with stills of graffiti on the walls of the Gainax Shop, doodles, and emails that seem to come from fans. The staff wrote them specially, modeled on emails Gainax had received. An official pamphlet said the faked messages were meant to reflect on the relationship between a work and its admirers.

  The live-action section was once meant to run longer. It centered on Asuka, who would wake in an apartment after a night with Toji Suzuhara, with Misato as her neighbor and Rei as a friendlier colleague. In that alternate world Shinji never existed, yet Asuka would hear his voice calling her through the streets of Tokyo-2. Anno cut it during production, after the unplanned double theatrical release, according to Evangelion Chronicle magazine.

  Years later, a reconstruction appeared in Renewal of Evangelion and later Blu-ray editions. It is incomplete because the original materials were lost when the plan changed mid-filming. Anno rebuilt as much of his original concept as he could without new filming or recording, and he added Shinji's closing line, which had never been recorded.

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• 5. Bach and Bitter Songs

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  Shiro Sagisu, who wrote the music for the original series, also composed the score for the film. Alongside it, the film draws on a wide selection of pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach. The first episode takes its title from the second movement of the orchestral suite No. 3, known as "Air on the G String", which plays in one of its key scenes. The second half also uses the tenth movement of Bach's cantata "Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben".

  Critics compared the use of classical music in violent scenes to the films of Stanley Kubrick. When an interviewer raised the similarity, Anno replied that Kubrick had not influenced him "that much". Sagisu arranged and recorded his own version of "Air on the G String", while the pianist Jan Panenka's existing recording of "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" was used as it was.

  Two original songs were written for the movie. "Thanatos: If I can't be yours" builds on the original series' soundtrack and was performed by the gospel singer Loren with the artist Martin Lascelles, who used the stage name "Mash". Loren recorded it in London in June 1997 under Otsuki's supervision. It plays over the credits between the two segments.

  The second song, "Komm, süsser Tod", meaning "Come, sweet death", was performed by Arianne. Its English lyrics were translated from words by Anno. An official booklet pointed out that a director writing a song for the closing feature of an animated series had a precedent in the third Mobile Suit Gundam feature. The title matches a Bach composition, "Komm, süßer Tod, komm selge Ruh", and its melody has been compared to "Hey Jude" by the Beatles.

  Sagisu tried to make the guitar sound spin through all the surround outputs. Anno wanted every detail, from chord progressions to layered instruments, to fit the images on screen. A Japanese song sung by preschool children was added to a playground scene in "Sincerely Yours" for realism. Producer Satsukawa and a special production team recorded it at Haishima Municipal Kindergarten in Akishima, which the daughter of Production I.G co-founder Mitsuhisa Ishikawa attended.

  In all, eighteen songs were composed and recorded for the film, and the soundtrack came out as two albums in 1997. One song, "Everything You've Ever Dreamed", was meant for the Instrumentality sequences but was dropped during production. It later surfaced on the album Refrain of Evangelion.

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• 6. Borrowed Symbols

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  Anno admitted that he inserted terms to create atmosphere and suggest something deeper behind the story, so that, in his own words, he could sound "intelligent". The film is thick with Jewish and Christian imagery. It mentions the number of the beast, 666, the Tree of Life, the Sephiroth, the Catholic stigmata, the universal flood, Noah's Ark, the Genesis creation story and the Book of Revelation.

  In the early stage of Instrumentality, the Eva Series forms a giant Sephirotic Tree in the sky, and each Eva takes the role of a sephirah. Shinji appears at Tiferet at the moment of his metaphorical sacrifice. A Slant Magazine writer noted that Tiferet in Christian Kabbalah is identified with Christ on the cross.

  Seele names its plan the "Red Earth Purification Ceremony". The name connects to theories that Adam means "earth" or "red", and it also recalls misogi, a Shinto ceremony of blessing. Eva-01 serves as a yorishiro, an object that attracts divine spirits known as kami. Evangelion Chronicle linked Seele's description of Instrumentality as a rite of passage to Arnold van Gennep's anthropological concept and to the sacrament of baptism.

  Sigmund Freud shadows the film too, especially the pairing of Eros and Thanatos. Critics read the characters as caught between the sexual drive and a destructive, suicidal drive that Edoardo Weiss called destrudo. According to Evangelion Chronicle, destrudo in Shinji's mind is needed to start Instrumentality. Scenes such as his destroying a sand pyramid, or childish drawings of dead animals appearing as he strangles Asuka, have been read as the death drive. The writers Kazuhisa Fujie and Martin Foster saw the lyrics of "Thanatos" and "Komm, süsser Tod" as underlining this tension. When Yui tells Shinji that all living beings can regain their form if they wish to live, the life drive wins.

  The staff also named other works as sources. They drew on Devilman by Go Nagai and on Ideon by Yoshiyuki Tomino, whose final chapter proposes wiping out the human race. Critics tied the massacre of Nerv personnel to the slaughter of the Solo Ship, the Tree of Life to the Ide, and the Third Impact to the Ideon's final Armageddon. Anno was also influenced by the final volume of Miyazaki's Nausicaä manga.

  Other critics compared the film to Greg Bear's Blood Music, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which also shows a planetary syzygy. The reviewer Esther Rosenfield argued that its rapid cutting and superimposition owed something to the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Animage magazine described the film as a shishosetsu, an I-novel, a form of Japanese confessional literature.

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• 7. A Message to Fans

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  Anno, an otaku himself, said after the series ended that the opinions of fans lost in the Internet were like "graffiti in public toilets". He found otaku, meaning obsessive fans of animation, games and comics, too closed, too self-referential and too introverted. In 1996 he said he was disappointed that the series had become a refuge from unpleasant things. He meant the film to "purify" viewers, wake them up and return them to the real world.

  He pointed to the message at the start of the twenty-sixth episode: "There is no fiction in that shot. It's real, and it's true". Some fans read the violence as revenge for the criticism of the television ending. Tsurumaki rejected that: "It wasn't a bitterness toward the fans. A lot of people think anime should always have happy endings, but that's not always the case. We wanted to educate the fans that anime can have bitter endings." Some fans also read Shinji as Anno himself, and Asuka as Miyamura, who had been rumored to be romantically involved with him.

  Critics read Instrumentality, where the individual fades into a cosmic fusion, as a metaphor for the plight of otaku. The Japanese critic Manabu Tsuribe argued that the film ends when Shinji recognizes Asuka as a separate being, the Other who can never be fully absorbed. The critic Nozomi Omori called the film Anno arguing with himself about living with anime. She and Tsuribe compared it to Mamoru Oshii's Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer, where the hero returns to an animated reality. In Evangelion, after Asuka's final words, there is no way back.

  In the live-action scene, Rei tells Shinji that one cannot dream alone, because it would be only an alternative to reality. Photographs of Gainax office graffiti and fans at the Shinjuku Milano cinema appear over her words, so the dream reads as a metaphor for anime. Yuichiro Oguro, editor of the home-video materials, said the sequence shows that fans share Shinji's problems. For him, Rei's dismemberment marks the end of the otaku dream.

  Then comes the final shoreline. Shinji and Asuka lie on a deserted beach, and he strangles her until she touches his cheek. He weeps and loosens his grip, and she says, "How disgusting". The academic Mariana Ortega read them as the Adam and Eve of a new humanity, and Hiroyuki Morioka thought everyday life would begin again.

  The website AnimeNation saw Asuka's phrase as her realization that another human being, Shinji, exists, and as a possible echo of Sartre's "Hell is other people". The series' official figurine game offers a similar reading, saying that Shinji's first act was to place his hands around her neck "To feel the existence of an 'other'". The artist Takashi Murakami saw a plea for understanding, with Asuka disgusted because she finds him pathetic. Other critics noted that her words suggest no one has changed.

  Fujie tied the scene to the film's subtitle, "I need you", and to the impossibility of living alone. Tsurumaki offered a modest reading: "I thought the last scene meant to say that life goes on, but I could be wrong".

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• 8. Release and Reception

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  Pre-sales for The End of Evangelion began on the 17th of May 1997, and holders of unused Death and Rebirth tickets could use them. The film opened in Japanese theaters on the 19th of July 1997, after a preview at Yomiuri Hall Cinema two days earlier. Merchandise ranged from posters and drinks to figures and clothing. Theaters sold an illustrated booklet for 800 yen, which Western fans nicknamed the "Red Cross Book".

  The public arrived in force. Evangelion was a national debate in 1997, and the controversy over its ending drew people who rarely watched animation. The film pulled in 400,000 viewers in its first three days, more than Death and Rebirth. It finished the week in third place behind The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Princess Mononoke. It earned about 1.5 billion yen in distributor rentals, making it the fourth-highest-grossing Japanese film of 1997. A 2015 estimate put its total at 2.5 billion yen.

  The soundtrack album sold over 100,000 copies in its first week and reached the top three of the Oricon album charts. No anime soundtrack had done that since Galaxy Express 999, and none repeated it for ten years. It sold about 400,000 units, and the single "Thanatos" sold 600,000. In 1998 the film took first place in the Anime Grand Prix survey run by Animage. That same year, the two overlapping films were merged as Revival of Evangelion, which drew over 300,000 viewers when it opened on the 7th of March.

  Not everyone embraced it. Many fans found the opening scene, in which Shinji commits a sexual act over the comatose Asuka, among the most unpleasant in Japanese animation. When Nippon Television aired the film at midnight on the 25th of August 2014, it cut and censored sequences, which drew protests from fans and the authors. The debate over the two endings was still running on the Internet twenty years after the release.

  Critics were largely positive. Nick Creamer of Anime News Network called it the best ending in Japanese animation. Comic Book Resources called the battle between Asuka and the nine Eva Series units "the beating heart of the film". Paste ranked it 46th among anime movies, the magazine Cut ranked it third, and The Daily Telegraph's Robbie Collin placed it 29th among animated films. Others objected. Carlos Ross of THEM Anime Reviews found the second half incoherent and obtuse, and Anime-Planet called its symbolism pompous. One defender wrote: "Not all great anime is meant to be understood on first viewing".

  Outside Japan, A.D. Vision at first declined the film because Gainax demanded too high a fee. In 1999 Manga Entertainment bought the rights for US$2 million, and the DVD slipped to September 2002. Amanda Winn Lee, Rei's English voice, wrote the subtitles and adaptation and directed the dub, recorded in Los Angeles, Houston and New York City. Home video in Japan began with two Laserdiscs in 1998, and a 2003 DVD gave the sound a new 5.1 surround mix. In late 2020 GKIDS in North America and Anime Limited in the United Kingdom acquired the rights.

  On the 17th and the 20th of March 2024, GKIDS ran the film in North American theaters in Japanese with English subtitles. It earned $1.31 million in the United States and $1.58 million worldwide from 570 locations.

  Its influence keeps surfacing. Dazed said it shaped Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs, and animators cited the fight between Eva-02 and the Eva Series as inspiration. The manga artist Nobuhiro Watsuki praised its dramatization, movement and editing. Steven Universe, Claymore, Chainsaw Man and the last episode of Devilman Crybaby have referenced it, and the band Parkway Drive used clips in an extended play. David Ehrlich of IndieWire noticed a similar apocalyptic scenario in Hideo Kojima's video game Death Stranding.

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