Neon Genesis Evangelion

1995. TV series. (26 X 30 min.) Science fiction. dir Hideaki Anno. scr Hideaki Anno, Shinji Higuchi, Yoji Enokido, others. mus Shiro Sagisu. des Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Hideaki Anno, Ikuto Yamashita, others. -bc

One of the most celebrated—and controversial—anime TV series of all time, Evangelion offers a complicated take on the teen-pilots-in-giant-robots genre by placing its adolescent heroes in life-or-death combat while still sending them to school every day and dealing with their raging hormones.

In the year 2015, in Tokyo-3, a city rebuilt after the destruction caused fifteen years earlier by the Second Impact, a top-secret agency called NERV awaits the onset of attacks by “Angels,” enigmatic otherworldly entities that are both clever and destructive. To meet these attacks, NERV-head Dr. Gendo Ikari has built “Evas,” giant combat robots with biological components meant to be piloted by “chosen” children who were born after the Second Impact and are now fourteen years old. The “Third Child” is Ikari’s own son, Shinji, who is assigned to Eva Unit 01 and joins “First Child” Rei
Ayanami, a quiet, unassuming girl who pilots Eva Unit 00. The two are expected to master their Evas and prevail in battles with Angels, which appear regularly and take on a variety of bizarre and often beautiful forms as they embark on a series of increasingly sophisticated attacks on NERV headquarters.

Shinji is ordered to share an apartment with his instructor, NERV’s chief operations officer, Misato Katsuragi, an impetuous, fun-loving, beer-drinking young woman who is also a hard taskmaster and tough commander. They are joined midway through the series by Asuka Langley, a redheaded German girl and the proclaimed “Second Child,” who is vain, headstrong, and utterly incapable of keeping her feelings to herself. The three adolescents, Shinji, Rei, and Asuka, also attend school and are expected to keep up their grades while saving the world from the Angels. Shinji’s male classroom buddies are Toji and Kensuke, both of whom develop a serious crush on Misato. In this mix, Shinji has to deal with the normal pain and confusion of being a fourteen year old.

As the attacks by Angels step up, more and more is expected of the three pilots. Through it all, deep dark secrets behind the creation of the Evas and the real meaning of the Second Impact (caused, as the official story insists, by a meteorite’s destruction of Antarctica) are hinted at and slowly revealed, as are the pasts of the various characters, revealing a complex interconnectedness between Dr. Ikari; his late wife, Yui; Misato’s late father, Dr. Katsuragi; Ritsuko Akagi, NERV’s chief scientific officer; Ritsuko’s late mother, Dr. Akagi, who programmed and devised the Magi, three central computers which NERV consults for key decisions; and Rei, whose origin is clouded in mystery. It all comes to a head when the Angels figure out how to get as close as possible to the nerve center of the operation. But even then, the principal characters must come to grips with the fact that their main enemy may not be the Angels after all.

Evangelion is done in a boldly experimental fashion that defies the normal expectations of conventionally edited action entertainment. There are frequent ellipses, where things are missing, sometimes to be filled in later as a flashback, sometimes never to be filled in at all. There are flash cuts from the violent to the mundane, from scenes of wrenching battle action to moments of downtime for the protagonists in their high-rise apartment, with equally sudden shifts in the musical accompaniment. There are hallucinatory episodes, occasional abstract backgrounds, and the absurdist touch of Misato’s pet penguin that seems to display an enhanced intelligence level and sports a perennially bemused expression.

Scenes are often made up of extreme closeups of faces and individual objects juxtaposed with extreme long shots, often from unusual angles. (Mi­sato’s empty beer cans are lovingly photographed.) Every scene is carefully edited and composed. The characters are often placed in intricate geometric compositions within their enormous settings, such as a long take of Shinji and Rei as tiny figures standing on escalator steps going miles below ground to NERV HQ. There are frequent establishing shots of the city and its individual components—streetlights, walkways, apartment buildings, power lines, traffic stops, school halls, parking lots, train stations—complete with natural sounds, including the steady hum of insects buzzing. There is a lot of play with natural light. Numerous scenes are set at dusk, with everything bathed in a reddish-golden glow, or right after sunset with everything blue in the fading light.

The youthful lead characters are rather simply designed, presented as typically wide-eyed adolescents in the manner of so much high-school-themed anime, but their faces are very expressive. Shinji, in particular, has to carry the emotional load of the series and needs a face built for moping and hesitation, but flexible enough to allow the rare smile.

The Evas also defy conventional expectations of giant robots. They’re shaped much more organically than, say, Gundams, and they move differently as well, with their long, lanky limbs. In some scenes, they even move like animals, in keeping, perhaps, with their biological components. The Angels look different every time they appear and are not always recognizable as such. One is simply a giant blue crystal hovering over the city, while another looks like a giant eye with wings and appears in outer space. They’re clearly the most unusual looking menace a giant robot pilot has ever had to face in anime.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth (1997, movie)

The End of Evangelion (1997, movie)

Revival of Evangelion (1998, movie)

Evangelion may be the most difficult series to write about from the standpoint of an anime classic, because it’s one of the most challenging, ambitious, and dense animated works ever to be shown on Japanese television. It’s an immensely beautiful work, with the kind of intricate and fluid animation that’s rarely seen in a TV series, but it also makes things hard for the viewer, pouring out technical details at a rapid clip, on the one hand, and refusing to dole out easy answers or tidy narrative resolutions, on the other. The ending, in fact, caused such outrage in Japan that a new ending had to be produced as a movie and released in theaters. Whether it calmed the outrage or fueled it even more is still a subject of debate some ten years later.

On one level, Evangelion is an intensely psychological variation on the teen pilot/giant robot genre, with a particular nod to Mobile Suit Gundam and its conflicted fifteen-year-old hero, Amuro Ray. As such, it goes more deeply into the young pilot’s state of mind, with the nature of the conflict for which the giant robots are required taking a lesser role in the narrative. On another level, it’s a high school comedy-drama about the peculiar joys, pains, and tribulations of being an adolescent in Japanese society. Scenes of violent, destructive combat with deadly “Angels” that come out of nowhere are intercut with scenes of normal adolescent behavior at school and in the public and living spaces the kids occupy. There is also an intriguing backdrop of global tension, conspiratorial activity, and secret powers masking a plan that could have serious ramifications for all humanity.

Although the meaning of the series will be debated for as long as it continues to be seen, it can be argued that the use of teenagers to pilot giant robots is a metaphor designed to dramatize the life- and soul-crushing pressure on modern Japanese youth who are exhorted to excel at school for the good of the nation, often at the loss of their own childhood and peace of mind. The pressure on Shinji to fight and kill when he is clearly unprepared emotionally for such a role mirrors the role of Japanese schools and parents in forcing kids to attend cram schools and pass a series of all-important entrance exams.

Adding weight to this theme is the constant parent-child tension experienced in the series by various characters. Both Misato and Ritsuko, adult women and skilled professionals, harbor great bitterness and anger toward their late, high-profile parent figures, whose work they are in some fashion forced to continue. Shinji is estranged from his father but desperately wants his approval and encouragement. Shinji’s father, on the other hand, coldly sees his son only as a necessary component of his far-reaching plan. In each case, the children cannot escape feelings that their parent has failed them.

Episode 24 of the series offers a fairly conventional ending that could have wrapped up the action and ruffled far fewer feathers, although it didn’t answer many of the questions raised by all the wrangling for truth about the mysterious “Adam” kept miles beneath NERV’s underground headquarters. The original TV series ending, found in episodes 25–26, came out of far left field and offered one of the most deliberately abstract pieces of animation ever to be found in a commercially produced animated work. It probes into Shinji’s consciousness and deconstructs every emotional crisis he ever had in the series, playing them over and subjecting him to interrogation by the other characters in a staged setting. There is even a rosy alternate reality constructed for him, concluding with a special message from director Anno to his audience.

Outcry from confused fans prompted production of a new version, End of Evangelion, which premiered in theaters in Japan a year after the series ended and addressed unresolved narrative issues with a full-blown, apocalyptic ending involving a large-scale bloody battle between NERV and opposing government forces, and Shinji himself forced to make a truly world-altering decision. While it did indeed close the series with the appropriate cosmic bang, it raised as many questions as it answered and left many viewers still puzzled. For some, the more hopeful original ending is the preferred one.

There’s a scene at the end of episode 19 where Shinji’s unit, Eva 01, goes berserk and beats up the Angel it’s fighting and then “eats” it, chomping with great relish. And this happens after it has lost all power and left Shinji helpless, acting on its own in a burst of sudden, unexpected fury that makes us question what’s really in these machines. Everyone watching at NERV HQ is astonished too.

Adolescent awkwardness and nervousness around the opposite sex are on full display in a scene in episode 5 that is touching and amusing. Entering Rei’s apartment to deliver her new ID card, Shinji looks around, calls her name, and sees no sign of her. He enters her room, examines a pair of broken glasses on the top of her dresser, and, for some reason, puts them on. Rei enters straight out of the shower, wearing only a towel, and strides across the room to snatch the glasses from the stunned Shinji’s face. She pulls on him and, as he falls, his bag strap gets caught and pulls out a drawer filled with undies and bras, which fly everywhere as he falls on top of her. He winds up crouched over her and stares down at her in an extreme state of embarrassment. With an impassive gaze, she breaks the silence by asking in a matter-of-fact tone, “Won’t you get off?” At which point Shinji notices the indelicate place on her naked body where his hands happen to be, the first time he’s been this . . . intimate with the opposite sex. The editing, involving such individual elements as the glasses, Shinji, Rei, Shinji’s bag strap, the drawer, the items inside it, and the towel, is as intricate as you’ll find in the best montage sequence in a classic Hollywood movie.

Character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto also designed the characters for The Wings of Honneamise, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, and FLCL, and is the original creator and designer of .hack//SIGN, and its sequels. He also drew the Neon Genesis Evangelion manga.

Composer Shiro Sagisu also scored Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and His and Her Circum­stances, as well as Megazone 23, Kimagure Orange Road, Macross II, and Bleach.

In addition to the lively score by Shiro Sagisu, which deftly and most cleverly captures the series’ shifting moods, there is occasional creative use of classical themes, such as Handel’s Messiah and Albinoni’s Adagio. In addition, several different versions of the pop standard, “Fly Me to the Moon,” by Bart Howard, once a hit for Frank Sinatra, are heard over the end credits. A memorable opening song, “A Thesis of the Cruel Angel,” relates to the series’ themes and is sung by Yoko Takahashi.

There are numerous biblical references throughout the series. The Magi, a central computer that NERV relies on for key decisions, is made up of three separate systems named after the Three Magi (Wise Men) who attended Jesus’s birth: Casper, Balthazar, and Melchior. SEELE, the secret organization backing NERV, uses the Dead Sea Scrolls to make predictions regarding the Angels and their movements. The Lance of Longinus is a weapon used to fight an Angel in outer space and has a connection to the catastrophic events that preceded the series. It is named for the “Spear of Destiny” which is believed to have been used by a Roman centurion to pierce Jesus’s side on the cross.

There is an alternate reality depicted in the original final episode (26) that shows Shinji and the other kids in a normal high school setting in an undamaged Tokyo, with nary a giant robot or Angel in sight. One might see this as a lead-in to Anno’s next series, His and Her Circumstances, which also dealt with high-achieving high schoolers, but in a straight high school setting.

The influence of Evangelion’s avant-garde storytelling can be seen in numerous subsequent anime series including Serial Experiments Lain, Gasaraki, Boogiepop Phantom, RahXephon, and Texhnolyze.

violence There is violence in the series, but mainly between the Evas and Angels, including the aforementioned “eating” scene. In End of Evangelion, there are scenes of bloody combat during the military’s takeover of NERV headquarters. nudity Female nudity, generally in shower scenes. There is one bedroom scene between Misato and her old boyfriend, Kaji. Misato’s asides at the end of each episode include the occasional promise of fan service, some of which are met (as when she wears a short skirt for a trip to the kids’ high school class), and some of which aren’t.