EVANGELION

Overview

Neon Genesis Evangelion (commonly shortened to EVA) is an original Japanese animated series produced by GAINAX and directed by Hideaki Anno, first broadcast in October 1995. It did not merely bend the conventions of the giant-robot genre; it broke them, and in doing so set off what is often called the third boom in Japanese animation. Beyond the 26-episode television series, the 1997 feature film The End of Evangelion and the four-part Rebuild of Evangelion, which took fourteen years to complete between 2007 and 2021, together form a work that has spanned nearly three decades and shaped several generations of viewers.

The World

The story is set in a half-ruined world following the cataclysm of the year 2000, known as the Second Impact. In 2015, colossal beings called Angels begin attacking the fortress city of Tokyo-3 one after another. Humanity answers through a special agency, NERV, and its multipurpose humanoid decisive weapon: Evangelion.

The work weaves together the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and Judaeo-Christian mythology. An Evangelion appears to be a machine of steel, but it is in truth an organic being cloned from the First Angel — and behind it lies the mystery that runs through the entire series: the Human Instrumentality Project, an attempt at the evolution and salvation of the human soul itself.

The Characters

Shinji Ikari, Rei Ayanami, Asuka Langley and Kaworu Nagisa are children pushed onto a battlefield they never chose. The series abandons conventional heroism and turns instead to an unsparing, realistic account of what fear, the search for identity and inherited family wounds do to a fourteen-year-old pilot.

It draws heavily on Schopenhauer's hedgehog's dilemma and on Freudian psychoanalysis to examine a particular kind of loneliness: wanting to be close to another person while being afraid of hurting them. The long passages of mental contamination, stream of consciousness and interior monologue in the closing episodes opened a path for animation to take existentialism and the question of the self seriously.

Cultural Impact

The influence of EVA on what came after it is hard to overstate:

• A shift in storytelling: it made psychological interiority and dark deconstruction a mainstream mode, and inspired countless later works of science fiction and psychological suspense.
• A shift in business: it established the production committee model and the cross-media franchise (media mix) as the standard shape of modern anime, and drove the rise of pilgrimage tourism and merchandise culture.
• A shift in status: it broke the assumption that animation is for children, and prompted serious discussion in philosophy, religious studies, psychology and sociology, becoming a reference point in the study of contemporary popular culture.

About This Site

This site is a tribute to the visual language and the systems philosophy of EVA:

• The MAGI supercomputer: the core logic of this site is modelled on NERV's MAGI, three personality algorithms (Melchior-1, Balthasar-2, Casper-3) that retrieve information and reach a verdict together.
• The NERV look: the high-contrast black, amber and red of emergency alerts and surveillance readouts, set in the unmistakable Matisse mincho typeface and laid out as modular panels.
• EVA World mode: a switch that lets you step further in, bringing the series' mixture of high technology and approaching end times into the way the page itself behaves.