What is Neon Genesis Evangelion?
Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Japanese animated television series produced by Gainax and Tatsunoko Production, directed by Hideaki Anno, and broadcast on TV Tokyo from October 1995 to March 1996. It runs 26 episodes and is set in the fortified city of Tokyo-3, fifteen years after a global catastrophe called Second Impact reshaped the world and killed much of its population.
The premise looks like classic mecha anime. The paramilitary organisation NERV recruits teenagers, among them the reluctant Shinji Ikari, to pilot Evangelions, enormous biomechanical units that are less robots than restrained organisms in armour. Their enemies are the Angels, a sequence of beings, each stranger than the last, attacking one at a time in the manner of a monster of the week show.
As the series proceeds the formula corrodes. Episodes turn inward toward depression, fear of intimacy, and the cost of defining yourself through other people's approval, themes Anno has said grew out of his own experience. The final two episodes abandon the external plot almost entirely for a psychological collage, a choice forced partly by schedule and budget and debated by viewers ever since.
The story did not end there. The 1997 film The End of Evangelion re-staged the conclusion on a cinema budget, and the four Rebuild of Evangelion films, released between 2007 and 2021, retold and then departed from the television story. For collectors the series is also a physical media landmark, with distinct Japanese and English releases on LaserDisc, VHS, DVD and Blu-ray that are covered in their own pages in this section.
