Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Series That Broke Anime and Its Own Studio

"Neon Genesis Evangelion" premiered in October 1995. It was designed, at least initially, as a commercially safe mecha series — giant robots, a teenage pilot, episodic monster battles — the kind of show that had reliably sold toys and model kits since the 1970s. What it became instead was one of the most psychologically disturbing, formally experimental, and culturally significant animated works ever produced. The gap between what it was supposed to be and what it became is the story of Hideaki Anno, the man who made it, and the state he was in while making it.

Anno had spent the four years before Evangelion in a depressive episode so severe that he described being unable to do anything at all — no work, no social contact, nothing. When he emerged from it and began developing the series, he used the show as a vehicle for processing that experience in ways that became increasingly direct as production continued. The early episodes function as a reasonably competent action series. As the series progresses, the psychological content becomes more explicit, the narrative structure more fragmented, and the protagonist Shinji Ikari's interiority more central than the battles he is nominally fighting. By the final two episodes — produced when the studio had run out of money and could no longer afford conventional animation — the show had become an extended internal monologue staged almost entirely through still images, text, and voice.

Those final episodes produced a crisis of audience expectation so acute that Gainax received death threats from fans who felt that the conventional ending they had been promised had been withheld. Anno and several other staff members received threatening letters. The studio responded by producing "The End of Evangelion" (1997), a theatrical film providing an alternative ending that delivers the apocalyptic spectacle the television ending denied — and then surrounds it with content so bleak and accusatory toward the audience itself that it functions less as a concession than as a confrontation.

The cultural impact of Evangelion is now so thoroughly absorbed into anime that it is difficult to see clearly. Series that interrogate their own genre conventions, protagonists who are defined by psychological damage rather than simple heroism, narratives that deliberately withhold resolution — all of these were present in anime before 1995, but Evangelion made them legitimate at a mass audience level in ways that had not existed before. It also established a commercial model — the "rebuild," the repackaged rerelease, the franchise extended through new productions years after the original — that the anime industry has reproduced extensively.

Anno spent the years after the original Evangelion in and out of depression, making films and returning eventually to produce the "Rebuild of Evangelion" tetralogy, a four-film reimagining of the original series. The final film, "Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time," was released in 2021 after years of delays. It is, by most readings, a work of genuine closure — Anno processing and releasing something he had carried for twenty-five years. Whether it succeeds as a work of art independently of that autobiographical context is a question viewers continue to debate.