Evangelion's giant-robot hero keeps saying he mustn't run away. Its creator disagrees
Shinji Ikari tells himself again and again that he mustn't run away. Many fans took that as the show's moral. Director Hideaki Anno says otherwise: the final episodes tell Shinji that fleeing is allowed, and the real theme is choosing something instead of drifting in a limbo close to death.
Neon Genesis Evangelion aired on TV Tokyo from October 1995 to March 1996, produced by Gainax and Tatsunoko Production. It is set in 2015 in the fortified city of Tokyo-3, fifteen years after a disaster called the Second Impact. Shinji's estranged father, Gendo, runs a secretive agency named Nerv and summons his teenage son to pilot a biomechanical giant, Unit-01, against creatures known as Angels. The machines are wired into their pilots' nervous systems, so the pilots feel the damage done to them.
What looks like a standard mecha show turns into a study of damaged people. Anno built the characters partly from his own personality. Rei Ayanami, the quiet pilot of Unit-00, turns out to be one of many clones; Asuka, a proud German-Japanese-American prodigy, suffers a severe breakdown; Misato, the officer who takes Shinji in, is disciplined at work and chaotic at home. The series weaves in imagery from Shinto, Kabbalah and Midrashic stories, together with the psychoanalytic ideas of Freud and Jung.
The ending split viewers. The last two episodes play out almost entirely inside Shinji's mind as his father launches the Human Instrumentality Project, a forced merging of human souls. Many found them baffling. Gainax blamed a punishing production schedule and also called it a deliberate choice by Anno. A feature-length remake of those episodes, The End of Evangelion, followed in 1997, and the four Rebuild of Evangelion films between 2007 and 2021 retold the story with a different ending.
The commercial side was huge. Merchandise had earned over 150 billion yen by 2007, and Evangelion pachinko machines brought in 700 billion yen by 2015. Books with Rei on the cover sold so well that the press called her the Premium Girl. The show is now counted among the greatest animated series and has shaped a great deal of the anime made since.
Source: Neon Genesis Evangelion
