“The development of Evangelion gives me the feeling of a ‘Live’ concert,” said the Japanese auteur Hideaki Anno in 1996. “Whatever the story or the development of the characters, I made them without a plan.” In fact, he says, “at first I had intended to make a simple work featuring robots.” Anything but “simple,” Anno’s futuristic anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, which debuted in October 1995 and ran for 26 episodes, until March 1996, has achieved a fine-wine shelf life, inspiring an evergreen cult obsession of the sort usually associated with the films of, say, Stanley Kubrick or David Lynch.
“Animation is an entirely made-up fictional world,” said Anno in 2021. “This also means that it’s the best medium to put imagination to picture.”
