新世紀エヴァンゲリオン (Neon Genesis Evangelion)

The inheritance is a genre turned against itself. Evangelion took the giant-machine story and made the pilots damaged children under adult coercion, the organisation sinister, and the enemy a theological problem rather than an army. Isayama's manga applies the same treatment: walls that turn out to be a prison rather than a defence, a command structure lying to the people it protects, and a hero whose transformation into the thing he fights is the plot rather than a twist. Filed MEDIUM. Isayama has cited Muv-Luv more often than Evangelion, and what is shared here is a post-1995 posture toward the genre that Anno is generally credited with creating.

Akira is the film that made the 1990s Japanese animation industry commercially and visually possible, and Evangelion is built in the space it cleared. Concretely: a Tokyo rebuilt after an apocalypse whose cause is a government secret, a teenage subject of that secret programme whose power cannot be contained, and a climactic dissolution of a human body into something vast and undifferentiated. The Third Impact sequence and Tetsuo's transformation are the same idea filmed twice. Filed MEDIUM: a shared vocabulary within one industry, not a stated debt.

Anno has been open about Kubrick, and the last act of Evangelion is where it stops being subtext: a sequence of abstract light and colour, a protagonist dissolved and remade, and a closing image of a new kind of being. The series also borrows 2001's willingness to stop the plot entirely for several minutes of contemplation, which is not a normal thing for a Sunday evening robot show to do. Filed MEDIUM. Anno's named sources are mostly Japanese, and this is one strand.