Neon Genesis Evangelion
The television broadcast of Neon Genesis Evangelion began in 1995. Produced by GAINAX and directed by Hideaki Anno — an animator who, years earlier, had worked on the God Warrior sequence in Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Evangelion took the form of a giant-robot series, but at its center was the inner world of a fourteen-year-old boy, Shinji Ikari. A camera and editing inherited from tokusatsu cinema, a bold use of pauses: Anno's direction departed from the usual grammar of television animation and left the viewer with a lingering tension. Its 26 episodes, with their enigmatic ending, kept generating debate long after they aired and set off, in 1990s Japan, the phenomenon known as the third anime boom. The story reached a first conclusion with the two films of the classic run, released in 1997.
"Farewell, all of Evangelion."
Ten years after those films, Anno launched Rebuild of Evangelion, a new series of films that rebuilt the same story from scratch, at Studio Khara, which he had founded himself. Evangelion: 1.0 (2007), 2.0 (2009), 3.0 (2012) and, finally, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time (2021). What began as a remake veered toward an ending different from that of the original work and brought a 26-year story to a close. Released after a decade of silence, the new tetralogy welcomed a young generation that had not lived through the original series and widened its base of followers still further.
Groundwork of Evangelion
Every finished image begins with a pencil stroke. Groundwork of Evangelion is the series that compiles the genga of Evangelion: the original drawings traced by hand by the animators. The movement of the characters, the battles against the Angels, the construction of the framing. Here is the drawing in its rawest phase, before it becomes a moving image. From the accumulation of lines, it lets you read how much information and how many decisions a single original drawing contains.
Complete Records Collection
What Complete Records Collection documents is the full picture of how the original drawings are assembled until they become a film. It gathers each of the Rebuild films in one volume, in two editions: Visual Story, which follows the story through images and production notes, and Setting Data, which brings together the design material for backgrounds, mechas and characters. It lets you take in at a glance how much design work accumulates behind a single film.
Evangelion Illustrations
If the original drawings and the design material reflect the production process, what Evangelion Illustrations brings together is Evangelion as a finished, full-color image. Magazine covers, posters, commemorative illustrations drawn over the course of a long history — images shown only once in their day — compiled into one volume in chronological order. It lets you contemplate the time the work has traveled through the evolution of its illustrations.
To each, their own Evangelion
If everything above consists of books born from within the work, Evangelion also has a world that extends outward. The richness of the culture surrounding this work arises from the fact that the story offers no "answers." Who Rei Ayanami is, why Kaworu Nagisa is drawn to Shinji — the work brings down the curtain without explaining its characters, and the viewer fills that void on their own, carrying with them their own Evangelion. Both the analysis and the derivative work are nothing other than the result of people responding to that void. A photobook centered on Kaworu Nagisa, a volume compiling fan art, and ANIMA, that other Evangelion that Ikuto Yamashita developed in the form of a novel — these books too are all forms of that Evangelion that belongs to each person, born from the void the work left behind.
Evangelion, a point of arrival
What AKIRA opened and Ghost in the Shell widened — that current through which animation surpassed the framework of children's entertainment to be recognized as a form of expression capable of addressing thought and inner life — is the current in which Evangelion is situated as well. The art books in this category are original Japanese editions: from art books and production-record books such as Groundwork of Evangelion and Complete Records Collection to works that extend beyond the story itself, every title is in Japanese. There is an Evangelion you don't yet know, and it is here.