Evangelion was a 26-part science fiction series which first aired on Tokyo TV in 1995, and became an overnight sensation, triggering a tsunami of Web shrines, fan clubs and commentary across the entire planet, perhaps the most extraordinary robot animation series ever made. The series was the brainchild of Hideaki Anno, an animator with Gainax Studios, a small independent animation company co-founded in 1981 by Anno and two of his friends from an Osaka art-school.

Anno demolished the reigning conventions of the mecha genre, combining eye-popping visuals, a tremendous sound-track, remarkable scripting and voice acting, and rich and complex characters, all tied together by one of the most subversive storylines ever created. Anno also pushed beyond the boundaries of Cold War science fiction, by reappropriating a number of the greatest US science fiction narratives of the late 20th century (e.g. Robert Wise’ film classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) as well as William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic Neuromancer (1984) in a distinctively East Asian context. Most striking of all, Evangelion generated a micropolitics of gender worthy of its post-Cold War geopolitics. 

While there were outstanding TV series before Evangelion—most notably, The Prisoner and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalogue (1987)—what Anno did which no other artist had ever done before was to tap into the geopolitical unconscious of East Asia’s burgeoning media culture, thereby creating an aesthetic vocabulary capable of expressing the social contradictions of the East Asian region. This is encoded in the basic storyline of Evangelion, which begins by reappropriating the Cold War fiction of the invasion of Earth by mysterious aliens. These aliens are strange creatures called “angels”, seemingly bent on destroying the human species, and they can only be defeated by the Evangelions, or giant robots. However, these robots can only be piloted by a select group of fourteen-year old children—including the main protagonist of the series, Shinji Ikari. Making things even more complicated, Shinji Ikari’s father, Gendou Ikari, turns out to be the main scientist responsible for the construction of the robots.