My Cultural Diet

When Neon Genesis Evangelion’s final episode aired on March 27, 1996, some fans were left perplexed. The series had been building towards a climactic showdown that would decide the fate of humanity, only to retreat into the psyche of its main character, a depressed and traumatized 14-year-old named Shinji Ikari. Reports that Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno received death threats in response to the finale are largely overblown. Nevertheless, it was controversial at the time for failing to resolve the series’ major story points. In response, Anno cooked up The End of Evangelion as a more definitive conclusion. And by “definitive,” I mean dark, disturbing, and apocalyptic in the extreme. The movie begins with Shinji masturbating over his fellow Eva pilot Asuka, who’s been rendered comatose by her fight against the alien Angels, and it’s only downhill from there. The End of Evangelion’s 90 minutes are packed with intense imagery — a bloody shootout in Nerv’s underground headquarters, a giant kabbalistic Tree of Life floating in the sky, an Earth-sized angelic figure collecting humanity’s souls — as Anno explores themes of trauma, grief, and existential angst, every single second of which is rendered in vivid detail by Gainax and Production I.G. If you can believe it, Anno considered an even darker ending for the movie at one point, but what he settled on remains heavily debated even to this day and permanently sealed Evangelion’s status as one of the most iconic and talked about anime titles of all time.

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