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Neon Genesis Evangelion

新世紀エヴァンゲリオン

1995 –1996 Gainax / Tatsunoko Production TV Tokyo 26 episodes Completed

Action Mecha Psychological Drama

The year is 2015. Fifteen years after a cataclysm that killed half the human race, the city of Tokyo-3 is under attack from beings called Angels - massive, incomprehensible, and apparently unkillable by conventional means. The only things that can stop them are the Evangelions: giant biomechanical units that can only be piloted by children born in the aftermath of the disaster. Shinji Ikari is fourteen years old. His father, commander of the paramilitary organization NERV, has not spoken to him in years. He is asked to climb inside the Eva and save the world. He does not want to.

Produced by Gainax and directed by Hideaki Anno - who made the series as a working through of his own four-year clinical depression - Neon Genesis Evangelion aired on TV Tokyo from October 1995 to March 1996. It begins as a mecha action series and becomes, by its end, something else entirely: a deconstruction of heroism, identity, and the terror of human connection so thorough it broke the genre it was working in.

26 episodes. The last two will make you feel insane. Watch The End of Evangelion immediately after. Then sit quietly for a while.

Gainax went bankrupt in 2024. The series endures.

Shinji Ikari

Protagonist

Called by his father to pilot a machine he has never seen to fight a creature he cannot comprehend, and he does it. That part always gets lost in the discourse. Shinji gets in the Eva. He gets in every time, despite the fear and the pain and a father who treats him as an instrument rather than a son. He is fourteen years old and the full weight of human survival gets placed on his shoulders by a man who never once asked if that was acceptable.

The show's sharpest trick is making you frustrated with Shinji before it makes you understand him. He is passive, conflict-averse, desperate for approval from people who are not equipped to give it. He is also a textbook portrait of what an absent and cold father produces in a sensitive child. Hideaki Anno was not writing a bad protagonist. He was writing a real one. That is considerably harder and the fandom has been arguing about it for thirty years.

Rei Ayanami

SPOILER!

Protagonist

Quiet. Compliant. Operates without apparent affect, following orders with a serenity that reads as either emptiness or something the series does not have a word for yet. Rei is the show's central question in human shape: what makes a person a person, and what remains when you remove the usual answers. Her relationship with Gendo is unsettling in ways NGE earns the right to explain on its own schedule. The blue hair and the red eyes became iconic for reasons that go considerably deeper than aesthetic. She started a character archetype that anime is still processing and still failing to replicate properly.

Asuka Langley Soryu

Protagonist

Second Child. Pilot of Unit 02. Brilliant, aggressive, the most technically accomplished Eva pilot alive at fourteen years old and she will inform you of this. The confidence is real. So is everything underneath it that the confidence exists to protect. Asuka is the series' sharpest illustration of the gap between what a person shows the world and what they are working very hard to keep the world from seeing. Her arc in the second half of the series is one of the most unflinching depictions of psychological collapse in the medium. Not comfortable to watch. Absolutely not meant to be.

Misato Katsuragi

Supporting

NERV Operations Director and Shinji's guardian, which requires her to manage an apocalyptic war and a traumatized teenager simultaneously and do neither as well as she would like. Warm on the surface, self-destructive underneath, handling both through forward motion and beer. Second Impact killed her father in front of her and broke something she has been building around ever since. She genuinely cares about the pilots. NGE is honest and specific about the limits of what genuine care can accomplish when the system around it is what it is.

Gendo Ikari

Antagonist

Shinji's father. NERV Commander. Had not spoken to his son in years before using the end of the world as the occasion to call him back to pilot. Everything Gendo does across twenty-six episodes serves a plan the show reveals in careful pieces, and each piece makes the man harder to assess cleanly. Cold is not accurate. Cold implies the absence of feeling. Gendo has feeling. He has aimed it entirely at a singular purpose that does not include his son, and he is aware of the cost to Shinji, and he proceeds anyway. The most comprehensively damaging father in anime. The show earns that completely.

Ritsuko Akagi

SPOILER!

Supporting

NERV's chief scientist. Built the Magi supercomputer system on the foundation her mother designed and died building. Brilliant, controlled, operating at the intersection of science and decisions she is fully aware she should not be making and makes anyway. Ritsuko understands more about what NERV actually is than almost anyone alive, and that understanding has required a series of compromises the show tracks with cold and unsentimental precision. The most knowingly compromised person in the building, which in NGE's cast is a competitive category.

Kaworu Nagisa

SPOILER!

Supporting

Arrives late. Matters completely. Kaworu is the first person in the series who looks at Shinji and offers something that functions like unconditional acceptance, and what that does to a boy who has received nothing resembling it is the most human moment in a show about the end of humanity. What Kaworu actually is and what his presence in the story means is information NGE holds back and then delivers across a single episode that the fandom has been discussing for thirty years. He is onscreen briefly. He is permanent.

Ryoji Kaji

SPOILER!

Supporting

Intelligence operative running multiple angles simultaneously: NERV, SEELE, the Japanese government, and his own. Misato's ex-boyfriend and the person she is still in love with and the person who is going to get himself killed and she knows it and cannot stop it. Casual in affect, precise in everything he actually does. Grows watermelons in the NERV facility in his spare time. That detail is not decoration. His position is more dangerous than he lets on and he lets on more than most people in his situation would. The show gives him exactly as much screen time as it needs to and uses every second of it.

Kozo Fuyutsuki

Supporting

NERV Vice Commander. Was there before Gendo. Knew Yui Ikari when she was still a person and not a question the show takes its time answering. Fuyutsuki carries the institutional memory of what NERV was before it became what it is, and he has chosen to stand beside Gendo anyway, for reasons the series explores carefully and does not fully excuse. His presence in scenes with Gendo is NGE's way of showing you that at least one other person sees clearly what is happening and has made a deliberate decision to keep standing there.

Toji Suzuhara

SPOILER!

Supporting

Shinji's classmate and eventually his friend, which in NGE is its own kind of sentence. Straightforward, physical, protective of his younger sister who is hospitalized and the reason he makes the decisions he makes. The most uncomplicated person in a show built around psychological damage and hidden agendas. What happens to Toji is NGE removing its last remaining pretense that being a normal kid in proximity to this war offers any protection whatsoever. The show uses his simplicity as the sharpest possible instrument.

Kensuke Aida

Supporting

The one who wants to be a pilot. Military obsessive, always filming, always cataloguing hardware and operations with the enthusiasm of someone who has decided war is exciting from a safe distance. Kensuke is the show's quiet comment on the gap between wanting to be inside an Eva and what being inside an Eva actually does to a fourteen year old. He watches from the outside for the entire series. NGE is aware of exactly what it is saying about that.

Pen Pen

Supporting

Warm water penguin. Lives in Misato's refrigerator by choice and apparent preference. Drinks beer. Reads the newspaper. Regards the other occupants of the apartment with the bearing of someone who has seen a great deal and elected not to discuss any of it. Pen Pen is the pressure valve a show this relentlessly psychological requires, the reminder that a small warm creature going about its business exists in the same world as Human Instrumentality. He survives the series. In the context of Neon Genesis Evangelion, this is not a small thing.