The Inner Worlds of Neon Genesis Evangelion | Current | The Criterion Collection
“W hen did it start? Since when did animation stop being interesting? That is, animation itself may have stopped being interesting, and I myself may have been unable to maintain interest in animation. Both may be true. Animation may be over.” Hideaki Anno wrote these words in 1993, just two years before he would definitively disprove them with the creation of his magnum opus, Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–6). His pessimism was not without cause: the anime industry was in a slump, even before the bursting of Japan’s “bubble economy” in 1992 lead to major contractions. In particular, the science-fiction and mecha (a.k.a. “giant robot”) genres that had forged Anno’s own fandom, and on which he’d cut his professional teeth, had mostly disappeared from the airwaves and migrated to the home-video market. Anno and his studio Gainax had broken it big there with his first directorial project, the 1988 miniseries Gunbuster—an eccentric mash-up of giant robots, sports anime, hard sci-fi, and the