"Angel Attack" is the first episode of the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, created by animation studio Gainax. The episode was written by the series director Hideaki Anno and directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki. It was originally aired on TV Tokyo on October 4, 1995. The series is mostly set in the futuristic, fortified city Tokyo-3, fifteen years after a worldwide cataclysm named Second Impact. The protagonist is Shinji Ikari, a teenage boy whose father Gendo has recruited him to the organization Nerv to pilot a giant mecha named Evangelion to combat beings called Angels. In the episode, Tokyo-3 is attacked by the Angel Sachiel, who fights the United Nations Army and the JSSDF. Gendo summons Shinji for the first time, and Shinji reluctantly agrees to pilot the mecha.
Production for "Angel Attack" began in September 1994 and ended in April 1995. Work on this and the series' early episodes took considerably longer than expected, a delay that would later cause scheduling problems for Gainax during the second half of the series. The episode, influenced by Japanese tokusatsu, references other mecha anime series and Gainax's previous works. It scored a 6.8% rating of audience share on Japanese TV and received critical and public acclaim focused on its visuals, direction, and introduction of the characters.
Contents
Plot
Gendo Ikari, commander of a special agency named Nerv, summons his son Shinji to the city of Tokyo-3. Sachiel, the third of a series of mysterious enemies known as Angels, approaches a Japanese city underwater as a Japan Strategic Self-Defense Forces tank battalion awaits it on the shoreline. Shinji, who recently arrived in a nearby town, has remained above ground waiting for Misato Katsuragi, head of the military department of Nerv, who is due to pick him up. The Japan Strategic Self-Defense Forces air force begins to attack the Angel with missiles. Shinji is nearly killed in the ensuing battle but is rescued at the last moment by Misato, who arrives in her car.
The Japan Strategic Self-Defense Forces, admitting their ineffectiveness, transfer responsibility for the Angel's destruction to Gendo and Nerv. Elsewhere, Shinji and Misato descend deep underground into a geofront in a car train. Shinji is taken to the hangar of a giant mecha named Evangelion, where he is shown Unit 01, the first test type of the Eva series, as Gendo appears above. Shinji learns he has been summoned to pilot Unit 01 into battle against the Angel. He confronts his father and protests his treatment, believing he has no chance of completing the task, but Gendo tells him to pilot the craft or leave. Shinji initially refuses, and Gendo sends for his other pilot, Rei Ayanami, who is seriously injured. Confronted with the sight of Rei's injuries, Shinji agrees to pilot the Evangelion, which is then launched from the geofront into the path of the Angel on a road on the surface.
Production
Gainax began planning the production of Neon Genesis Evangelion in July 1993. On September 20, the first internal meeting about the new project was held at the studio, but production for the first two episodes did not begin until September 1994, one year after the first meeting, and lasted for months. The production was slow, and, according to Evangelion's director Hideaki Anno, it took six months to complete the script for the first episode. Anno himself wrote the script; he also personally wrote the message on Misato's photograph in his characteristically soft, feminine handwriting. The director set himself the goal of surpassing the first episode of Mobile Suit Gundam; Anno himself and the series' staff admired it so deeply that they knew its shots, scenes, and narrative rhythm by heart. Kazuya Tsurumaki, assistant director of Neon Genesis Evangelion, served as director of "Angel Attack"; Anno and Masayuki, who drew storyboards for the episode, assisted him, while Shunji Suzuki worked as chief animator. Yoshitō Asari, Seiji Kio, and Yuh Imakake worked as assistant character designers. Production also involved animator Mitsuo Iso, who animated the battle between Sachiel and the United Nations aircraft.
Gainax decided the basic plot for "Angel Attack" in 1993, when it wrote a presentation document of Neon Genesis Evangelion titled New Century Evangelion (tentative name) Proposal (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン (仮) 企画書, Shinseiki Evangelion (kari) kikakusho). In the first draft, "Angel Attack" had been named "People's reunion" (再会する人々, Saikai suru hitobito). The Proposal document contained a detailed description of the first episode, which was conceived as a diptych with the second one. The episode would have begun with Shinji on a train, stopped by a battle between Rei Ayanami's Eva-00 and an Angel named Raziel; Raziel, described as a metallic Angel in the Proposal, would have vanished into a lake, with the damaged Unit 00 returning to the Nerv base. The beginning of a battle between Raziel and a berserk Unit 01 was also planned, but it was moved to the second episode. Until shortly before he began drawing the storyboards, Anno had not yet written the line in which Shinji firmly declares that he wants to pilot Eva-01, nor the scene in which he says "I mustn't run away". Unlike Yoshiyuki Tomino, the director of Mobile Suit Victory Gundam, Anno found it difficult to believe that anyone would willingly agree to pilot an Eva without hesitation; looking back, he said that he had made the same mistake as Victory Gundam. In the original script draft, once Shinji realized that he was wanted only because he was useful, he would smile with a hint of self-deprecation and quiet happiness. Furthermore, the staff employed several visual conventions typical of Japanese animation and manga in "Angel Attack"; in one scene from the episode, for example, Misato makes cartoonish expressions of surprise.
Cultural references and themes
Gualtiero Cannarsi, who curated the first Italian adaptation of the series, noted that "Angel Attack" story starts in medias res, a narrative technique used in the following episodes of the anime by which, by means of flashbacks or the speeches and thoughts of the characters, what happened before the beginning of the narrative is reconstructed. He also noted that Shinji pronounces the phrase "I mustn't run away" in one scene of the episode, which later becomes one of the most typical of the character. Hiroki Azuma, a Japanese philosopher and cultural critic, speaking of his motto "I mustn't run away", described Evangelion as a story that depicts "anxiety without a cause", linking this feeling to the social repercussions in Japan after the Aum Shinrikyō Tokyo subway sarin attack. The sentence is inspired by the personal experience of Hideaki Anno, who felt "completely destroyed" after his work on Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water; he faced a hard time in the four years before the series' release and then returned to work on anime with the same idea. For Yasuhiro Takeda, a member of the Gainax studio, "what we saw in Evangelion was maybe just a reflection of those feelings". For the phrase "I mustn't run away", according to Takeda, the director took inspiration from an old failed Gainax project, Blue Uru, a sequel to the Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise (1987) movie. The series reprises this theme in the final episode. After discussing it with the series' character designer, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Anno added the line, "You can run away". According to Anno, the series does not argue that people should never run away, because running away is not always wrong. Instead, he criticized those who remain trapped in indecision over whether to flee, leaving themselves in a state akin to death, rather than those who escape genuinely unbearable situations.
According to writer Álvaro Arbonés, Neon Genesis Evangelion looks like a normal anime series in the first episode. The official series encyclopedia Evangelion Chronicle noted that the cheerful, catchy music accompanying the scene in which Shinji first sees Nerv headquarters evokes the atmosphere of an optimistic science fiction film depicting a bright future. Scholar Susan J. Napier similarly argued that Evangelion is a classic mecha in "its basic plot outlines" but subverts the genre since its first episode, which is constructed around "all the conventions of the classic 'saving the world' narrative, only to undermine them". "Angel Attack" also presents the show's major themes, including the father-son relationships and interpersonal communication. Yūichirō Oguro, editor of extra materials from the home video editions of the series, noted how Misato tells Shinji to act like a man in "Angel Attack", a theme also presented later in the series. According to an official booklet on the anime, it is unclear if the series supports the patriarchal model of masculinity or discusses its value instead. Claudio Cordella emphasized how his father doesn't care for Shinji, who is instead immediately put under psychological pressure. According to Anime Feminist, Shinji then feels betrayed when Misato also asks him to board. Scholar Nikolai Afanasov also noted that Shinji receives a letter containing an erotic photograph and a provocative note from Misato; thus, "the traditional strategy of sexualizing female characters to attract the attention of an adolescent male audience is fully present in the early stages". Scholar Álvaro Arbonés and critic Vrai Kaiser described Misato's picture as a simple example of fan service. Writer Andrew M. Winters has linked erotic tones in Shinji and Misato's interaction in "Angel Attack" to the series finale, in which Misato tries to spur Shinji to fight by kissing him and promising him sexual intercourse in her final scene.
Reception
The episode received critical and public acclaim. Gainax premiered "Angel Attack", along with the second episode, in a preview at the second Gainax festival on July 22 and 23, 1995, receiving a positive reception. The episode was first broadcast on October 4, 1995, and scored a 6.8% rating of audience share on Japanese television. After the series' first run, it ranked seventeenth among the best anime episodes of the moment in an Animage magazine Grand Prix poll. The scene in which Shinji meets Rei Ayanami for the first time also ranked sixteenth in a survey by TV Asahi about the best anime scenes. At the 2006 Tokyo International Anime Fair, anime fans voted the first two Neon Genesis Evangelion episodes as the anime they would most like to see again.
Critics, including animator Yūichirō Oguro writing for Newtype magazine, Screen Rant, Animedia and Anime News Network's Nick Creamer, appreciated the episode's direction and editing. Academic Susan J. Napier described the depiction of Shinji's and Misato's "inner world" in "Angel Attack" as an example of the series' unconventionality. Italian writer and critic Andrea Fontana wrote, "From the first episode, every detail [in Neon Genesis Evangelion] overflows with many meanings". Comic Book Resources criticized the depiction of the futuristic scenario, but defended Shinji and his reluctance to face the task of protecting humanity in "Angel Attack" from some criticisms made by animation enthusiasts. Kristy Anderson, writing for the Supanova Expo website, picked his decision to ride Eva-01 as one of the character's best moments. Film School Rejects' Max Covill similarly placed "Angel Attack" third among the best Neon Genesis Evangelion episodes, praising it for its visuals and introduction of mysteries of the series; he also lauded one shot of Shinji reading a book with the hand of an Evangelion in the background, listing it among the "perfect shots" of the series.
The Animé Café's Japanese reviewer Akio Nagatomi described the animation as "average" for a TV serial and praised "some interesting creature and mecha design", but also criticized the premise of the story of a young boy who fights alien beings as excessively derivative. The December 1995 issue of Newtype magazine lauded the series' realism and dense amount of information. SyFy Wire's Daniel Dockery described Sachiel's debut as "terrifying", but considered it reminiscent of "a bunch of giant monster tropes". Newtype wrote, "there are many elaborate camera angles that appeal to fans" and "the slightly unusual subtitles and the eye-catch screens are also strong points". Protoculture Addicts magazine lauded the animation, soundtrack, and story. Multiversity Comics' Matthew Garcia similarly praised the confidence in the filmmaking and the animation of "Angel Attack" and "The Beast", eulogizing the "assurance and tenacity" of Anno and Gainax. Ex magazine's Charles McCarter lauded the animation as "nice and clean", the soundtrack, and the pace of the first two episodes. According to the Newtype's official Evangelion film books, the scene in which Gendo takes command of the battle against Sachiel also received a positive reception for its "expressiveness", being "considered one of the best-executed of this episode".