The are fictional entities from the anime television series Neon Genesis Evangelion, which was produced by Gainax studio and directed by Hideaki Anno. The Angels also appear in the manga adaptation of the same name, which was illustrated by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto.
In the original animated work, almost all of the Angels are antagonists of mankind who repeatedly try to reach the headquarters of the special agency Nerv in the city of Tokyo-3. Most of the Angels originate from an entity called Adam, but the eighteenth specimen, humanity, is descended from Lilith, the second Angel. To counter the Angels' invasion, Nerv builds the Evangelions, mechas that possess a force field called an AT Field, which the Angels also use to defend themselves.
The Angels appear in works from the animated series, in spin-off manga, video games, visual novels, in the yonkoma manga Petit Eva: Evangelion@School, and the Rebuild of Evangelion film tetralogy. The names of the Angels past Adam and Lilith, which are revealed in the fourteenth and twenty-third episodes of the series, refer to the namesake angels of non-canonical Judeo-Christian tradition. The characteristics and functions of each Angel are deliberately similar to those of their namesakes in ancient sacred texts. Their designs have been praised by critics and animation enthusiasts, and influenced subsequent animated series.
Conception
During the making of Neon Genesis Evangelion, the production staff decided to set the work on a battle between gods and humans.Interview with Sadamoto in In one early draft, which was published about two years before airing, Gainax included enemies named , which they conceived as ancient relics scattered all over the globe and left in hibernation by a species called . These enemies were referred to as simple weapons with almost no biological component. According to Gualtiero Cannarsi, the editor who was in charge of the first Italian-language edition of the series, the Gainax studio members might have been inspired by James P. Hogan's Giants series, Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Sentinel" and its film adaptation 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The Apostolos would have been the servants and apostles of the giant Adam, the divine sentinel of a distant alien race formed long before humanity, drawing on Hogan's evolutionary and science fiction themes. Anno also drew inspiration from classic carnivorous kaiju such as Gyaos from the Gamera franchise and Gaira from the 1966 film The War of the Gargantuas. A similar scenario with ancient superior civilizations can be found in Hayao Miyazaki's manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Anno's previous work Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water.
The original authors intended there to have been twenty-eight enemies, the first of which, Adam, would have been found in the Dead Sea region but destroyed in an explosion fifteen years before the events of the series. The initial scenario also included the introduction of two Apostolos named , which was described as the "Angel of silence", and , "the rock of God". Writer Virginie Nebbia compared Turel's design with the Emperor Neo mask from Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water. The project was shelved during production, but the ideas were recycled for the Angels Ramiel and Sahaquiel. The first episode would have featured a confrontation between Eva-01, piloted by Rei, and a "metal Angel" named Raziel which would have had anthropomorphic features similar to those of a giant. In the twenty-fourth episode, titled , there would be a great lunar battle against twelve Apostolos; humans would realize their helplessness in the face of their enemies' overwhelming superiority, and "the promised time" would approach. Evangelion Chronicle, an official encyclopedia about the series, noted that the number twelve reflects the number of the apostles mentioned in the book of Revelation; the encyclopedia also compared the initial scenario to the battle against the nine Mass Production Model Evangelions in the 1997 theatrical conclusion.
Another scenario planned two ancient prehistoric civilizations equipped with advanced technology appearing on Earth before the appearance of humanity. The first of the two, known as the "First Ancestral Race", would create artificial humanoid Evangelions, which would then rebel against their creators, causing their extinction. A "Second Ancestral Race" would then create the Spear of Longinus in an attempt to defeat them, scattering the dormant Angels around the globe in case anyone tried to reactivate the humanoids. Moreover, in a draft of the twentieth episode of the series, Misato would mention the origin of the enemies, saying, . According to Nebbia, staff took inspiration both from Nadia and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind for the scenario, in which ancient civilizations are destroyed by their own creations, while for the opposition between Adam and Lilith, Gainax may have possibly took clue from the works of artist Daijirō Morohoshi. Nebbia also compared the Angels' red core with Ultraman's Color Timer, and the AT Field to the Ideon's barrier from Space Runaway Ideon. Writer Alexandre Marine noted how Angels role can be traced to Ultraman, in which Zarab aleins or Imitation Ultra are represented as evil copies of the titular character. Wired also compared the Evangelion dichotomy of Angels as powerful beings with the fruit of life and humans as beings with the fruit of knowledge to Super Dimension Fortress Macross, in which the human species is born to spread culture and the Zentradi to fight.
The original ending would have revealed ancient ruins of a place called at the bottom of Nerv, a name referring to one of the levels of the Jewish underworld. Writer Alexandre Marine in particular compared the original scenario to the dismantling of the Tower of Babel seen in Nadia - The Secret of Blue Water. Other elements of the original scenario also recall Hayao Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky (1986). According to the academic Taro Igarashi, Arqa ruins possibly become Nerv's base in the final script, which Fuyutsuki describes as a perfectly round cave. For Igarashi, this means the geofront is "some sort of ancient ruin" itself. Animator Mitsuo Iso proposed further ideas. Many tiles, objects into which the Arqans would have transcribed their personalities, would have been found in Arqa. Another proposal included multiple Arqas: one in Japan and one in Antarctica, which was actually supposed to be "the Antarctic underground kingdom discovered by Nazi Germany". Iso's scenario also envisioned a substance called Adamah, found in areas particularly important for human evolution, such as the Great Rift Valley in Africa or Qumran. Only a few ideas for the final battle on Arqa partially survived into the final version. Iso proposed having the Angels and Gendo unite at the Tree of Life in the final episode, despite having no idea exactly what the final twelve Angels would look like at the time. The fusion scene, similar to insemination or pollination, was compared by Iso himself to Jack and the Beanstalk, and would have featured the Angels as sperm fertilizing the Arqa egg. Iso's Angels, initially immobile like church statues, would have presented themselves as "messengers from the land of Nun"; the final twelve Angels, unlike the others, would have been the original inhabitants of Arqa. Adam would have been "impregnated," with Shinji inside him like a fetus who is then reborn. The Moon would have shattered. Iso suggested the idea that Angels are beings who experience various forms of existence, humanity being one of these forms, and that Angels learn from their battles against humanity. For example, he conceived Turel's bomb attack as a suicide attack that was intended to benefit the next Angel.
Mahiro Maeda drew Gaghiel and Israfel, while Yoshitō Asari designed Sachiel, Shamshel, and Zeruel. The artists avoided giving them anthropomorphic designs, which would have been more challenging during production. In the first two episodes, in which Sachiel appears, the staff had enough resources to hire animators, but for the fifth and sixth they already changed course. In the final version of the show, the Angels were renamed and indicated in the characters' dialogue with the word , after Jesus' twelve disciples, rather than the term , with which the angels of the Christian tradition are usually indicated. Within the series' narrative, Gainax chose to use the English translation for Angel, "messenger", which is written in Latin characters and is readable in graphemes and written in overlays, as in the case of Nerv's computers. Michael House, the only American member of Gainax, protested about the juxtaposition of the two terms, but Hideaki Anno decided to keep the dual naming of the enemies. In one early draft of the series, the Nerv's supercomputer, the Magi System, would assign a name to each Angel. The director gave general guidelines for the design of each Angel. Their shapes became reflections of the feelings of Anno's generation, reflecting the climate of Japan in the 1990s. During the broadcast of the series, the Japanese economy and society were perceived in the country as inherently corrupt and decadent, with no one being able to trace the causes, making the concept of "enemy" ambiguous. The enemy of twentieth-century Japan, according to Anno, was neither political nor defined, as in the case of the religious sect Aum Shinrikyō, which in March 1995 attacked the Tokyo subway with sarin gas. The Angels and the character Gendo Ikari were represented as amorphous beings, since for the director the concept of "enemy" is per sé undefined.
Characteristics Angels are organic beings whose atomic structure has both particle and wave nature, and therefore characterized by the wave-particle duality of light. At the beginning of the series, their objectives and identity are unknown. but they are all attracted by an Angel – called Lilith – that is locked in the deepest section of the Nerv's headquarters, the Terminal Dogma. Academic Cristophe Thouny described them as "polymorphous figures of destruction that mark irruption of the world into the everyday, the opening of the social structure to alterity and death". The Angels' genetic makeup has a 99.89% affinity with that of humans. They can change shape from vaguely anthropomorphic to that of a geometric solid, and equally variable sizes. Many are equipped with a red sphere known as the "core" or "sphere of light", which is also their main source of energy and weakness. The "fruit of life", an organ of unknown nature, is responsible for their regenerative abilities. Humanity, the last example of an Angel, has the "fruit of knowledge" instead.
Angels have the universal ability to generate a force field called the Absolute Terror Field, or simply AT Field, which is similar to that of Evangelion units and makes them nearly indestructible. Their names and attacks have been prophesied in the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient documents in the possession of a secret organization called Seele. The reason they appear in Tokyo-3 one at a time, never attacking collectively, is unknown. In the opening sequence of the seventeenth episode, "Fourth Child", Nerv director Gendō Ikari says the Angels "are beginning to attain intelligence". According to academic Satoshi Tsukamoto, the sentence means that the Angels "are attempting to acquire abilities to compete against human beings and control them". Writer Kitamura similarly stated that the Angels gradually make progress in communicating with the Evas they fight and send messages to Shinji during the series. According to a guide on the series contained in a manual for the card game , there is a connection between the Angels; each Angel seems to be an evolutionary outgrowth of the previous one, and the fact they attack one at a time suggests they are aware of the status of each of the other specimens and react accordingly.
In Neon Genesis Evangelion