"Rei I", also known by the Japanese title is the fifth episode of the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, which was created by animation studio Gainax. "Rei I" was written by Hideaki Anno and Akio Satsukawa, and directed by Keiichi Sugiyama. It was first broadcast on TV Tokyo on November 1, 1995. The series is set fifteen years after a worldwide cataclysm named Second Impact, mostly in the futuristic, fortified city called Tokyo-3. The episode's protagonist is Shinji Ikari, a teenage boy who is recruited by his father Gendo into the organization Nerv to pilot a giant biomechanical mecha named Evangelion to combat certain beings called Angels. In the episode, Shinji tries, but fails, to connect with Rei Ayanami, a fellow pilot, who is close to his distant and cold father Gendo.
When it was first broadcast, "Rei I" scored a 7.2% rating of audience share on Japanese TV. The episode won popularity polls and was praised by critics, who appreciated the introduction of Rei's character and her mysteriousness. Scientific concepts are mentioned in the installment, which contains cultural references to DNA, nitrogenous bases, and wave-particle duality. "Rei I" contains references to earlier fictional works as well, such as The Andromeda Strain and Sailor Moon. The laconic attitude of Rei's character has also been linked by critics to the Japanese socio-cultural situation, in particular with the generation born in the seventies and with a martyr complex. Critics analyzed Rei's home as well, comparing it to buildings of postwar Japan. Merchandise based on the episode has also been released by Gainax.
Plot The episode opens with a flashback to twenty-two days before. Rei Ayanami, the pilot of a giant mecha named Evangelion, is subjected with her Unit 00 to a test by operatives of the special agency Nerv. During the test, Eva-00 malfunctions, smashing the walls and windows of the room before eventually coming to a stop. Rei's cockpit is ejected during the emergency; Gendo Ikari, commander of Nerv, runs to open the cabin to make sure of Rei's status. The pilot, though injured, is still alive and conscious, while Gendo burns his palm and drops and damages his glasses.
In the present, Shinji Ikari, pilot of Unit 01, notices that Rei is always alone at school but appears to have a good relationship with his father Gendo, who instead is cold towards him. Shinji is tasked with delivering the new Nerv ID card to Rei and heads to her apartment. Finding the door unlocked and open, the boy enters and happens upon his father's damaged old glasses, which Rei is storing on her nightstand as a keepsake. Being distracted by the glasses, Shinji is taken by surprise when he accidentally bumps into a naked Rei, and ends up tripping and landing on top of her in a fit of panic. Rei does not flinch at the awkwardness of the situation and proceeds to stoically ignore her colleague and put her underwear on as he frantically tries to apologize and explain himself. Rei is later subjected to a new test with Eva-00, which is interrupted by an attack by a new enemy, the fifth Angel Ramiel. Shinji exits with Eva-01 to intercept the Angel, who fires a particle cannon, hitting the mecha's chest. Shinji screams in pain as Eva-01's chest begins to melt from the heat.
Production
According to an official Neon Genesis Evangelion booklet, the fourth episode, "Hedgehog's Dilemma", was once omitted in terms of the series composition, and it was planned that "Rei I" would come after the third, "A Transfer". After the battle against Angel Shamshel, Shinji would become friends with his classmates Toji Suzuhara and Kensuke Aida in the third episode, receiving a call from them. As production progressed, however, staff members said they thought there was a need to depict Shinji's relationships with the people around him after the third episode. As they were writing the scripts and the screenplay, the staff also felt that it would be logically implausible to have Shinji pilot Eva-01 again without first considering the effects of the boy's traumatic experience. Neon Genesis Evangelion director Hideaki Anno was also stuck after writing the script for the first episode, "Angel Attack", which took half a year to complete, and he wrote "Rei I" and the sixth episode "Rei II" before the third and the fourth. For production reasons, the post-recording dubbing followed the same order. Akio Satsukawa and Hideaki Anno wrote the episode; Anno also worked on Ramiel's design. Jun'ichi Satō drew the storyboards under the pseudonym of Kiichi Jinme, Keiichi Sugiyama served as director and Masahiko Ohtsuku as assistant director. Shunji Suzuki worked as chief animator, while Seiji Kio served as setting assistant.
In 1993 Gainax wrote a presentation document of Neon Genesis Evangelion named to find potential sponsors for the series, with the basic plot of the episode already programmed. The Proposal document was then published in 1994. The Japanese title "Rei, Beyond Her Heart" was also planned. In the episode's original draft, Gainax planned to equip the Evangelions with a positron engine made of a "pure crystalline metal of unknown origin". The staff also planned a scene in which Shinji would wonder why more Eva units were not being built and another in which Toji, jealous of the girls' attention toward Shinji, would attempt a basketball shot. Both ideas were later revisited for the seventh and seventeenth episode before ultimately being discarded. Rei was still to wear her eye bandage, while neither Misato Katsuragi's pet penguin's name, nor Ritsuko's remarks about Commander Ikari's inability to live had yet been conceived. Ritsuko would refer to Eva-00 as "Proto Evangelion", and her conversation with Misato about the cause of the activation test accident was originally intended to take place while the test was still in progress. Finally, the staff planned for Eva-00 to fail to activate because its internal battery had been completely depleted, as well as a scene in which Ramiel would be struck by cruise missiles.
Once the first part of Shinji's character arc was over in the previous episodes, the director decided to focus on Rei Ayanami in the two installments that followed. During the production, Anno encountered difficulties writing the character, not feeling "particularly interested" nor relating to her, but he thought of her as a representation of his unconscious mind. He also said that he forgot about her existence during production, giving her just a marginal space. In the fifth episode, explicitly dedicated to her character, Rei speaks seven lines and fifty-two words in the whole installment. Her storyline also changed. In the second draft of the scenario for the first episode, it was planned for Rei to rescue Shinji with an Eva. According to Neon Genesis Evangelion assistant director Kazuya Tsurumaki, the tentative plot would have given a valid reason for Shinji to choose to get on 01, thinking that Rei was hurt because of him, but the storyline was changed. A final scenario, in which Rei is injured during a botched Eva-00 test, was then considered. Moreover, the idea of Gendo's glasses being broken during the test was provided by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, the character designer of the series.
For the scene of Rei and Shinji on the Nerv escalators, the staff graphically reproduced the effects of relative motion, making an ascending escalator appear faster, and a second one, which follows the camera movement, appear slower. While the scene where Shinji enters Rei's room was done in the typical style of Neon Genesis Evangelion, the scene where Rei is described as a normal girl was done in the style of Jun'ichi Satō, who previously worked on the Sailor Moon series. In the meal scene between Misato, Ritsuko and Shinji, Misato was represented taking inspiration from Usagi Tsukino, the protagonist of Sailor Moon. In the same scene, staff inserted graphic and humorous symbols on the characters' heads, taking inspiration from the shōjo manga and Sailor Moon. Furthermore, Sato tried to represent the scene in which Shinji is discovered in Rei's room by imitating the style of Leiji Matsumoto. He also wanted to add more details to the description of daily life, but Anno thought it would be excessive. Anno only gave the instruction to represent Rei's room as a "bleak room", and to represent it Akio Satsukawa was inspired by a flat he saw when he worked as a part-time plumber. It was easy for Satsukawa to write "Rei I", and the final product did not differ much from the initial draft he wrote.
Animator and screenwriter Mitsuo Iso had the idea of adding a rainbow in Rei's room scene. Iso chose it because since ancient times it had been considered a symbol of the path to Heaven and the Covenant between Man and God. In the original project, Rei would have eaten the flesh of an ancient ruin located in the depths of Nerv, Arqa, as in Daijirō Morohoshi's Koushi Ankoku. In her room in Arqa, there would have been many glasses, so as to create rainbows, flasks, and test tubes, German technical books, the Old Testament, and many toys—none of which, however, were human-shaped. In her apartment, there would also have been the symbol of the Essenes and an object representing the Tree of Life, similar to the Devil Tower in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Iso also specified that "blood-stained eye bandage should be clearly identified as such, or a lot of numbskulls will get the wrong idea". In an early draft of the script, Shinji was supposed to be covered head to toe in Rei's underwear. However, as work progressed, this initial version seemed too suggestive and mischievous to the staff; the scene was thus reworked with a more comical twist. Jin Yamanoi and Yūko Miyamura voiced the unnamed Nerv technical operators in the episode, Kōichi Nagano and Hiro Yūki played two boys from Shinji's school, while Megumi Hayashibara, Rei's Japanese voice actress, sang a version of Fly Me to the Moon named "Rei #5" used as the ending theme.
Cultural references, style and themes
"Rei I" makes reference to scientific and biological concepts. During the incident where Eva-00 malfunctioned, for example, the Nerv use a special bakelite to block the Eva units, named after the homonymous phenol formaldehyde resin. In the following scenes, Dr. Ritsuko talks about the Angels' genetic similarity with humans; she analyzes the body of the fourth Angel, Shamshel, and its wave spectrum, finding it similar to the human gene. The words "pattern: blue" appear on her computer screen, since Angel's matter has a wavelength corresponding to that of blue light. On another screen also appears a map of human DNA, with the letters A, C, G, and T, corresponding to the nitrogenous bases — adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. According to Ritsuko, although there are differences in constituent materials, the two maps have the same waveform pattern, and their signal arrangement and coordinates are 99.89% matched. The book by Yahata Shoten noted how the number is higher than the percentage of genetic similarity between humans and monkeys. For academic Philip Brophy, this means Angels are more terrestrial than extraterrestrial and "more than mere Others". Japanese magazine Animage linked this resemblance to the traditional Christian angelic hierarchy in Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica or De Coelesti Hierarchia by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, according to which angels occupy the lowest rank of the celestial hierarchy and are therefore the closest to humankind.