"Rei II", also known by the Japanese title is the sixth episode of the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, which was created by animation studio Gainax. "Rei II" was written by Hideaki Anno and Akio Satsukawa and directed by Hiroyuki Ishido. The series is set fifteen years after a worldwide cataclysm named Second Impact, and is mostly set in the futuristic, fortified fictional city of Tokyo-3. The episode's protagonist is teenage boy Shinji Ikari, who is recruited by his father Gendo to the organization Nerv to pilot a biomechanical mecha named Evangelion against beings called Angels. In the episode, Shinji must annihilate the fifth Angel Ramiel, who is able to destroy every enemy in its vicinity with an accelerated particle cannon. A plan called Operation Yashima is worked out, which involves Shinji shooting Ramiel from a distance with a Positron Rifle.
Production of the sixth episode took place simultaneously with the fifth, "Rei I", before the third, "A Transfer", and the fourth, "Hedgehog's Dilemma". The final scene, in which female pilot Rei Ayanami smiles at Shinji, has been described by staff and critics as the end of Evangelion's grand narrative. "Rei II" first aired on TV Tokyo on November 8, 1995, and scored a 7.7% audience share on Japanese TV. The episode was positively received by critics, who praised the interpretation of the Japanese voice actors, the deepening of the relationship between Shinji and Rei, and the realism of Operation Yashima. The Operation entered Japanese popular culture, being referenced on other shows. Merchandise based on the episode was also released.
Plot Shinji Ikari, the pilot of the giant mecha Evangelion, is attacked and damaged by Ramiel, the fifth of a series of enemies known as Angels. His Evangelion Unit-01 is recovered, and Shinji is rescued and hospitalized. The Angel then settles over the headquarters of the special agency Nerv and begins to drill the land to reach it, destroying every enemy that approaches with a particle cannon. While Shinji is recovering, Nerv's Major, Misato Katsuragi, comes up with a plan named Operation Yashima: to destroy Ramiel with a positron beam rifle, fired from outside Ramiel's attack zone. For the plan, the rifle must be able to withstand a high amount of electric energy, and it is determined that it needs power from the whole of Japan.
While the countdown for the shooting is starting, Ramiel starts to charge to attack the Evangelion and shoots toward it, simultaneously with the Evangelion's rifle's shot, resulting in the collision of the two beams and the shots miss. Ramiel charges up for a second attack, which it can fire at Shinji before he can prepare his positron rifle for a second shot. Rei Ayanami in Evangelion Unit-00 steps in and shields Unit-01 from Ramiel's beam, but both the shield and Unit-00 sustain severe damage in the process. Shinji fires his second shot, which pierces the Angel and kills it, stopping the drill. Shinji ejects Unit-00's cockpit and opens the hatch. Rei is unharmed and unfazed. Shinji cries, and Rei says she doesn't know what to feel; Shinji advises her to smile, and Rei smiles.
Production
In 1993 Gainax produced a presentation document of Neon Genesis Evangelion named , containing a first draft of the planned episodes. The Proposal document was then published in 1994. In the first draft, the basic plot for the sixth episode was already planned, and the Japanese title "Showdown in Tokyo-3" was decided. "The Eva's revenge" was also planned to take place in the installment. Neon Genesis Evangelion director Hideaki Anno and Akio Satsukawa wrote "Rei II", while Masayuki drew the storyboards. Hiroyuki Ishido served as director, Nobuhiro Hosoi as chief animator, and Rei Yumeno as assistant character designer. Megumi Hayashibara, Rei's voice actress, performed the voice of an anonymous woman making time announcements during the process; Tetsuya Iwanaga and Tomokazu Seki voiced unnamed Nerv operators, while Yūko Miyamura voiced a female announcer. A version of Bart Howard's "Fly Me to the Moon" named "Rei #6" sung by Hayashibara was also used for the ending theme of the episode.
Anno felt stuck after writing the script for the first episode, "Angel Attack", which took half a year to complete, and he wrote "Rei I" and "Rei II" before the third and fourth episodes. In the staff's original plans, after the battle against Angel Shamshel in the third episode "A Transfer", Shinji would become friends with his classmates Toji Suzuhara and Kensuke Aida in the episode finale, 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, so the fourth episode, "Hedgehog's Dilemma", was added to the plan. For production reasons, the post-recording dubbing followed the same order. In the episode's original script draft, Gainax had not yet decided on either the name Operation Yashima or the scene in which Shinji pries open Eva-00's cockpit by hand to rescue Rei. The staff also planned a scene following Rei's smile in which Gendo would watch Rei smiling at Shinji on a monitor before giving her a cold look.
Academic José Andrés Santiago Iglesias noted that, during the scene in which Misato asks Gendo Ikari to approve Operation Yashima, the conversation between them lasts more than twenty seconds, but it consists entirely of two static shots; Iglesias mentioned this as an example of Neon Genesis Evangelion's extensive use of limited animation, in which "the scene is animated by a variation on shot-reverse-shot and cross-dialogue techniques". The episode marked the first time two Evangelion units were portrayed at the same time, so they were intentionally represented with few movements, with the Eva-00 using only a shield and the Eva-01 motionless while shooting Ramiel, to save animation resources. Ramiel's design, made by Anno himself, was also conceived to save money. While Sachiel, the Angel from the first and second episodes, has a humanoid shape, Ramiel has a geometric abstract shape, because the staff did not have enough resources for an anthropomorphic enemy. Moreover, according to series assistant director Kazuya Tsurumaki, "everything after the storyboard was ordered by another company", and Gainax had no control over it. Yashima Operation was delegated to Vega Entertainment instead.
In "Rei II", captions were used to create a documentary feel, a technique Anno previously used in Gunbuster. The installment also depicts real existing places during the preparations for Operation Yashima, such as Mount Futago, Makurazaki, Betsukai, Ube, and Mitaka Ward of Tokyo, the birthplace of Anno and the place of the headquarters of Gainax, respectively. Real-world brands were featured in the Operation Yashima preparation scenes, such as the Sega Saturn consoles and Shimorak milk. A map of Japan is also framed during the operation. According to Gualtiero Cannarsi, who curated the Italian adaptation of the series, since Second Impact raised the sea level in the Evangelion universe the map has slight differences from reality, as smaller islands are difficult to trace on the map, while the main islands of Honshū, Hokkaidō, Shikoku, and Kyūshū have different shapes. Anno encountered difficulties while writing for Rei, not feeling "particularly interested" or relating to her, but he thought of her as a representation of his unconscious mind and shaped the character with the phrase "You won't die, I will protect you". He also inserted a scene where Rei smiles at Shinji at the end of the episode, but he later regretted it, since Shinji and Rei manage to communicate with each other and establish emotional contact in the episode; according to Anno, the character of Rei thus reaches its conclusion smiling.
Cultural references
According to Yūichirō Oguro, an editor of some Japanese home video editions of Evangelion, the Japanese title "Showdown in Tokyo-3" is a possible reference to the sixth episode of Return of Ultraman, "Showdown! Monsters vs. MAT". Like "Rei II", "Showdown! Monsters vs. MAT" contains a large-scale operation. Oguro noted that ticker tape is also used during the episode, similarly to Anno's previous works Gunbuster and Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water. He compared the use of ticker tape to the works of Japanese director Kihachi Okamoto. Critics also speculated that Ramiel's design was influenced by an enemy that first appeared in Mirai Keisatsu Urashiman anime series and some abstract geometric elements visible in the final abstract scenes from Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
The name of Operation Yashima originates from the Battle of Yashima, fought in 1185, during the Genpei War. According to a legend, the samurai warrior Nasu no Yoichi, riding his horse, shot an arrow through the water and hit the red fan of his enemy Tamamushi, resolving the battle in favor of the Minamoto clan. Ramiel is similarly centered and beaten in Neon Genesis Evangelion by a precise shot fired from a position located across the waters of Lake Ashi, Mount Futago. The operation's name also derives from , which can be translated as "eight islands", an ancient epithet of Japan, a reference to the Positron Rifle's electrical energy, taken from the entire Japanese archipelago. The naming is the result of a specific request from the series' director, Hideaki Anno, who asked to include something related to the name Yashima during the production.
In "Rei II" scientific concepts are used as well. During Operation Yashima, for example, Eva-00 uses an SSTO as a shield, while Eva-01 uses the Positron Sniper Rifle as a firearm, which draws its power from positron particles, generating a bright beam of photons. The Positron Rifle is actually a self-propelled positron gun developed by the Strategic Self-Defence Forces and later requisitioned by Nerv for Eva units in the series. Angel Ramiel has a nuclear reactor in its body, fighting with a charged particle beam. The expression "phase transition space" is mentioned. The book by Yahata Shoten linked the expression to the phase change and the cosmological phase transition. The Magi System, a biological supercomputer composed of three computers that rule Nerv and Tokyo-3, is also mentioned for the first time in the episode. The Magi System is a democratic and rational system similar to the concept of artificial intelligence. Its name originates from the Biblical Magi mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew, traditionally named Balthasar, Gaspar, and Melchior. Their names first appeared in an eighth-century religious chronicle named Excerpta Latina Barbari. According to the official Neon Genesis Evangelion film books, like the three astrologers from whom it takes its name, the supercomputer is composed of three independent calculators that to solve any kind of problem consult each other and make a decision by majority. Writers Víctor Sellés de Lucas and Manuel Hernández-Pérez similarly wrote that, as later Christian tradition identified Magi as astrologers and scholars, the Magi System "operates as a council of the wise and sometimes even as an oracle of sorts".
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