is the sixteenth episode of the Japanese anime television series Neon Genesis Evangelion, which was created by animation studio Gainax. The episode was written by Hideaki Anno and Hiroshi Yamaguchi, and directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki. The series' protagonist is Shinji Ikari, a teenage boy whose father Gendo recruits him to the special military organization Nerv to pilot a gigantic biomechanical mecha named Evangelion into combat against beings called Angels. In the episode, Shinji is absorbed into an Angel called Leliel in a space of imaginary numbers called the Dirac sea. Shinji has a vision in which he sees another version of himself as a child and discusses his lifestyle.
To write "Splitting of the Breast", the staff writers merged the ideas originally planned for a trilogy of episodes with the same theme. The episode contains several references to other Japanese television shows, such as Ultraman and Gundam, and to psychoanalysis. The title refers to Melanie Klein's psychological concept of splitting, while the episode's Japanese title is a reference to Søren Kierkegaard's work The Sickness unto Death.
"Splitting of the Breast" was first broadcast on TV Tokyo on January 17, 1996, and drew a 9.4% share of the national television audience. Animage readers voted the episode among the best anime installments of 1996, and Gainax has released merchandise based on it. Critics positively received "Splitting of the Breast" for its symbolism, Leliel's attack, its animation, and its moments of introspection.
Plot Shinji Ikari and Asuka Soryu Langley, two fellow pilots of the Evangelion mecha units, continue their domestic lives at the home of Misato Katsuragi, their superior at the paramilitary agency Nerv. Asuka accuses Shinji of being too self-nihilistic. Meanwhile, Shinji beats Asuka in a test with the Evas, and Misato praises him. Leliel, the twelfth in a series of enemies called Angels, appears as a floating sphere in the skies of Tokyo-3 city. Asuka's pride is wounded by Shinji's achievement and provokes him; Shinji decides to attack the enemy alone, but is absorbed with his Evangelion Unit-01 into its shadow.
Ritsuko Akagi, head of Nerv's scientific department, determines that Leliel exists on a higher dimension of existence, which can only be explained using abstract mathematical concepts. The Angel's shadow on the ground is its actual body, while the sphere in the sky is its true shadow. Nerv prepares a recovery strategy for Eva-01. Shinji, who is suspended between life and death in a space called the Dirac sea, has a vision in which he argues with a younger version of himself on a train. During a stream of consciousness, he feels the presence of his mother, who died years earlier in a mysterious accident. Before the recovery operation begins, Eva-01 violently emerges under its own power from Leliel, much to the horror of the onlookers. Shinji is recovered alive and physically well in the aftermath but is somewhat unsettled by his experiences.
Production Genesis and staff
In 1993 Gainax wrote a presentation document for Neon Genesis Evangelion entitled containing the initial synopses of the planned episodes. The Proposal document was then published in 1994. For the first twelve episodes aired, the company followed the proposal's schedule with only a few minor script differences. From the thirteenth episode onward, the production deviated from the writers' original plan and from the submission document. According to Michael House, translator for Gainax, Neon Genesis Evangelion main director Hideaki Anno initially intended to give the story a happy ending, but he realized he had created problematic characters, so he changed his plans during production. According to Hiroki Azuma, a culture critic who interviewed Anno, during the airing of the series, Anno began to criticize obsessive anime fans, known as otaku, whom he considered closed-minded and introverted, and changed his original plans by creating a dramatic, introspective mid-series story.
Beginning with "Lilliputian Hitcher", the production ran into severe scheduling problems because of delays in episode delivery. Gainax had completed only twelve episodes by the time the series began airing after nearly two years of production, leaving the staff to produce the remaining fourteen in just six months—roughly one-third of the time they had spent on the first twelve. According to the series' staff, "Splitting of the Breast" also revives directing and storytelling techniques that Gainax had previously used in the thirty-seventh episode of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, "Emperor Neo". Midway through production, the episode underwent an almost complete overhaul in just two weeks. Pressed for time, Gainax repurposed existing footage and reshaped it through editing into an entirely different story; the studio thus followed the same approach on "Splitting of the Breast", using previously animated drawings and shots to tell a new story.
In the first draft, the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth episodes of the series would have constituted a trilogy with a common theme. The title was initially planned for the fourteenth episode, during which Shinji would have understood desperation and fear. In the following episode, Shinji would decide to pilot Eva-01 again after a recovery. In the sixteenth, initially called , Shinji would have been absorbed into an enemy, and there would have been a first attempt at communication between humans and Angels. The writers abandoned the original plans, and some of the ideas for the trilogy were later transferred and condensed into "Splitting of the Breast"; other ideas were transferred into the nineteenth episode "Introjection". Hideaki Anno and Hiroshi Yamaguchi wrote the screenplay, while Kazuya Tsurumaki produced the storyboards. Tsurumaki directed the episode and served as assistant character designer, with Masahiko Ohtsuka and Ken Ando as assistant directors. Shinya Hasegawa worked as the chief animator. Production involved studios other than Gainax; these were Cosmos, Tokyo Photo Studio, and FAI International.
Development "Splitting of the Breast" represents a turning point in the narrative of Neon Genesis Evangelion. According to academic Emily Wati Muir, the series, which initially presented as a children's anime, takes a "pivotal turn" after this episode, presenting explicit themes like sex and violence. Hiroki Azuma similarly noted the first half of the series unfolds like a normal mecha anime in which the characters are positively depicted, and the story seems to be moving toward a happy ending. The first part of the episode follows this traditional narrative line, but the second half presents an abrupt change of direction. According to academic Christophe Thuony, starting from "Splitting of the Breast", the series' grand narrative structure is destroyed in favor of a proliferation of small, character-based narratives; this process is "deployed through a liberation of a logic of quotation that gradually undermines the overarching narrative of salvation by producing a multitude of enigmas and an excess of information".
Director Anno's increased interest in psychology influenced the change of direction. During the writing of the fourteenth episode, "Weaving a Story", Anno decided to include an internal monologue of the character of Rei Ayanami, an introverted Evangelion pilot, for the first time, depicting her as a schizophrenic character, but feeling unlike the character he was stuck on and could not write the monologue. To help him, a friend of his gave him a magazine-like book on mental illness called , which included a poem written by a mentally ill person. Although he had attended a psychology course at university, Anno never seriously read psychoanalysis books; with Evangelion, he tried to talk about himself and find the words to express his emotions; Bessatsu Takarajima book gave him a shock. After reading the book, he successfully wrote Rei's monologue, shifting the concept of the series toward introspection and trying to understand how the human mind works.
Production of "Splitting of the Breast" started before work on the fourteenth episode. The Leliel episode was originally intended to include a simple, traditional battle following the track established by the previous episodes "Magmadiver", "The Day Tokyo-3 Stood Still" and "She said, "Don't make others suffer for your personal hatred."". The production staff, however, decided to include an installment with an Angel that is more interested in humans than in their annihilation to avoid revealing the mysteries about the Angels' true nature. In the initial scenario, Leliel would select Japanese from the verses of some animals and several human languages so it could communicate with Shinji. Tsurumaki forbade the use of human language for the Angel, finding the idea "too anti-climactic" and "pulp fiction", and devised the final scenario, in which "Shinji converses with himself". Tsurumaki also suggested the dialogue between the two Shinji within Leliel's shadow, which was inspired by a dream he had.
For a scene depicting a battle against Leliel, the staff designed a gun similar to an Israeli Desert Eagle 50AE for the Eva-01. In the same sequence, the characters speak through holographic screens, a technique that was used in Gunbuster, a previous Gainax work. The design of Leliel was inspired by the artistic currents of surrealism and optical art. Japanese architect Yasutaka Yoshimura compared Leliel's design with Bridget Riley's work Fragment 5. Inside Leliel, Shinji has a vision of himself in a train; the train or station symbols have been previously used in the "Hedgehog's Dilemma" episode. Writer River Seager noted Anno showed an interest in trains since his short film At the Bus Stop (1980) and Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack (1988); the symbol of the train then returns in Anno's next work, Love & Pop (1998). Seager argues that trains have fused the themes of death and modernity in Japanese media since Kenji Miyazawa's novel Night on the Galactic Railroad, which was adapted into an anime film by Gisaburō Sugii and possibly influenced Galaxy Express 999. Trains thus became a site of isolation, loneliness, and the desire to run away; however, in Anno's cinematography, train stations also offer the hope for growth and change. Writer Álvaro Arbonés also noted Anno's "tuned sense of editing" is on full display in the train scene; he linked this to the medium limitations, so Anno had to "maximize the dynamism of the editing".