is a J-pop song performed by Japanese singer Yōko Takahashi and the opening theme of the anime television series Neon Genesis Evangelion. The song was composed by Toshiyuki Ōmori and Hidetoshi Satō, with its lyrics written by Neko Oikawa. It was released as a double-A-side single with "Fly Me to the Moon", the show's closing theme, on October 25, 1995. "The Cruel Angel's Thesis" was also included in the series' soundtrack releases and Takahashi's albums.
The song received acclaim from music critics and audiences alike; it later became a well-known Japanese anisong, a song specially created for an anime series. Years after the show's first airing, "The Cruel Angel's Thesis" has remained a popular Japanese karaoke song, winning popularity polls and awards. On the Internet, along with its official video, the song gained further fame through covers and parodies, becoming one of the most famous theme songs in the history of anime.
Background and recording
Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series director Hideaki Anno initially suggested using an existing piece of classical music as the series' opening theme. He planned to use the Polovtsian Dances from the opera Prince Igor by Russian composer Aleksander Borodin. TV Tokyo expressed concern that classical music as an opening theme would be "unclear" for the start of a television anime, and the production ultimately did not use the piece. Shirō Sagisu composed the series' original soundtrack, while Hidetoshi Satō composed the theme song and Toshiyuki Ōmori arranged it. Toshimichi Ōtsuki, a member of King Records and the official producer of the animated series, coordinated the song, although his name does not appear in the film's credits. During the demo stage, Ōtsuki requested that the "streaming melody" change into a "crispy notching style".
Singer Yōko Takahashi recorded "A Cruel Angel's Thesis" without knowing anything about the anime, its story, or its imagery. After Ōmori had roughly finished the arrangement, Takahashi recorded a temporary track by singing the melody using only the syllable "la". Once the final lyrics were ready, the production staff asked Takahashi, then almost thirty years old, to adopt a teenage tone of voice. When she received a demo with a tentative synthesizer melody, she found both the song and its lyrics difficult and considered its fast tempo particularly challenging. She later identified "A Cruel Angel's Thesis" as the most challenging song of her career to perform. Anno also requested the removal of a planned male backing choir to emphasize "maternal affection" in the opening theme.
Composition and lyrics Neko Oikawa wrote the lyrics under Ōtsuki's instructions to make them "philosophical" and "difficult". She conceived the key concepts of "mother", "fourteen-year-old boys and girls", and "an older woman". After listening to a demo tape on which Takahashi had recorded the melody, Oikawa completed the lyrics in two hours. She received a project proposal and videos of the first two, still-incomplete episodes, but skimmed the proposal and watched the videos in fast-forward. Oikawa wrote from the perspective of a mother wishing that her boy would not grow up, making use of rhetoric and double meanings. The song begins with the voice of a woman who advises a young man to behave like an angel without mercy, encouraging him with the cry of . For the woman, the boy is still innocent and naïve; he looks at her, smiles, and says nothing, and she gently invites him to rest. Reassuring him that fate brought them together, she says: "On your back you have feathers that will carry you into the future".
For the title, Oikawa used the German word . Yahoo! Japan noted that the concept of These appears, among others, in the philosophy of German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Oikawa also took inspiration from Moto Hagio's then-ongoing manga , and inserted the term , which usually refers to the angels of Christianity. The lyrics also include the verse ("This is the Bible with which you will learn what freedom is"). Oikawa initially considered the imperative for the lyrics, but the production staff told her that it sounded like and that television standards did not allow the expression. They asked her to replace it with , already present in the second verse. Oikawa retained an imperative ending because she found it satisfying to sing and suitable for conveying an older person's perspective. The song's interlude also contains the chorus , which Oikawa did not write. Ōmori, Takahashi, and her brother Gō Takahashi performed the chorus. In 2022, Oikawa asked arranger Toshiyuki Ōmori about the words; according to Ōmori, they have no particular meaning and "suddenly came down from the universe".
Critics have classified "A Cruel Angel's Thesis" as a J-pop song. Writer Dennis Redmond, in particular, argued that the theme avoids many conventions of Japanese anime opening songs, noting that it "begins and ends in a minor key and avoids clichéd choruses". Anime scholar Susan J. Napier argued that "A Cruel Angel's Thesis" reinforces the initial impression of Evangelion as a conventional mecha series through its upbeat tone and its exhortation to an unnamed youth to "become a legend"; according to Napier, the anime subsequently overturns those genre conventions, revealing a far darker and more unsettling work. According to writer Katherine Savoy, the song carries many of the important themes that appear in the series, focusing on innocence and inevitability; the lyrics play with the term destiny, "showing the struggle between what the boy is searching for and what is expected to come of him". According to Comic Book Resources' Devin Meenan, the lyrics could refer to Yui Ikari, protagonist Shinji's mother, or Misato Katsuragi, his superior who encourages him "to come out of his shell". Kotono Mitsuishi, Misato's Japanese voice actress, gave a similar interpretation, saying that when she listened to "The Cruel Angel's Thesis" again, the lyric "pierced [her] heart"; she wondered whether it was "truly the voice of Misato's heart".
Release "The Cruel Angel's Thesis" debuted as a single in two versions on October 25, 1995. The first, priced at , included another song by Takahashi, ; the second, priced at , paired it with Claire Littley's rendition of "Fly Me to the Moon", the series' ending theme. A reissue of the second version followed on March 26, 2003, alongside the Renewal Edition of Neon Genesis Evangelion. The song also appeared on the anime's soundtrack albums, beginning with Neon Genesis Evangelion I on December 6, 1995. Neon Genesis Evangelion II followed on February 16, 1996, and included the shorter "TV Size Version" heard in the TV Tokyo broadcast.
The song also appeared on other releases, such as the special box set The Day of Second Impact (September 13, 2000), Neon Genesis Evangelion: S² Works (December 4, 1998), Refrain of Evangelion (July 24, 2003), Neon Genesis Evangelion Decade (October 26, 2005), AT EVA01 Reference CD (December 21, 2007), Shin Godzilla vs Evangelion Symphony (December 27, 2017), Evangelion Finally (October 7, 2020), and Neon Genesis Evangelion Soundtrack 25th Anniversary Box, which contains multiple versions of the theme song. The track also appeared on unrelated compilations, such as the Star Child Selection (28 January 2000), various Super Robot Tamashii anthologies in various mixes, pop'n music 12 Iroha AC CS pop'n music 10 (13 April 2005), Brass Band Koushien 3 (June 24, 2009), and Nekoism 〜 Neko Oikawa Sakuhin-shū (February 21, 2018). In 2026, Dolby Atmos spatial audio mixes of "A Cruel Angel's Thesis" and "Soul's Refrain" were released on Apple Music, following a proposal by Takahashi. For the Evangelion franchise's thirtieth anniversary, Takahashi also released "A Cruel Angel's Thesis" Evangelion 30th Anniversary Edition LP on February 21, 2026.
Reception According to Yahoo!, "The Cruel Angel's Thesis", despite having been released in 1995, continued to rank highly in anime-song rankings conducted by various media and remained popular across a wide range of generations. The release of the Rebuild of Evangelion theatrical films also renewed its popularity. In 1996 and 1997, after the first broadcast of Neon Genesis Evangelion, the Animage Anime Grand Prix named "The Cruel Angel's Thesis" its best song for two consecutive years; in the second year, it received more than twice as many votes as runner-up Give a Reason by Megumi Hayashibara. In a 2002 TV Asahi poll of the 100 most unforgettable anime songs, "The Cruel Angel's Thesis" placed 55th. It later placed 18th in another TV Asahi ranking of anime songs from the 1990s onward. In 2016, Anime News Network users ranked the song first among their favorite anisongs of the 1990s, while a CD & DL Data survey of 6,956 respondents aged 10 to 39 also ranked it first among their favorite anime songs. In 2018, 110 respondents to an Anime! Anime! poll ranked "The Cruel Angel's Thesis" third among anime songs they would choose as Japan's national anthem. The following year, it placed second in a Merumo survey of female respondents' favorite anime songs to sing.
Critical reception Critics positively received "The Cruel Angel's Thesis". Casey Baseel of Sora News and Ederlyn Peralta of Comic Book Resources described it as an unforgettable track and one of the most iconic anime songs. Comic Book Resources' Eduardo Luquin praised its tone, writing: "'Cruel Angel's Thesis' is a hype train that starts the trippy trip to the destinations known as philosophy, religion, and teenage angst. Like a starting shot at the start of the race, it implores the watcher to go headlong into the show and try to take in everything Evangelion has to offer." Anime News Network reviewer Martin Theron described it as "one of the all-time great anime series openers". Matt Fagaly of Crunchyroll and Tom Pinchuk of Geek & Sundry contrasted the series' dark themes with the opening song's more uplifting character. Following the anime's release on Netflix, David Levesley of Gentlemen's Quarterly called the theme "exceptional", while Junichi Tsukagoshi of Animate Times called it "a great song that everyone knows". Comic Book Resources ranked "A Cruel Angel's Thesis" first among anime openings of the 1990s and third among anime opening themes overall.
Legacy SoraNews24 described "The Cruel Angel's Thesis" as an "unqualified hit" that transcended anime fandom, while Crunchyroll's Kara Dennison called it "one of the most recognizable [themes] in anime history". According to Polygon writer Francesco Cacciatore, the song helped Neon Genesis Evangelion to "become a beachhead for anime on the shores of mainstream popular culture". Throughout the years, the song spawned memes and parody edits. MAD videos parodying or recreating the opening sequence also circulated online; according to Comic Book Resources's Angelo Delos Trinos, it has been "endlessly covered and edited more so than anything from the actual anime. Even anime newcomers who have yet to watch anything from Evangelion are already familiar with its opening because of its undying online presence". Internet users also produced edit videos, mash-ups, and covers of the song. In 2018, a Twitter user combined the song with a video clip of LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem", inspiring further variations on social media. In 2022 Japanese voice actress and singer Aina Aiba named "The Cruel Angel's Thesis" as an anime song that changed her life, saying that performing it on the electone as a child helped inspire her to enter the entertainment industry. Voice actress Sally Amaki said that Takahashi and other prominent 1990s anime performers helped popularize anime in Japan, adding that Takahashi "really paved the way" for later performers and "fired up the 'ani-song' community".
Merchandise and other uses