新世紀エヴァンゲリオン
How Hideaki Anno transformed his battle with depression into one of anime's most profound works
In the early 1990s, Hideaki Anno was lost. After the commercial failure of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water's later episodes and a series of abandoned projects, the acclaimed animator fell into a severe depression that would last four years.
He stopped working. He stopped creating. He questioned the very nature of existence, relationships, and his place in the world. For an artist whose identity was so intertwined with his work, this was annihilation.
Gainax approaches Anno about a new project. Still deep in depression, he begins channeling his psychological state into the concept of giant robots and broken children.
Anno starts writing obsessively. The characters of Shinji, Asuka, and Rei become vessels for exploring his own fears — the fear of rejection, the terror of intimacy, the paralysis of choice.
Neon Genesis Evangelion premieres on TV Tokyo. What audiences expect to be a standard mecha anime slowly reveals itself as something far more personal and disturbing.
Episodes 25 and 26 abandon traditional narrative entirely, becoming an abstract exploration of Anno's psychological breakthroughs. Budget constraints become creative liberation.
The protagonist Shinji Ikari is often criticized for being passive, whiny, and unable to act. This was intentional. Anno poured his own paralysis into Shinji — the inability to connect with others, the desperate need for validation, the retreat into isolation as a defense mechanism.
But Evangelion doesn't wallow. Through 26 episodes, we watch Shinji — and by extension, Anno himself — confront the fundamental question: Is it better to feel pain through connection, or feel nothing through isolation?
Humans need closeness but inevitably hurt each other when they get too close. Anno explored his own fear of intimacy through this metaphor, eventually concluding that the pain is worth the connection.
The "Absolute Terror Field" that protects the Evas is also the wall humans build around their hearts. Breaking through requires vulnerability — the very thing Anno feared most.
The Human Instrumentality Project — dissolving all human boundaries into one consciousness — represents both the appeal and horror of losing individual identity. Depression often feels like dissolution.
The infamous final scene, where everyone applauds Shinji for accepting himself, was Anno's genuine breakthrough moment — realizing that self-acceptance was possible.
Creating Evangelion didn't magically cure Anno's depression. But it gave him a framework to understand it, externalize it, and ultimately move through it.
The act of creation became therapeutic not because it provided answers, but because it allowed Anno to ask the questions that haunted him in a form others could witness. He wasn't alone in the darkness anymore — millions of viewers were there with him, fighting the same Angels.
In the years since, Anno has continued to work, to create, to struggle. The Rebuild of Evangelion films, completed in 2021, show an artist who has grown — able to finally give Shinji, and himself, a gentler ending. Not because the pain wasn't real, but because healing is possible.
Evangelion resonates so deeply because it refuses to pretend that depression, anxiety, and the terror of human connection are simple problems with simple solutions. It sits in the discomfort. It shows the ugliness. And then, impossibly, it finds a fragile hope.
For countless fans who struggle with similar demons, Eva is proof that art can come from darkness — and that creating something from your pain doesn't diminish the pain, but transforms it into connection with others who understand.