Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance
2009 · Masayuki, Kazuya Tsurumaki, Hideaki Anno
Under constant attack by monstrous creatures called Angels that seek to eradicate humankind, U.N. Special Agency NERV introduces two new EVA pilots to help defend the city of Tokyo-3: the mysterious Makinami Mari Illustrous and the intense Asuka Langley Shikinami. Meanwhile, Gendo Ikari and SEELE proceed with a secret project that involves both Rei and Shinji.
dir. Masayuki, Kazuya Tsurumaki, Hideaki Anno · 2009
The second installment of the Rebuild of Evangelion tetralogy is where Hideaki Anno's project reveals its true ambition: not a remaster of his epochal 1990s television series but a rewriting of it, familiar scenes bending into unfamiliar shapes until longtime viewers lose their footing entirely. Teenage pilots in biomechanical giants still defend a fortified Tokyo-3 from inscrutable invaders called Angels, but the emotional temperature has changed — warmer, more social, almost hopeful, which in the Evangelion universe is its own kind of dread. Produced at Studio Khara, the company Anno founded to reclaim his creation, the film marries hand-drawn intensity with digital production, and its battle sequences — color-saturated, geometrically audacious — rank among the most kinetic in modern anime. A new pilot, Mari, and a subtly altered Asuka signal that the deck has been reshuffled. The final movement, scored to Hikaru Utada, escalates with an abandon that left theaters in stunned silence, and its closing minutes remain a landmark of animation as pure emotional overload. Few franchise films have dared to betray their source this thrillingly.
Lines of influence
- Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) — The TV original supplies the exact shot compositions, character designs, and Angel roster that Rebuild's 'self-rerewrite' method recopies and then deliberately diverges from, making the recomposition legible as authorship.
- The End of Evangelion (1997) — Its climactic strategy — cranking cross-cut destruction against a single pop-vocal ballad until affect overloads — is the template Rebuild 2.0 reworks with Utada's 'Beautiful World' over the Zeruel finale.
- Gunbuster (1988) — Anno's Gainax debut established his signature escalation of mecha scale plus a sudden emotional/tonal switch at the finale, the same build-and-detonate curve driving 2.0's Unit-01 awakening.
- Ultraman (1966) — Anno's lifelong tokusatsu debt shows in the geometrically posed giant-vs-monster staging — figures planted mid-frame against receding cityscape grids — that structures the color-saturated battle set-pieces.
- Space Runaway Ideon (1980) — Tomino's apocalyptic 'everyone transcends flesh' finale and the idea of a robot as an incomprehensible divine engine feed Eva's dread-in-hope theology and the berserker Unit-01.
- Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) — The 'real robot' innovation — mecha as maintained military hardware with logistics, launch sequences, and umbilical cables — is the genre grammar Eva inherits and then re-mystifies.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) — Kubrick's frontal, symmetrical framing of monoliths and vast machinery as sublime geometric objects is a direct source for Anno's 'geometric audacity' staging of Angels and the Eva launch bays.
- Devilman (1972) — Nagai's fusion of protagonist and monstrous power, where the hero's body becomes the horror, prefigures the pilot-Eva symbiosis and the fleshy, screaming Unit-01.
- Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990) — Anno developed here the reluctant-boy/wounded-girl dynamic and the warmer social-comedy register that 2.0 amplifies with Mari and the softened Asuka to make the eventual cruelty land harder.
- FLCL (2000) — Co-director Tsurumaki's hyper-kinetic, genre-collaging edit — coming-of-age emotion channeled through robots erupting from a body — is the sensibility he carries into Rebuild's overload climaxes.
- RahXephon (2002) — A direct post-Eva descendant that keeps the mystical-mecha-piloted-by-a-troubled-boy frame while trading dread for lyricism, defining the sibling field 2.0 competes in.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (2007) — The Gainax lineage's counter-move: it takes Anno's escalation-of-scale staging and strips the despair, letting 2.0's warmer, more triumphant beats read as Eva answering that optimism on its own terms.
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011) — Inherits Eva's deconstruction method — a wish-fulfillment genre revealed as a trap for traumatized children — plus abstract, collage-based monster design descended from the Angels' non-figurative geometry.
- Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo (2012) — The next tetralogy installment weaponizes 2.0's 'reshuffled deck': the timeskip and consequence-of-the-finale structure only work because 2.0 rewrote the source enough to strand the audience.
- Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time (2021) — The tetralogy's resolution completes the hand-drawn/digital-hybrid technique 2.0 pioneered, fully integrating CG Eva bodies with 2D animation into a single plastic, warping space.
- Promare (2019) — Extends 2.0's color-saturated battle palette and geometric-audacity staging into flat CG polygonal shapes, treating combat as pure graphic design of hue and angle rather than realism.