Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time
2021 · Kazuya Tsurumaki
For when you want an ending — a big, emotional, everything-on-the-table finale to sit with afterward. Newcomers should start earlier in the series; for those who've made the journey, this is the payoff night.
What it's about
After a cataclysm has ruined the Earth, teenage pilots Shinji, Asuka, and Rei wash up in one of the last pockets of surviving humanity — a village where, for the first time, they live ordinary lives of farming, work, and community instead of war. But the danger isn't over: one final impact looms, and with it a reckoning between Shinji and his father that has been building across the entire saga.
The experience
A film of two temperatures: a long, tender, almost pastoral stretch of healing, then a finale of overwhelming, reality-bending mecha spectacle. It's cathartic in a way blockbusters rarely are — you can feel a creator making peace with his own creation.
The craft
Hideaki Anno and his co-directors at Studio Khara stage some of the most audacious animation of its era, with a final act where the imagery deliberately destabilizes — battles spilling into soundstages and storyboards, as if the film were dismantling its own machinery on camera. It demands the biggest screen and best sound you can give it.
Why it matters
The conclusion of a decade-plus Rebuild project and the definitive farewell to one of anime's most influential and agonized-over franchises — a rare case of a creator ending his life's work on his own terms, in something like peace.
Hideaki Anno had ended Neon Genesis Evangelion at least twice before, each conclusion more scorched than the last. The finale of his Rebuild tetralogy is something stranger: a farewell made in apparent peace. Picking up after apocalyptic events, it grants its traumatized child-pilots an extended pastoral interlude — rice paddies, communal labor, the radical notion of ordinary life — before plunging into a final act of dizzying mecha spectacle where the imagery grows deliberately unstable, sets dissolving into soundstages and storyboards as if the series were dismantling its own machinery on camera. Anno, the definitive auteur of the anime medium and a founding figure of Studio Gainax turned head of Studio Khara, spent over a decade on the Rebuild project; this capstone became Japan's highest-grossing film of 2021. Its craft synthesizes everything modern anime can do — hand-drawn intimacy, unmoored CG cameras, abstraction bleeding into live-action texture. Twenty-six years of cultural obsession, therapy-in-public, and giant-robot iconography funnel into a single gesture of release. Few franchises have ever been allowed to grow up; fewer still have chosen to let go.
Lines of influence
- The End of Evangelion (1997) — Established Anno's signature rupture from animation into live-action footage — real Tokyo streets and a filmed cinema audience — the exact 'abstraction-into-live-action' device 3.0+1.0 reprises when the battle collapses onto a visible Khara soundstage.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion (episodes 25–26) (1996) — Pioneered Anno's therapy-session interiority — congratulatory chairs, monochrome pencil-sketch abstraction, characters narrating their own psyches — the trauma-and-therapy staging 3.0+1.0 externalizes into the Instrumentality confrontation.
- Gunbuster (1988) — Anno's directorial debut fused hard-SF mecha with a coming-of-age register and closed on a stark black-and-white finale, prefiguring his habit of switching visual grammar to mark emotional/metaphysical thresholds.
- The Ideon: Be Invoked (1982) — Its cosmic apocalyptic finale — every character killed and consciousness dispersed into a reborn universe — is the direct metaphysical template for Instrumentality's dissolution of individual ego into a single fluid.
- Mobile Suit Gundam (1981) — Founded the 'real robot' idiom where mecha are logistical military hardware and pilots are traumatized adolescents, the operational-realism framing (deployment protocols, chains of command) Eva inherits wholesale.
- Ultraman (1966) — The tokusatsu love Anno never hid — miniature-set kaiju destruction and the frank artificiality of the soundstage — resurfaces literally when 3.0+1.0's climax stages combat on an exposed film-set backlot with painted backdrops and prop rails.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) — Its Star Gate sequence models transcendence as pure non-representational abstraction rather than narrative event, the strategy Anno uses to render Instrumentality as geometric red-sea imagery beyond figuration.
- Solaris (1972) — Psychologized SF where an alien force materializes a character's guilt and dead loved ones to force interior reckoning — the confrontation-with-manifested-memory mode Shinji undergoes on the DSS Choker beach.
- Shin Godzilla (2016) — Same Khara-era Anno toolkit: an unmoored digital handheld camera roams impossibly through CG geometry with hyper-rapid cutting and docudrama framing, the identical 'unmoored-CG-camera' language of Thrice Upon a Time's action.
- Millennium Actress (2001) — Editing that dissolves the boundary between film-set fiction and physical reality — the camera crew walking into the movie — is the metafictional-collapse cut Anno deploys pulling combatants out onto the real production stage.
- Perfect Blue (1997) — Match-cuts that seamlessly fuse fantasy, memory, and reality across the same framing pioneered the abstraction-into-live-action editing grammar Eva weaponizes to break its own diegesis.
- Promare (2019) — Trigger (ex-Gainax) composites flat hand-drawn figures over angular cel-shaded CG mecha with a free virtual camera — the hand-drawn/CG hybrid pipeline Khara refined across the Rebuild films.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (2007) — Ex-Gainax mecha whose ever-escalating scale and drill-driven transcendence answers Eva's apocalypse in a life-affirming key, inheriting the same emotional-catharsis-through-mecha structure.
- Belle (2021) — A 2021 anime built on the same hand-drawn/CG hybrid, sweeping an unmoored virtual camera through vast fully-CG environments while keeping 2D character acting — the era-defining pipeline Thrice Upon a Time exemplifies.
- Your Name (2016) — Layers hand-drawn characters over photoreal composited landscapes and grounds cosmic disaster in a pastoral rural interlude — the same hybrid rendering plus 'ordinary-life' village respite as 3.0+1.0's Village-3 farming section.
- Devilman (1972) — Its body-horror apocalypse fusing human and monstrous flesh into an eschatological climax established the transgressive, transformation-as-transcendence finale that Eva's angelic biomechanics descend from.