The story follows the teenagers Shinji Ikari, Rei Ayanami and Asuka Langley Soryu, who pilot mechas called Evangelion to defeat enemies who threaten humanity named Angels.

Seele discovers that Gendo Ikari, the commander of Nerv and Shinji's father, intends to create his version of Third Impact to reunite with his deceased wife Yui, whose soul resides in Unit-01.

According to official information and staff statements, problems with the schedule, delays in production, and some personal indecision on the part of the director Hideaki Anno[6] led to the abandonment of the original script of the penultimate episode.

[22] At the suggestion of Neon Genesis Evangelion character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, the unreleased film was to be set in winter, in contrast to the eternal summer in which Japan is trapped in the animated series.

[53] One of Yamashita's proposals for the never-made feature film[14] involved the Eva-01 attacking the headquarters of the German branch of Nerv, in possession of a weapon called the "Long Range Universal Invasion Cannon", or "Dead God Spine".

[57] Additional changes were made at the script stage; in one of the opening sequences, for example, Shinji would say goodbye to his two former classmates and friends, Kensuke Aida and Toji Suzuhara, at their middle school in Tokyo-3, just before their sudden departure for Germany.

When the man stopped squeezing her neck, the woman regained a cold attitude, uttering the words Asuka would say to Shinji in the original script, "I can't stand the idea of being killed by someone like you" (あんたなんかに殺されるのは真っ平よ).

[61] For The End of Evangelion, all of the voice actors from the original animated series were called, except for some characters that were excluded from the script during the writing phase, such as Toji Suzuhara and Kensuke Aida.

[87] Anno was in charge of the script and was assisted by Shinji Higuchi as the special effects director, with whom he discussed ideas and compared his opinions about every single frame of the sequences.

[35] Shinji's world was portrayed with harsher tones than the television ending, so scenes were executed using multiple overlapping or reversed rhodium glasses or sequences in three-dimensional computer graphics.

[91] At the end of the segment, stills depicting graffiti on the walls of the Gainax Shop, doodles, and emails apparently written by fans of the series,[92] including the words "Anno, I'll kill you!!"

[106] Like the original series, which includes cultural references to philosophy and psychology, a great deal of information was added in The End of Evangelion, in a style called "pedantic" in the official materials.

[116][123] Seele also describes Instrumentality as a rite of passage; Evangelion Chronicle magazine linked the term to Arnold van Gennep's anthropological concept of the same name and the sacrament of baptism.

[127] According to writers Kazuhisa Fujie and Martin Foster, the lyrics of the film's two songs "Thanatos" and "Komm, süsser Tod" emphasize the importance of the drive dialectic for the protagonist's path.

[133][136] Ex magazine reviewer Scott Rider likened "Air" to the works of Harlan Ellison,[137] while critic Nozomi Oomori and writer Hiroyuki Morioka have compared The End of Evangelion's crypticity to that of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as to widescreen baroque science fiction, which is characterized by extravagance, violence, and intricate plots.

[138] Other sequences have been interpreted as a tribute to Karel Thole's illustration on the cover of Howard Fast's science-fiction collection The General Zapped an Angel, which depicts the face of a giant being lying on a red sea.

[153][154] Hideaki Anno, an otaku himself, considers them excessively closed, self-referential, and introverted; after the end of the series, he criticized fans who were absorbed by the Internet and escaping from reality, saying their opinions are like "graffiti in public toilets".

Along with Rei's spoken lines, photographs of graffiti on Gainax offices and images of fans at Shinjuku Milano cinema appear on the screen, so the concept of the dream has been interpreted as a metaphor for anime.

According to Oguro, the series' most popular character Rei represents Neon Genesis Evangelion's pleasure principle and her dismemberment indicates the end of the otaku dream and a return to the real world.

[165][166] An official, A4-sized, illustrated booklet about Evangelion dubbed Red Cross Book by Western fans containing explanations and interviews with staff and voice actors, was sold in theaters for ¥800.

[168][169] Bandai distributed a trading card game called Evangelion Carddass Masters G (エヴァンゲリオン カードダスマスターズG), which was released in September 1998 as a supplement to the Japanese magazine RPG.

[179] On August 28 and 29, 2015, to celebrate the release of the Blu-ray box set of the series, the film was played along with the first episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion, "Angel Attack", at Toho Cinema in Shinjuku, Tokyo.

Although it is incomplete due to the loss of original materials after the plan was changed mid-filming, Hideaki Anno chose to recreate, as much as possible without additional filming or recording, the concept he had at that time.

Vision, responsible for the original series' adaptation, was initially uninterested in acquiring The End of Evangelion's distribution rights because Gainax demanded too high a fee for the licenses.

[243] The battle between Asuka and the nine units of the Eva Series, on the other hand, was described by Real Live as a scene that "probably left a mark on the history of Japanese animation",[244] and as "the beating heart of the film" by Comic Book Resources.

[133] Little White Lies's Kambole Campbell praised the animation, the apocalyptic themes, and Anno's breaking of the fourth wall with the use of animatics, hand-drawn sketches, and live-action shots.

[264] Newtype USA panned it, calling it the "saga of bamboozlement", criticizing its "biblical overtones, teen melodrama and bad parenting", eliciting protests from Manga Entertainment, The End of Evangelion's North American distributor.

[265][266] The film's cultural references were praised by other critics, such as Mark Schilling,[267] and was defended by writer Brain Camp, who wrote; "Not all great anime is meant to be understood on first viewing ... You don't always have to understand something to enjoy it.

[287] The Chinese animated feature film One Hundred Thousand Bad Jokes also pays homage to The End of Evangelion in its final sequences, in which a musical piece similar to "Komm, süsser Tod" is heard.

[288] According to IndieWire's David Ehrlich, an apocalyptic scenario similar to that of The End of Evangelion is presented in the video game Death Stranding, scripted and directed by Hideo Kojima.