The Man Who Broke Himself to Create Evangelion

In 1991, Hideaki Anno was one of the most promising directors in anime. By 1992, he couldn't get out of bed. The man who had animated some of the most technically brilliant scenes in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and co-founded Gainax studio found himself paralyzed, not by injury, but by his own mind.

What followed was a four-year descent into depression so severe that Anno later described it as a kind of death. "I tried to include everything of myself in Neon Genesis Evangelion," he would later say. "Myself, a broken man who could do nothing for four years."

This is the story of how that breakdown became a breakthrough. And how one man's psychological crisis created a work that would redefine an entire medium.

The Breaking Point

The early 90s should have been Anno's moment. Gainax was riding high after the cult success of Gunbuster and Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water. But something cracked. Production troubles, creative differences, and a deepening sense of existential dread collided into a perfect storm.

Anno stopped working. He stopped creating. For an artist whose identity was so intertwined with his output, this was a form of annihilation. He retreated into isolation, spending his days watching the ceiling, questioning everything: especially himself.

His friends described a man unrecognizable from the energetic animator they knew. He couldn't explain what was wrong. He only knew that some essential part of himself had broken, and he didn't know how to fix it.

Then, in 1993, Gainax came calling with a proposition: a new mecha anime, a chance to reinvent the genre. Anno was hesitant. But somewhere in that conversation, something clicked. What if he didn't try to make a "good" anime? What if he just made something true?

The Birth of Shinji

Every character in Evangelion carries a piece of Anno's fractured psyche, but none more than Shinji Ikari, the reluctant 14-year-old pilot audiences would come to either despise or deeply recognize.

Shinji doesn't want to pilot Eva. He doesn't want to save the world. He wants what everyone who has experienced depression secretly wants: to disappear without actually dying. His famous mantra ("I mustn't run away") isn't a battle cry. It's a survival mechanism.

"Shinji does reflect my character, both the conscious and unconscious parts," Anno admitted. The paralysis, the desperate need for validation, the terror of human connection: these weren't character flaws added for drama. They were autobiography.

The Hedgehog's Dilemma

One of Evangelion's most enduring concepts is the "hedgehog's dilemma": the idea that the closer people get, the more they hurt each other, like hedgehogs trying to share warmth in winter. It's a perfect metaphor for depression's cruelest trick: convincing you that isolation is protection, when it's actually poison.

Anno explored this through the AT Field (the "Absolute Terror Field" that protects the massive bio-mechanical Evas in combat). But symbolically, it represents something more intimate: the walls we build around our hearts, the barriers we erect against vulnerability.

Every battle in Evangelion is really two battles: one against the Angels, and one against the characters' own emotional armor. Breaking through requires the one thing Anno feared most: genuine human connection.

The Controversial Ending

By the final two episodes, something remarkable happened: Anno ran out of budget, out of time, and out of conventional storytelling. What emerged was something unprecedented: an entirely internal journey through Shinji's (and by extension, Anno's) psychological landscape.

Episodes 25 and 26 abandoned giant robot fights entirely. Instead, viewers got abstract imagery, recycled animation, and long stretches of characters simply... talking. About their fears. Their regrets. Their desperate, stumbling attempts at self-understanding.

Fans were furious. Death threats arrived at Gainax's offices. But something else happened too: people started recognizing themselves.

The ending's final moment, where every character appears to congratulate Shinji for accepting himself, wasn't cheap sentiment. It was Anno's genuine breakthrough. After four years of darkness, he had found something that felt like light: the radical idea that self-acceptance was possible.

The Long Road After

Creating Evangelion didn't cure Anno. Depression isn't something you defeat like an Angel. It's something you learn to live alongside. But the act of creation gave him a framework to externalize his pain, to share it with millions who saw their own struggles reflected back.

The Rebuild films, completed over 14 years, show an artist in conversation with his younger self. The final film, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, released in 2021, gave Shinji something the original series never could: a gentle ending.

Not because the pain wasn't real. But because healing is possible.