Name: Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death and Rebirth
Genre: Animation, Drama, Science Fiction
Released: 1997-03-15T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 101 min
Cast: Megumi Ogata, Megumi Hayashibara, Yuko Miyamura, Kotono Mitsuishi, Fumihiko Tachiki

A boy stands at the lip of a rust-colored sea, the water thick and still under a bruised orange sky, while another boy watches him from a broken spar of rock. That image, all wreckage and silence and a horizon the shade of an open wound, is the register in which Neon Genesis Evangelion first closed itself on a big screen. Hideaki Anno‘s Death and Rebirth is less a film that tells a story than one that takes a story apart, sifting the giant-robot apocalypse of his television series down to its grief, its repetitions, and its long held pauses.

It arrives the way it has always arrived: as a fragment. The picture is built in two unequal halves. The first spends roughly an hour re-cutting the series into a fugue of memory, looping back through the same faces and the same wounds. The second breaks off mid-sentence, opening the first movement of an ending that would not actually be completed for months. It is a bridge with one bank missing, and that incompleteness, more than any single sequence, is what has kept viewers arguing over what the thing even is.

The voices holding it together are the ones that made the series a landmark. Megumi Ogata plays Shinji Ikari as a raw nerve, a fourteen-year-old collapsing inward; Megumi Hayashibara gives Rei Ayanami her flat, unnerving calm; Yuko Miyamura’s Asuka Langley Soryu is all armor and fracture; Kotono Mitsuishi’s Misato Katsuragi carries the adult exhaustion the teenagers cannot yet name. Stripped of most of their action beats and reduced to fragments, these performances stop being plot delivery and start functioning as pure interiority, which is the whole argument the compilation is making about the show.

Anno assembled the package at the point where the series had already broken its own frame. The television run had ended on two episodes of stark psychological abstraction, chalk-white rooms and hand-drawn scribble, that split the audience down the middle, and the studio behind it, Gainax, was fielding both adoration and fury. Death and Rebirth sits in that wound. It is the work of a director circling his own material, unable to leave it, using the remix as a way to think out loud about what the ending should be before he had the resources to build it.

The Death half treats the series as a score to be re-orchestrated, intercutting the four teenage pilots in a recital that keeps returning to the same phrases. The Rebirth half is something else entirely: the literal first reel of what would soon become The End of Evangelion, the alternate finale Anno delivered after the production overran. Watched today, Rebirth plays as a cliffhanger the film never intended to hold, cutting out precisely as the apocalypse it has been threatening begins to move.

None of which makes it a complete work, and it is worth being honest about that. Death and Rebirth was, in plain terms, a stopgap, shaped as much by scheduling and money as by intention. The remix recycles footage many of its viewers already knew by heart, and the second half resolves nothing because resolution was, by design, being held back for a separate release. A revival built around it inherits that hollow center. It offers the image of an ending rather than an ending, and anyone walking in cold will leave without the payoff the marketing implies.

A still from Neon Genesis Evangelion Death and Rebirth, 1997 — Shinji Ikari in *Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death and Rebirth* (1997)

What the compilation does deliver is the texture of Anno’s despair rendered with unusual formal control. Shiro Sagisu’s score moves between orchestral swell and near-silence; Yoshiyuki Sadamoto’s character designs hold their fragility even in still frames; the palette runs to clinical blues, hospital greens, and that recurring liturgical red that floods the final images until the screen seems to bleed. The compositions favor negative space, a face pushed to one edge of the frame with emptiness pressing in from the other, and the recut sharpens rather than dilutes that loneliness. The co-direction credited to Kazuya Tsurumaki and Masayuki, working under Anno with production support from Production I.G, keeps the recut from feeling like a mere highlight reel. The lineup rounds out with Fumihiko Tachiki as the glacial Gendo Ikari and Koichi Yamadera as Ryoji Kaji, both threading adult menace through a story otherwise anchored in adolescence.

The North American return comes through GKIDS, which has spent recent years bringing the once out-of-print Evangelion films back into circulation. The distributor is presenting the material as a two-night event billed as the Evangelion 30th Movie Fest, screening the revised Death (True)² & Rebirth cut on July 21 and The End of Evangelion the following night, July 22, at participating chains including AMC and Cinemark. For the compilation in particular it is a first proper theatrical run on these shores, a chance to see the fragment projected at the scale it was cut for, running roughly a hundred minutes. Whether that fragment stands on its own or only makes sense as the doorway to the film that follows it is, fittingly, the argument it has always started.