Hiroki Azuma, Ph.D from the University of Tokyo
>A lot of you probably maintain a single image of anime culture. But in Japan, it is actually heavily split in two ways. This happened in 1995. It was the year when Evangelion was first released. This anime led the split, but it also carries both elements. On one side, it depicts the “real” emotional conflicts of a teenager, and battle scenes are also highly realistic. But on the other hand, it also expresses fictive quality of a symbolic imagination. This split is becoming deeper and deeper.
Toshio Okada
>Whatever we discuss today, we cannot avoid Eva "
Mamoru Oshii
>"After Eva ended, there were a mountain of shows similar to it, but all they did was trace the details.
Makoto Shinkai
>Shinkai, 39, cites Evangelion, Hideaki Anno's coming-of-age epic of childhood betrayal at the hands of misguided adults, as having taught him "anime doesn't always have to be about crazy movement and a lot of action. Sometimes it is also about the words or even the lack of words, things not being spoken."'
Takashi Murakami
>"Evangelion is the endpoint of the post-war lineage of otaku favorites : from Godzilla to the Ultra series to Yamato to Gundam"
Shinbo
>"If Evangelion did not become such a hit, probably we could not have made anime like we do now"
