Rei Ayanami
Rei Ayanami is a fictional character from the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series and its eponymous franchise created by the anime studio Gainax. In the anime series, Rei is an introverted girl chosen as the enigmatic pilot of Evangelion Unit-00, one of a series of giant mechas called Evangelions. She is called the First Child among the Evangelion pilots. At the beginning of the series, Rei is a mysterious figure whose unusual behavior astonishes her peers. As the series progresses, she becomes more involved with the people around her, particularly her classmate and fellow Evangelion pilot, Shinji Ikari. She is revealed to be a clone of his mother, Yui Ikari, and Lilith, a large being known as an Angel. Rei appears in the franchise's animated feature films and related media, video games, the original net animation Petit Eva: Evangelion@School, the Rebuild of Evangelion films, and the manga adaptation by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto.
Hideaki Anno, director of the animated series, conceived Rei as a representation of his unconscious mind. He was also influenced by his readings on psychology, particularly Freudian psychoanalysis, taking inspiration from Freud's theories on the Oedipus complex. Other influences for its creation include earlier works by Gainax staff members, such as Aoki Uru, and Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose. Rei is voiced by Megumi Hayashibara in Japanese and by Amanda Winn-Lee, Brina Palencia, and Ryan Bartley in English.
Reactions from viewers and critics to Rei have generally been positive. She has maintained a high ranking in popularity polls of the series and of the most popular anime characters in Japan. Reviewers have praised Rei's mysterious aura and her role in the story. Merchandise based on her has been released, including action figures, life-size statues, clothing, and makeup. Critics linked her success to a series of moe traits, described by Thomas Zoth of Mania Entertainment as "weak vulnerable", that anime fans recognized, influencing the creation of subsequent female anime characters.
Conception
Design
, the director of the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, instructed Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, the character designer of the same work, on Rei's character design, saying, "Whatever else, she needs to be painted as a bitterly unhappy young girl with little sense of presence." The band Kinniku Shōjo Tai's theme song "Doko e demo ikeru kitte" and its line "hotai de masshiro na shojo" inspired Sadamoto to draw Rei. The same band produced a song named "Fumimi no kodomo", in which a female monologue is audible, and Sadamoto tried to portray a girl with a similar voice. Ukina, a character from Sadamoto's previous work Koto, served as Rei's model, and the artist gave her "shaggy, bobbed wolf-like hair". Another source of inspiration was The Snow Goose, a novella written by Paul Gallico; the story describes a painting portraying the protagonist, a thin and pale girl, in an empty room, and the artist tried to create a character similar to her.Anno required a "gloomy", short-haired character, so Sadamoto originally designed Rei as a brunette with dark eyes; however, it was necessary to distinguish her from the other female protagonist, Asuka Langley Soryu, so he depicted her with eye and hair colors opposite to Asuka's. He also published a drawing of a dark-haired character named Yui Ichijō among Rei's designs in one of his artbooks, without specifying whether it is an early conception of Yui Ikari. Although Asuka was designed to behave similar to an idol in Neon Genesis Evangelion and to symbolize heterosexual attraction, Sadamoto designed Rei as a motherhood symbol, thinking of her as "the Yin opposed to Asuka". Anno also suggested Rei's eye color be red, a feature he believed gave her more personality and distinguished her design from those of the other characters. Her hair color changed to blue, similar to the main character from Aoki Uru, the movie sequel to Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise, which was not made. Sadamoto also gave her black stockings, inspired by a women's handball team he saw playing in middle school. Black allowed him to differentiate her from the characters of the series released in the same period and go against their trend.
Japanese architect Kaichiro Morikawa compared the face of the first Rei, usually presented in a distorted and deformed way, to the installations of Tony Oursler, also comparing her bedroom to Gottfried Helnwein's photographs. Writer Claudio Cordella associated her personality with that of the female characters portrayed by the painter Edward Burne-Jones and her gaze with the "fixed and lifeless eyes" of Olympia from The Tales of Hoffmann. Furthermore, Takekuma Kentaro linked the image of Rei in bandages to the photos of Romain Slocombe, but Sadamoto compared her to the works of manga artist Sensha Yoshida. Her image is often flanked in the series by that of the Moon, a celestial body associated with motherhood, pallor, passivity, and femininity. Japanese engineer Yumiko Yano thus noticed a hieratic and unattainable aura in Rei Ayanami, comparing her to the Virgin Mary. Yano also associated her figure with the fragile and chaste women portrayed in fin de siècle art, particularly popular among the works of Symbolist painters.
Development
Similarly to other Evangelion characters, Ayanami's surname comes from a Japanese World War II naval vessel, the . Her first name comes from the character Rei Hino of the anime and manga series Sailor Moon. This was done to get one of Sailor Moons directors, Kunihiko Ikuhara, to work on Evangelion. Written in kanji, Rei can mean "zero" or "null". The character Rei also means "custom" or "routine". According to writer Patrick Drazen, her name can be a pun on her Evangelion 00. As for critic Hiroki Azuma, it may have been influenced by a character named Zero, the protagonist of the 1987 novel Ai to Gensō no Fascism, written by Ryū Murakami. Anno also took inspiration from Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the Oedipus complex for her role. He conceived the Evangelion and Rei as palliative mother figures for Shinji; Rei was also developed as emotionally close to Shinji's father, Gendo, creating a multi-layered Oedipus complex. In a discarded draft of the character's background, she was thus a more sensual character than her final version; character designer Sadamoto, however, unlike the more frank and explicit Hideaki Anno, decided to give her a much more "enigmatic" and bland eros. For Kazuya Tsurumaki, Shinji feels a sexual and incestuous desire for her, and Kentaro Takekuma described her as an "eternal virgin".During Evangelions production and first broadcast, Anno struggled writing the character, not feeling "particularly interested", understanding, or relating to her. Still, he thought of her as representing his unconscious mind, conceiving Rei as "the unconscious Shinji". In the fifth episode, "Rei I", explicitly dedicated to her character, Rei speaks seven lines and fifty-two words. Meanwhile, in the sixth, "Rei II", she has twenty-five lines. After working on the sixth episode, Anno said that he wondered that if Rei's purpose in the story was finished because of communicating with Shinji. Not feeling particularly close to her, the director, for a long time, forgot to explore Rei's personality, ignoring it or giving it marginal space. In the eighth episode, "Asuka Strikes!", for example, she does not appear in any scene, but in the seventh installment, "A Human Work", he remembered her and added a scene with Rei. As with other Evangelion characters, he transposed aspects of his life into the character, including the choice to not eat meat and maintain a vegetarian diet. At the beginning of the production, he also stated that he did not know what would happen to Rei or the other characters "because I don't know where life is taking the staff".
Her history has eventually changed. According to Sadamoto and assistant director Kazuya Tsurumaki, she was originally conceived as an alien entity, but staff later made her at least genetically human. During an interview, they described Rei as a girl with the human genes of Yui Ikari and ; Tsurumaki also associated her condition with a Devilman, a hybrid presented in the manga Devilman by Go Nagai. Moreover, in the original script for the twenty-first episode, the first Rei clone, killed by Naoko Akagi in the final version of the script, eventually survives after being strangled and having lost consciousness momentarily, awakening in an empty command room without Dr. Akagi. In contrast, Anno had planned the death of her second clone since the beginning.
During the production of the fourteenth episode, the director decided to focus on her and "explore her emotion", adding a monologue of Rei. As he was working on the monologue, he wanted to develop her in a "schizophrenic" direction and wondered how to portray a kind of madness. He was loaned a magazine-like book entitled Bessatsu Takarajima on mental illness that contained a poem by someone who had a mental disorder and that triggered his imagination. Moreover, during the production, Ikuhara, annoyed by the idealized image and the fetishism that some fans built around the character, proposed to Anno to "betray" fans and show her as a real girl who gets married and "gets pregnant in the last episode", but Anno rejected the suggestion. Furthermore, in the original finale wanted by Anno, the giant Rei added in The End of Evangelion was not foreseen since it was conceived later. Anno declared he considered her character "already finished" in her smile scene from the sixth episode since "she and Shinji completely 'communicated' there". In the last episodes of the series, Rei dies, and another clone, who acts like a stranger to Shinji, replaces her. Anno compared the story after her smile scene, in which there is a step back in interpersonal communication, to Hideki Gō, a character from the Return of Ultraman series; Gō seems to get closer to other people and his colleagues from the Monster Attack Team, but "then next week things begin again from estrangement". He also added: "At that point, something emerges of my mistrust or fear of communication with others."
In an interview with Anno, Japanese writer and academic Ōizumi Mitsunari likened the figure of Rei to the girls committed to the Japanese sect Aum Shinrikyō, which carried out the Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, as "completely dependent on their guru", Shōkō Asahara. The book Schizo Evangelion, edited by him, describes her as "a sacrifice offered to all the Japanese mama's boys and sadists" and in a series of dichotomies, such as opium and euphoria, Satan and God, "the infinite power of Eros" and "the blinding power of Thanatos at the same time", "a sarin prepared by Gendo Ikari for his plan to destroy humanity", the "keyhole of Pandora's box", and the Great Bad Mother trying to take in her son. According to the scholar Hiroki Azuma, Rei Ayanami introduces a "new type of solitude" into Japanese animation. Before her, anime characters were divided between sociable girls with expensive clothes and cosmetics, technological gadgets, and often engaged in prostitution activities called kogal; and otaku, isolated characters with rooms full of technology and magazines. According to Azuma, Rei transcends both stereotypes; he likened her room to Satyam, the scientific laboratory of Aum Shinrikyō.
Critic Krystian Woznicki compared Rei's role to Pinocchio in the film 964 Pinocchio, but "Rei's character is quite realistic, whereas Pinocchio is completely removed from reality". Japanese critic Tamaki Saitō described her as "the culmination of the Pygmalionism that began with Nanako SOS". At the same time, Kenneth Lee noted a similarity in her path of self-awareness with Pinocchio and Key from Key the Metal Idol. Furthermore, writer Tamaki Saito reported that Ami Mizuno from Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon has been interpreted as a forerunner of Rei. Patrick Drazen noticed that, like other Neon Genesis Evangelion characters, who have traits of some deities of Shinto mythology, Rei has affinities with the goddess of the Sun, Amaterasu, who is reborn at every dawn. He also compared the show's two other protagonists, Shinji and Asuka, with Susanoo and Ama-no-Uzume, respectively; Shinji, like Susanoo, has clumsy social manners and unsociable behavior, but Asuka, similar to Uzume, is ebullient and flaunts her body. According to Italian scholar Fabio Bartoli, her three incarnations could be linked to the three evolutionary stages of the soul postulated by the Jewish Qabbalah—Nephesh, the mere animal vitality; Ruach, the normal human soul; and Neshamah, the elevated spirit and result of the connection between man and God.