Official Release Date for Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo

Official Japanese release date: November 17th, 2012.
Click for larger image.

Finally, after years of waiting, it looks like the ‘true’ story of Neon Genesis Evangelion may actually be drawing to a close.

For those of you not in the anime know Neon Genesis Evangelion was an anime that ran between 1995-96 in Japan and, although widely well received, it was canceled due to the expensive cost of the animation (which is fantastic even in the original run). What followed wast the studio getting just enough budget to put together two final episodes that go down in history as the weirdest, most nonsensical, ending to anything ever. As the screen faded to black the writer/director, Hideaki Anno, promised that the series would be back with a true ending.

Fans did what they do best, rage, and soon we got a true ending to the series in the form of Evangelion: Death & Rebirth. These two ‘specials’ wrapped up the series, which was a crazy, fitting, and emotionally draining end, but still not really explained well and somehow lacked a core connection to the initial series.

Now we get to the current day with Rebuild of Evangelion. The plan behind Rebuild was to finally tell the story in it’s ultimate incarnation, from beginning to end, in four feature length films. The first two, 2007′s Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone and 2009′s Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance,were critical and financial sucesses. Evangelion 1.0 pretty much to the standard story origins while the Evangelion 2.0 some major diversions but still put us in familiar ground (until the last 30 minutes, which are batshit crazy in the best way).

The third installment, after three years of waiting, will finally arrive in Japanese cinema’s on November 17, 2012. It will probably hit American DVD shelves around a year later (as per the trend for the first two, although it could be sooner, who knows?). The fourth and final un-sub-titled film, Evangelion 4.0, is supposed to be on schedule for 2013 as Anno said he planned to release them back-to-back.

I can only know one thing for sure, given the end of Evangelion 2.0, this is gong to be one crazy ass movie although hopefully more upfront with it’s plot and science. I’ll see you guys on google November 18th when I’ll be hopelessly spending hours on end looking for a fan-sub!