The new Evangelion film, “Shin Evangelion Gekijō-ban :||”, is officially confirmed to debut in 2020 as a teaser announced the news.
Shown prior to the screenings of Mamoru Hosoda’s new “Mirai no Mirai” film, this marks around a year since the last announcement was made in regards to the film. The first news on the film was in 2012 and it was a title reveal and it is confirmed as either Evangelion Shin Gekijōban :||, or Evangelion: 3.0+1.0. Regarding the “:||” symbol at the end of the title, it’s meant to be the symbol used in music to denote repetition after reaching the end of a measure.
It was in April 2017 that news of the next “Shin Evangelion” project was revealed by studio Khara. At the same time, the official website of the studio opened a recruitment for animators, modelers, technical staff, system engineers, and production managers. Following this, an image board for the final movie was revealed in July 2017 by the film’s art director Tatsuya Kushida.
The film is meant to be the fourth in the “Rebuild of Evangelion” tetralogy The three previous films were “Evangelion: 1.0 You Are [Not] Alone”, “Evangelion: 2.0 You Can [Not] Advance”, and “Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo”, and they debuted in 2007, 2009, and 2012 respectively. The fourth film was originally meant to be released in 2015, however, due to Anno’s involvement with the 2016 film “Shin Godzilla”, the film had ended up delayed. It was in 2016 that the film resumed production.
“Rebuild of Evangelion” is a series of films and a reboot of the “Neon Genesis Evangelion” series. They were produced by Studio Khara and had Hideaki Anno, the creator of “Neon Genesis Evangelion” as the writer and general manager of the project. Kazuya Tsurumaki acted as the director for the first two films while Masayuki directed the 3rd film and will be directing the fourth film. Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Ikuto Yamashita and Shirō Sagisu who worked on the original series returned to provide character designs, mechanical designs, and music respectively.
A special feature of the films is that it used newly available 3D CG animation. What’s more, they provided new scenes, settings, and characters, with a completely new conclusion in the fourth film.