"ALL OF EVANGELION" 30th Anniversary Exhibition – Osaka

The exhibition marking thirty years of Evangelion comes to the event hall of Hirakata Park in Osaka. The series began with the television anime "Neon Genesis Evangelion", first broadcast in 1995, and reached its thirtieth year in 2025.

A figure of Evangelion Unit-01 about 2.5 metres tall stands at the entrance as a place to be photographed. Inside, the display follows the making of the series in order. It opens with the setting materials, the drawings and notes that stood as the plan of the work. They were made and remade many times before the first broadcast. After them come the cels. About 270 are shown, chosen from more than ten thousand cuts that survive. They were picked out with ATAC, a body founded by Anno Hideaki, which keeps the working material of anime and of tokusatsu, the live-action film-making built on special effects. A cel is a sheet of clear film painted by hand, and the parts of a face were painted separately so that a mouth or a pair of eyes could move on their own.

A section on sound holds part of the recordings made at the voice auditions. Beside them are the storyboards, and the thirty-second trailers for each episode, narrated by the character Katsuragi Misato and collected here into a single piece. The last two sections take the "Rebuild of Evangelion" films, from the hand-drawn key animation and layouts of the early ones, and the mecha and backgrounds made on a computer, through to the drawings and setting material of the film that closed the series in 2021.

The venue sells merchandise that is not on sale anywhere else. Each visitor is given one of five stickers, on which the characters are drawn against the rose garden of the park. Drinks and sweets made for the exhibition are sold in the park itself, which is entered separately.

Tickets are sold through the online ticket site Asoview, and at the door of the hall once the exhibition has opened. Tickets combining the exhibition with entry to the park cost 1,000 yen more and are sold online only. The exhibition can be visited without entering the park.