Fifth Angel

Hideaki Anno and Yoshitoh Asari overhauled the creature's look for the film, and the result was realized as a full 3D CG model. The silhouette still recalls its television counterpart, but the revision resurrects ideas from Asari concept sketches that never made it to air: arms divided into intricate segments, a mouth fitted with mandibles and fang-like points, and a spine left exposed inside the chest cavity, where ten legs anchor.

The palette shifts toward a deeper red, with an abdomen that glitters purple, one abdominal segment hollowed out, and a face recalling the Second Angel near the point where the head attaches. On screen the legs never rest, and the small arm-like growths beneath the core keep flexing in and out. Observers have noted that its rows of stubby legs parallel the cilia a planarian uses to move, and one suggestion holds that Dr. Poole's spacesuit in 2001: A Space Odyssey informed the design.

The film gives the Fifth Angel no voice, no expression, and no stated motive. What characterization exists is kinetic: limbs in perpetual motion, whips lashing its enemy, an advance that never hesitates.

It surfaces in Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone as the fifth attacker of the rebooted continuity, occupying the place Shamshel held in the original broadcast. Its signature weapons are tentacles of energy whose official Japanese name, Hikari no Muchi, translates as Whips of Light.

The battle ends with those whips run through Unit-01 even as the Angel perishes: its core balloons outward and the entire body erupts in a downpour of crimson fluid, leaving nothing behind except the embedded whips. Designer Yoshitoh Asari also drew Sachiel and Zeruel for the original TV series.