Eighth Angel

The film reworks its television predecessor from the ground up, giving the Angel a chain of distinct stages. In orbit it hangs as an enormous sphere studded with eyes recalling Leliel's shadow. As it plummets toward the surface it unfolds into something closer to the TV design's silhouette, though larger and trailing feathery spikes, and at the moment of impact a humanoid figure emerges from the central eye.

Its production history was unusually collaborative. The crew's working nickname for it was the Falling Angel, and the concept revisits the creature's depiction in episode 12 of the TV series with new ideas layered on. Takashi Watanabe drafted the basic structure and its shape transitions, Mahiro Maeda steered the design away from pure organics toward surrealist aesthetics, proposing the blossoming sphere and the humanoid figures appearing as the trumpets of the Apocalypse sound, Yoshitoh Asari first drew the humanoid core, Takeshi Honda refined it for animation, and Hideaki Anno handled the small angel figures. Rendering a creature spanning several kilometers strained the CG pipeline, forcing repeated redos of organic touches like its death twitch, while the sequence of the humanoid center grappling Unit-01 was animated entirely by hand.

The film gives the Eighth Angel no voice and no visible motive; it arrives as a falling catastrophe rather than a character. Its behavior is nonetheless evasive and adaptive, masking its landing point by manipulating light and velocity through its A.T. Field and whipping its core around at high speed to slip past attacks.

NERV first detects the Angel in space and cannot compute where it will land, since its A.T. Field distorts both its apparent light and its rate of descent. Shinji positions Unit-01 at the projected point of contact and spreads its A.T. Field to brake the fall, at which point the humanoid body bursts from the central eye and impales Unit-01's hands, the pain feeding straight back into Shinji. The core proves mobile and blindingly fast, evading everything Unit-02 throws at it until Rei physically seizes it with Unit-00 and holds on at terrible cost to herself. Unit-02 then drives both progressive knives into the trapped core, and only a knee strike that rams one blade clean through finally destroys it. In death the Angel folds its eye-covered plumage inward like an insect and detonates into a geyser of blood-like fluid that floods a wide swath of the city.