Hideaki Anno · 1995 · survival

Hideaki Anno's 1995 series. Fifteen years after a catastrophe at the pole drowned half the world, a fourteen-year-old is summoned by the father who abandoned him to pilot a machine against things nobody can explain - in a fortress city built on the real Hakone caldera, above a cavern that is not what anyone has been told it is.

1. 1
   Antarctica

   September 2000, and Second Impact: an explosion at the pole that melts the ice, tilts the axis, raises the seas and kills half of humanity. The world is told it was a meteorite. It was not.

2. 2
   Tokyo

   The old capital, lost in the wars and the chaos that followed - nuked in the fighting over what was left, and abandoned. Everything after this happens in cities built to replace it.

3. 3
   Matsumoto

   Tokyo-2, the temporary capital, raised in Nagano while the country reorganised - the administrative Japan that goes on existing quietly behind the whole series without ever appearing in it.

4. 4
   Sengokuhara

   Tokyo-3, built on the pre-Impact towns of Sengokuhara and Ubako on the northern shore of Lake Ashinoko - a fortress city that retracts into the ground, above a cavern nobody is supposed to ask about.

5. 5
   Berlin

   Where Asuka Langley Soryu is raised and trained, and where Unit-02 is built - a childhood as a designated prodigy that the series spends its second half quietly taking apart.

6. 6
   The Pacific

   The UN fleet crossing with Unit-02 aboard, and the Sixth Angel coming up under it - the largest naval force ever assembled reduced to scrap by something that ignores every weapon pointed at it.

7. 7
   Lake Ashinoko

   The caldera lake the battles are fought over and in - Anno chose Hakone for the volcanic ground and the mountains, and the anime reproduces the real landscape closely enough to walk round with a map.

8. 8
   Matsushiro

   The NERV Second Branch in Nagano, where Unit-03 is brought for its activation test - and where the test goes wrong in the way everyone watching has been dreading since the episode began.

9. 9
   Nevada

   The Second Branch in the American desert, and the S2 engine experiment - the facility and everything for miles around it simply gone, which is the series telling you what these machines actually are.

10. 10
    Ubako

    Beneath Tokyo-3: the GeoFront, Central Dogma, and Terminal Dogma at the bottom of it - where what NERV has been building toward all along is finally shown, and the last episodes stop being about giant robots.