Rebuild of Evangelion

Rebuild of Evangelion (ヱヴァンゲリヲン新劇場版) is a series of animated films that remake the original anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. It is being produced by Studio Khara and KlockWorx in partnership with Gainax. Hideaki Anno is writing the films and will serve as general director and manager for the entire project, with Kazuya Tsurumaki and Masayuki directing the films themselves. Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Ikuto Yamashita, and Shirō Sagisu are returning to provide character designs, mechanical designs, and music respectively.

The intention is for the series to be four films, a tetralogy, with the first three films providing new scenes, settings, and characters as well as newly available 3D CG technology and the fourth presenting a completely new conclusion to the story. Another stated intention of the series is for it to be more accessible to non-fans than the original TV series and films were.

Film titles
The concept of "序,破,急(jo-ha-kyū)", which roughly corresponds to "beginning", "middle", and "end", originated in classical gagaku music and is best known to describe the acts of a Nō play. In lieu of the traditional classification, the production team has chosen to represent 急(kyū,, lit. bursting) with the roman letter Q, for "quickening."

The film titles, in contrast to the normal katakana spelling of Evangelion (エヴァンゲリオン), replace the e (エ) and o (オ) characters with the obsolete we (ヱ) character and the infrequently used katakana wo (ヲ), respectively. The change is purely a stylistic one, as there is no change in pronunciation and all appearances of the Latin spelling of "Evangelion" remain the same.

As was done with episode titles in the original series, each film has an original Japanese title and a separate international title in English picked out by the Japanese studio itself.

Production
Work on Rebuild of Evangelion initially began in the autumn of 2002, with Hideaki Anno himself spending nearly six months on pre-production before being delayed by various other projects (the live action Cutie Honey film, the animated Re: Cutie Honey OVA, assistance with other projects, and even a few movie roles). This included watching the entire original series back-to-back. In the December 2006 issue of Newtype, Anno revealed he was happy to finally recreate Eva "as he wanted it to be" in the beginning and that he was no longer constrained by technological and budget limitations.