One of the most beloved songs in anime almost didn't exist. The director of Neon Genesis Evangelion wanted classical music to open his series, something grand and strange, but the broadcaster killed the idea as too obscure. On October 25, 1995, the job fell instead to Yoko Takahashi, a Japanese singer who walked into the studio with no idea what the show was about and walked out with 'A Cruel Angel's Thesis.'
The single arrived on October 25, 1995, the day 'A Cruel Angel's Thesis' was released as the opening theme for a series that would redefine Japanese animation. Composer Hidetoshi Sato wrote the music and Toshiyuki Omori arranged it, while Neko Oikawa supplied lyrics in a rush that took just two hours. Takahashi recorded her vocal without knowing the plot or the visuals, singing first a temporary track with only the syllable 'la' to guide her. The release came out on the Starchild label as a double A-side with 'Fly Me to the Moon,' the series' closing theme. The recording itself was dated August 4, 1995.
The classical opening that was rejected
The scramble started with a rejection. Director Hideaki Anno had proposed 'Polovtsian Dances' from Aleksander Borodin's opera Prince Igor as the opening, a piece of classical music he found fitting. TV Tokyo thought it too unclear for a television audience. That left the production team with a problem: they needed a song that could carry a series about giant machines and fragile teenagers, and they needed it fast.
Oikawa got the project request and a video of the first two unfinished episodes, but she skimmed the paperwork and watched the footage in fast-forward. What she took from it was a feeling rather than a plot. The producer Toshimichi Otsuki told her to make the lyrics philosophical and complex, so she built them around a mother, fourteen-year-old boys and girls, and an adult woman. The narrator is a mother who wishes her boy would never grow up.
From 'become a weapon' to 'become a myth'
One phrase almost changed everything. Oikawa first considered the imperative 'kyōki ni nare,' meaning 'become a weapon,' but the producers heard it as 'kyōki,' the word for madness. They replaced it with 'shinwa ni nare' — 'become a myth.' For the title she borrowed the German word These, meaning thesis, and drew inspiration from Moto Hagio's manga A Cruel God Reigns. The result was a J-pop song that sounded like a riddle, urgent and tender at once.
Takahashi was nearly thirty when the producers asked her to sing in a teenage voice, a demand that made 'A Cruel Angel's Thesis' the hardest song of her career to perform. The song opens and closes in a minor key and avoids the kind of chorus that usually anchors a pop hit. What should have been a compromise between a director's vision and a network's caution became something stranger: a pop song that behaves like an aria, full of philosophy and maternal longing.
The song's afterlife has been as strange as its birth. It won the Animage Anime Grand Prix as best song two years running, in 1996 and 1997. Two decades later, in 2016, Anime News Network readers placed it first among anime songs of the 1990s. There is even a stretch of road on the Ashinoko Skyline in Hakone, opened in 2015, where grooves in the pavement play the melody of 'A Cruel Angel's Thesis' to drivers moving at about forty kilometers per hour. In 2002, TV Asahi's poll of the 100 most unforgettable anime songs placed it at number 55. A 2016 survey by CD & DL Data with 6,956 respondents aged ten to thirty-nine also ranked it first.
The song that started as a rejected classical piece now runs through the asphalt of a mountain road. Yoko Takahashi, who sang it without knowing what she was singing for, gave Evangelion a voice that has outlived the arguments about what the show meant. It is a mother's wish, a myth, and a road that sings.