Jay

empathy and intelligence

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Eva file : Headless angel

If the Ode to Joy is Kaworu’s musical motif, the headless angel statue is Kaworu’s visual motif. As in the case of Beethoven’s piece, this statue appears in various scenes throughout both the main series (TV-run, Director’s Cut), Death and Rebirth, and the End of Evangelion (episodes 25′ and 26′).

The first time we see the statue coincides with the first time Kaworu is on screen: when he and Shinji meet on the beach. Kaworu is sitting on the statue’s neck and, although it may not be immediately clear that we are seeing the statue of an angel, the two wings hint that we are looking at the statue of a living being.

As you can see in the original run the statue is half-sunk in the lake and only one wing is clearly visible while the other is mostly under the water.

With the extra scene of episode 24, the “lake scene” where Kaworu talks to Seele, we are given a much clearer view of the statue and it is easier to see that it does indeed represent an angel. The statue is no longer half-sunk in the water, but stands upright so that a wider portion of its body is shown.

If the connection between the statue and Kaworu’s nature wasn’t clear enough, the film Death heavily points in this directions since the following two images are shown one after the other.

The statue being headless and bleeding points to both Kaworu’s nature (tipping off that he is an Angel and not a normal teenager) and his tragic end (decapitated by Eva-01). The bleeding neck is obviously a poetic licence since statues do not (normally) bleed, but the blood is an extra touch to emphasize that Kaworu is dead.