evangelion (and its manga series) were committed to realism to the extent that family members actually looked biologically related - in general, this is difficult to achieve in any animation medium, where stylistic convention can contribute to same face syndrome.
shinji is a perfect composite of gendo and yui’s features, but in a natural, effortless way - he’s not a random synthesis of “gendo’s eyes” and “yui’s chin” or whatever. rei looks like a young yui, but again the facsimile isn’t forced - it’s just enough to color naoko immediately suspicious, but not enough to arose suspicion from everyone everywhere. ritsuko and naoko share the same power brow and pointed chin - the show even went out of its way to explain ritsuko’s blonde hair as a result of repeated hair coloring, a slight of authenticity not often broached in anime. in the manga, kaji and his younger brother look so alike yet apart, and you can easily pick them out from a crowd of other nameless kids - this is really impressive, considering the medium.
rebuild isn’t interested in having relatives’ looks cohere. sakura and toji don’t look related - which is especially heinous considering toji’s looks are so pronounced and iconíqq (flat chin, dark skin... compared to sakura’s boringly petite and pale features) anno is on record saying his only goal for sakura was for her to be “cute”, so maybe he thought he couldn’t succeed if she looked too much like toji. trash.
AYE, MR FANTASTIC YOU GOOD?
Evangelion is not deep in the slightest and I constantly hate listening to fans go on about how deep it is.
It was a generic anime with mechs. The only reason it got “deep” is because the director, Hideaki Anno, was so bad a budgeting, that he blew almost the whole budget for the entire series within the first few episodes. That is why the animation quality gets progressively worse throughout the series, with the last episode having almost no moving animation in the slightest. The added “depth” is just him trying to think up of something interesting because he blew everything so early on.
Hell, know he is known for adding “strange” and “deep” meanings into his stuff. Which is why he added the stupid Godzilla humans at the end of Shin to try and make some sort of deep meaning despite there being no deep meaning behind it to begin with.
Please stop jerking off Evangelion and Hideaki Anno.