It's been a while since I saw NGE, so when I was browsing through the EvaGeeks wiki, I was rather surprised to find something I had forgotten, but was also instantly recognisable: the Angel Tower.



What surprised me was how similar it is to the final shot of Anno's film Shin Godzilla, which shows Godzilla's new evolutionary form:



This is just one of many visual similarities.

Huh! Somehow I managed not to notice the Angel Tower / GojiTail thing, even though I'm the one who added most of the stuff about the former to the wiki! That's really nifty.

The "swerving light beam" can probably be traced back at least as far as the God Warriors from the Nausicaa manga. Anno himself animated the melting, somewhat less lively one in the animated film, but you can see them destroying stuff in all their towering, toothy glory in the "God Warriors Attacks Tokyo" tokusatsu short by Anno and Shinji Higuchi, narrated by none other than Megumi Hayashibara.

Someone's done a really good video on this if you wanted to add more to this post though they used rebuild as the compassion not the original series

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r_p1mJQPCw