According to scholar Guido Tavassi, the "revolutionary" mecha design can be counted among the innovations introduced by Neon Genesis Evangelion, "which, on the one hand, brings the Eva units closer to the human figure, but on the other hand proposes a complete abstraction of the forms of the enemies, the Angels, with a choice that will have an enormous impact on the design of subsequent series of the genre". Maya Phillips, a writer for The New Yorker magazine, credited Evangelion with redefining the mecha genre and the relationship between pilot and fighting machine. The Evas, according to Phillips, introduce more ambiguity compared to the mecha of the past, being difficult to classify and halfway between Nagai's super robots and Gundam-like real robots; according to the writer, the anime, although indebted to the past series, "was perhaps the first to imagine the human as machine, and vice versa". The new element for Phillips is the frightening and dangerous nature of the humanoids, unknown until then to mainstream anime.
