Gainax, known for 'Evangelion' anime production, goes bankrupt | Hacker News Reader

Gainax, known for 'Evangelion' anime production, goes bankrupt

japantimes.co.jp

242 pointslnyan154 comments

Let's face it, Gainax was only an empty shell of its former glory. Most of the "important" people left for Khara and Trigger and Gainax has done nothing of importance for more than ten years or so?

Also, financial troubles is probably the most Gainax thing possible

Evangelion is almost 30 years old. The fact that they can't name a newer hit anime for them is the problem. I don't know about the economics but from a creative standpoint the anime industry seems quite healthy having recently produced a lot of great shows like Sousou no Frieren, Oshi no Ko, and Konosuba Season 3 in the last year or so.

Ranking of Kings is the underrated gem people need to go and watch. And is my pick for best anime of the last 5ish years.

Its a bit of a shonen, but hitting shonen tropes isn't necessarily a bad thing. And Ranking of Kings does it in a relatively fresh way, and absolutely nails the "Brothers Grimm" style to fairy-tale magic and lore. (Yes, kid-friendly on the surface, but then deep blood-magic involving the grinding of bones and drinking of blood to infuse deep magicks into the story and lore). Bonus points that the battle scenes are done by the venerated Studio Wit.

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With regards to Gainax: their last big hit was Gurren Lagaan in 2007 IMO. But even Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 was Studio Khara, not Gainax.

You're not wrong, but Gurren Lagaan is a great work, even if all those particular animators left Gainax shortly afterwards and started Studio Trigger. Most people consider Gurren Lagaan to be Studio Trigger for some reason but remember that group was still technically employed by Gainax when Gurren Lagaan came out.

On one level I liked Gurren Lagann but on another level it seemed frequently stupid to me and not covering any ground that wasn’t covered in other anime (I think Martian Successor Nadesico) ten years before. But it was a real success for Gainax but the authors of article don’t mention it.

Yeah, that was Imaishi though who left to found Trigger - since then has directed Kill la Kill, Cyberpunk Edgerunners, some other great but lesser known stuff like Promare

Most fiction doesn’t cover ground that hasn’t been covered elsewhere, just like ice skaters rarely come up with new tricks — it’s all about grade of execution for both. TTGL is mainly dumb when its characters are dumb, which is often because they literally grew up in Plato’s Cave.

Part of the fun of TTGL is that normally you'd stumble onto

"Our friends' hopes and dreams are etched into its body, transforming the infinite darkness into light! Unmatched in Heaven and Earth, one machine equal to the gods!" "SUPER GALAXY GURREN LAGANN!" "We're gonna show you the power... of the human race."

and be like "ehh, that's kinda silly".

After 20+ episodes? Your brain is sufficiently gooey that you just go "wooow..."

One of the main things that make TTGL so special is showing what happens after a revolution. Things don't just get magically better, rebuilding can be even harder. Even SW sequels don't really show what actually happens after, it just spins up another war.

I second RoR. It is really original which is really rare in the overcrowded and generic shounen world

> that group was still technically employed by Gainax when Gurren Lagaan came out

Huh, TIL.

Gurren Lagaan is surprisingly meta. One of the big problems with the fight-focused anime formula is that they constantly one-up themselves, eventually power spiraling to unsustainable levels. So Gurren Lagaan's plot revolves around an energy literally called "spiral power" and how unsustainable it is.

There's a physical limit as to how well one can fight, but competition and growth is just as limitless in the business world as in anime. The top people in early Dragonball make six figures, late Dragonball if you don't have 100 billion you don't qualify for screentime.

That's why you need jojo's route where it's not about who has the bigger number but who can use the skills better

or just who is weirder

One of those so called 'nitpicks', but Lagaan is the successful Indian cricket musical drama from 2001, the mecha would ususally be transcribed Lagann.

Thanks for the tips and thoughtful comments.

Best anime of the last 5 years? Really? It seemed incredibly drawn out to me. Every character who was bad turned out to secretly be good. Every character who was good also was secretly bad in some way. It was incredibly predictable and drew out far too long.

Yes but Evangelion is so massive and popular it'd be enough to sustain a studio. Gainax does not have the rights to NGE though. They only produced the original series back in the 90s.

Hideaki Anno literally setup a brand new studio specifically to do the rebuild films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khara_(studio)

Doesn’t have the staying power of Gundam which has survived postmodernism by producing spin-off shows about people who build Gundam models. (Gee I gotta build that Haro I have sitting around…)

Adam Savage did a build on Tested back in the lockdown period...

Adam Savage's First Gundam Build—RX-78-2 Perfect Grade Unleashed! https://youtu.be/xfmD1yYqP6k

There's also another channel that is in the "I wish I had the time / talent / inspiration to do those things..." Two Expensive Models, One Epic Diorama! https://youtu.be/q7vCFKRHloE

The Gundam model build shows up in my YouTube feed occasionally despite me not looking for them.

Gundam is usually a recycled stories (teenager ride an ace robot to war) with new toys.

How can Evangelion recycle their stories? Nobody want to see depressed, horny teenager forced to ride a robot so everyone can be turned into orange paste every two years.

It's always felt like a stretch them trying to turn this story into a franchise. It's like a Death Note franchise it just doesn't make sense.

Exactly, Evangelion is about the end of the world which can only end once. That may make it poignant but it doesn't have the staying power of Gundam or Macross or Pretty Cure where they can keep telling variations of the same story in different places and times indefinitely. (Funny to think how they weren't sure if they'd finish the first season of Futari Wa Pretty Cure so their budget for writing and direction was zero for a few episodes in the middle that were mostly incomprehensible scenes of people being corrupted, turned into monsters, and walking around doing things Kung Fu masters would do in Dragonball Z until suddenly the show started making sense again... And of course they went on to make another 20+ seasons)

> Exactly, Evangelion is about the end of the world which can only end once. That may make it poignant but it doesn't have the staying power of Gundam or Macross or Pretty Cure where they can keep telling variations of the same story in different places and times indefinitely

Various Gundam series take place across different universes, there is no reason a series based on "the world is ending" can't do the same thing - share thematic elements across different sets of characters.

Heck you could even make each series explore a different element of the human psyche.

IMHO the real issue is Evangelion is such a mind fuck that finding ways to reach that level of WTF is hard, and also the cultural zeitgeist moves on, and I doubt if Evangelion was related today it'd have the same impact. Kind of like how a lot of cyberpunk stuff is still around, but it has to be somewhat re-invented for each decade, because while some of the themes of the original 1980s stuff is still relevant, you can't just cut and paste, today's youth feels a different sense of hopelessness than what was felt in the 80s!

Same thing with 1990s material, super edgy goth cyberpunk vampires don't hit the same in 2024 as they did in 1994.

So finding writing staff that can keep up with making Really Good Stuff decade after decade, and who also want to do rehashes of the same material, may prove hard.

But still, a series of Evangelion universes all focused on different types of trauma would be interesting to see!

>Various Gundam series take place across different universes, there is no reason a series based on "the world is ending" can't do the same thing - share thematic elements across different sets of characters.

NGE has done that plenty. The early works, dating sim games, plastic models, fan fiction, manga, etc have all had 'alternate universe' entries -- which suits the series just fine since that concept is explored even in the original series via Shinji's 'instrumentality scenes'.

Gundam (MSG, in particular) is sort of about the world ending. Colony drop killing billions right off the bat.

Yeah the other spin-offs not related to the UC storyline are definitely more in the "angsty ace pilot teen with completely-overpowered-weapon-as-a-plot-device" category but there's so many of them, who's counting at that point?

While the mecha are all cool as heck, definitely felt the OG series and the spinoffs (008th MS Team, 0079: Stardust Memory, Zeta Gundam etc) are the best because they tell different aspects of a larger story.

∀ Gundam was quite cool though, neat story.

NGE isn't really about the world ending, it's about the forced ending of humanity as we know it; we're even left to see what the world looks like post-humanity in EoE.

Eva is pretty sustainable, just not for Gainax. Studio Khara has been selling Eva merchandise and related materials through brands like Radio EVA for a while.

Gainax just kind of doesn’t have any of the IP anymore, for various reasons.

> Studio Khara has been selling Eva merchandise.

Including a partnership with ASUS ROG which led to the infamous "Evangenlion" motherboard.

Which aspects of postmodernism threaten which aspects of the Gundam franchise? Or are you just alluding to the dominance of digital goods over physical hobbies such as model-building? I'll admit, I don't know where the money comes from. Is it really 80:20 merchandising:media?

I think their point is simply that a Gundam series about building model Gundams is a very postmodern thing (and, perhaps, that the rise of postmodernism has made it harder for a 100% unironic Gundam series to succeed).

When I say it could sustain a studio, I just mean revenue from merchandise sales etc... It's such a popular IP there's an entire theme park devoted to it.

I'd say NGE is absolutely more popular than Gundam. I think there's a perfect "target age" to get into NGE, and that age is 13-15 and new generations discover it. Quentin Tarantino once said the same thing about a lot of his old movies.

To attempt to put some metrics to this, NGE is in the mid 40s of the top 50 most popular anime list on MAL: https://myanimelist.net/topanime.php?type=bypopularity

No Gundam series is in the top 50.

It's also the oldest anime in that top 50 list, which I think is really indicative of how popular it is. The only other one that's even from the 90s is Cowboy Bepop.

OT, but: I really don't understand why Death Note is so popular. It was an above average first season that went downhill super fast. I gave up on it the first episode after the recap episode (26 if Wikipedia is right), and nothing in my conversations with other people have led me to believe the last dozen or so episodes would change my opinion on it.

MAL's demographics is probably the answer. Anime had a big wave in the 00s, and Death Note, Code Geass, Toradora, FMA and Gintama are all probably beneficiaries of that for higher ratings in MAL than in forums populated by younger or older fans.

That's part of it, but Death Note is, IMO, the worst series that you mention in your comment (Gintama is definitely not my cup of tea, but I can understand the attraction to it by those for whom it is). I ought to be in the target audience for Death Note, and I found it to be mediocre.

Gundam lives from the model-sales. The anime is just advertisement and justification for a new collection of models.

Also creates a difficult precedent to beat.

If a massive hit like evangelion is your benchmark, then everything will fail in comparison. Gainix had many good productions even after NGE, but if management sucks, then success will not help. And they haven't released anything new for nearly a decade now.

> I don't know about the economics but from a creative standpoint the anime industry seems quite healthy having recently produced a lot of great shows like Sousou no Frieren, Oshi no Ko, and Konosuba Season 3 in the last year or so.

Anime is dying, permanently, since decades. It's a very unhealthy exploitive industry, similar to the infamous Hollywood-accounting. And I guess with AI this will only become worse. But most productions are not anime-originals anyway, they usually originate from books or manga, and the creative animation work is rather small and generic at the end.

> The fact that they can't name a newer hit anime

I thought FLCL was quite good. The original one, at least. I heard they made a new FLCL series in recent years but haven't seen it.

But maybe most of FLCL's success was due to The Pillows as opposed to Gainax.

Alongside their general mismanagement under their President Yamaga[1] e.g. giving their management unsecured loans of company funds[2], they've been doing random crap like tomato farming.[3] They wouldn't have lasted so long without Hideaki Anno's (Eva) support for old times' sake.[1] They've been a deadbeat since 2012; it's just been a long downhill road to the inevitable end.

[1] https://evankaiser.medium.com/hideaki-anno-on-gainax-taintin...

[2] (Japanese only) https://www.oricon.co.jp/news/2330666/photo/1/

[3] https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2016-04-12/gainax-...

It's also not surprising. Anime studios rarely make money off their work. The only exceptions that I can think of are KyoAni and A1 since they have IP ownership, or have financial backing from a bigger company like Sony, respectively.

Yeah the fact the reporter decided Gainax's headline achievement was an anime from 1995 kinda says it all.

Not necessarily. Studio Ghibli's headline achievement would likely be considered to be Spirited Away (although I prefer Princess Mononoke), which is nearly as old, but they've still put out some solid work since then.

As dragontamer pointed out, Gainax has also produced Gurren Lagann in 2007, which is definitely a pretty big hit, even if it wasn't the phenomenal success of Evangelion.

It's all been downhill since Daicon IV!!!

Gurren Lagann is rated #1 series of all time by many anime fan, myself included. It's a masterpiece, although the cultural impact isn't of the same level as Evangelion.

That’s Ghibli though. The company that somehow can do Disney style mass appeal and contemplative art films, often at the same time.

Gainax makes fantastic, often quite out there, shows that play with anime tropes. Their addressable market is people who are already at least somewhat anime fans.

Seconded on Princess Mononoke. TBH, I haven't really enjoyed any of Ghibli's modern stuff since they moved from stories with morals to essentially dream sequences.

I mean that anime is Evagelion, it is like using Star Wars to showcase Lucasfilm, there is most accurate representation of the studio's accomplishment, as well as assets (used to be).

When I look at the credits of popular animes, very often I see what looks like Korean names, as if most of the animation has been outsourced. Could it be related?

American animated shows have been outsourcing to Korea since at least the 90s

Definitely before that; The Transformers had a lot of their work done in their 3rd season by Korean Studios and that was 86.

I think the parent poster's point is that nowadays Japanese studios also significantly outsource to Korea, which is probably true.

The entire anime industry is built on labor that is not compensated well, from many sources:

This whole substack, but in particular: https://news.animenomics.com/p/nafca-anime-worker-survey-lon...

NHK video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5AR2X6R4TM

From what I can tell, the production does a lot of Hollywood-style accounting where the production companies take most of the profits and most of the actual work is contracted out.

An good video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDEIPa9b3OU

However in this case with Gainax, the failure isn't due to anime production committee style accounting or anything like that. It's entirely because gainax hemorrhaged all their talent to offshoot studios and then gainax has done effectively nothing other than contract work out and milk IP in the ~15-20 years since then.

I think this happens when people have a dream of doing a specific job. As you mentioned, Hollywood does the same thing, as does the videogame industry in general. One could also look at a certain company which name starts with "T" and ends with "esla".

In a way, the work itself turns into part of the compensation so people are willing to have a worse everything else as long as they do the thing.

Previous discussion on HN: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074062

What is the distribution bottleneck that keeps artists from self organising?

Burning passion?

What prevents any group of workers from self organizing?

> What prevents any group of workers from self organizing?

Some combination of skill, capital and ambition. Running a company is hard, and a specialised skill. Just look at restaurants to see how unevenly distributed administrative skills are.

rent

Sort of the same problem as game testers.

If there are so many people willing to work for pennies _for the sake of working there_ that even a significant fraction of you organizing a stop-work won't make a dent other than a one-off blip if you arrange so much disruption it hiccups production visibly, there's only so much leverage to exert, since you have nothing they can't just source elsewhere.

> there's only so much leverage to exert, since you have nothing they can't just source elsewhere

That they’re making peanuts is unsurprising. That someone else isn’t, is. My question is what value the executives provide. In gaming, it’s distribution expertise—a random band of artists probably can’t negotiate distribution on a major console.

Anime is much the same. Licensing into the west only started in earnest in the last 10-15 years, which late by a lot of standards. I'm sure there are still a small slice of folks who can ink these deals, therefore giving anyone a job at all.

Also let's be real - most 'animators' are just tracing masters into different scenes. There's a small subset of them that are highly skilled, especially on non-original shows that use source material. I'd support paying true character artists and scene artists well, but not copy-pasters which seems like busy-work.

Any kind of media production involves a lot of grunt work. In general, you don't get anywhere in the arts without putting in a lot of hours on that sort of thing, during which you still need to eat and pay rent. Critiquing the production process over which they have no control to justify paying subpar wages is pretty mean-spirited.

Oh, man...spot on. We have a friend who was a senior game tester on a Very Big Francise(tm). He regularly worked twice as long every week than I did, made a fraction of the scratch and always said he did it because he loved the gaming biz. OK...I'm down with that...but maybe all of those stress-related health issues might be telling you something. Then he packed up everything and moved north because some assclown ex-ball player conned a ton of people into letting him cosplay being a game studio owner and our friend was one of many who got left holding the bag when that inevitably took a dump. He's still trying to fully recover. Definitely put the industry on the Nope list for me.

Ah 38 Studios :)

It's too bad about that one, fun game for what it was.

What I have noticed is that very often the problem with these "fun" jobs isn't that there is limited demand for them on the employer's side, rather the problem is that the profession of a game tester requires game developers. Some of the jobs are more popular than others. If you need two testers for every software developer working on a game and game testing is far more popular than game development, then game testing becomes a sweatshop activity because there aren't enough game developers to absorb all the people willing to become game testers.

Just based on my own experience and knowledge of the animation industry, it seems to be more of a risk-aversion/lack-of-imagination problem. It is true that getting onto major streaming platforms requires insider knowledge/connections, but there sure are a lot of people using free platforms that anyone can upload to, like YouTube.

Not the entire industry. Kyoto Animation, for example, pays its animators a salary rather than the piece rate many houses do. Sadly, they are the exception not the rule.

And sadly, we lost many of them a few years ago.

When you look at the end credits for a lot of anime series, you'll see many Thai, Vietnamese and Cambodian names credited for animation. Most animation that doesn't come from a "prestige" studio like Kyoto, Ghibli etc. is outsourced to Southeast Asia.

The real talent left to form Studio Khara, I think it part because of this kind of mismanagement.

Gainax has a long history of financial follies despite having created one of the most successful anime in history.

Also Studio Trigger.

Mostly Trigger. They are currently working on Delicious in Dungeon, which starts off slow but evolves into an amazing story.

And, thanks in no small part to the final collapse of GAINAX, they've announced a second season of Panty and Stocking after getting the rights.

Delicious in Dungeon, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Little Witch Academia, and Kill la Kill.

Trigger is knocking it out of the park. Clearly a top-tier animation studio of the last decade.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is such a killer anime, it's honestly one of my top all time favorites even though you can tell it had a small budget.

Even their less popular stuff I dig. I just watched Darling in the Franxx and I'm about to start Kiznaiver.

I dunno if you can call Darling in the Franxx "less popular". At least in my circles it seems like a hugely popular work. A lot of people like it but I do consider it a bit of a waifu-trash anime, lol. So I didn't think it was as critically good writing as the other stuff I listed.

Kinznaiver is on the less popular side. As is BNA (Brand New Animal). The Tokusatsu community seems to like the SSSS.(Gridman/Dynazenon) anime, but arguably taking the Gridman name makes them more into Tokusatsu than the anime community anyway.

It's really hard to take an anime seriously when the girls outfits have butt handles. Darling in the Franxx got a lot of attention, but a lot of that was the meme crowd have a field day with it.

Not really everyone watches anime "seriously", you can watch them in a more light-hearted way. I'm a big fun of Kill la Kill really because of how silly and over the top it is, same for the second season of JoJo.

I actually liked KLK, even with the sometimes extreme levels of fanservice. I think the thing that made KLK work for me is how it was both a love letter and at the same time a direct challenge to the cosplay community.

Franxx however tossed me out when the robots are controlled by dry humping teenagers. There's a level of pandering at which I just couldn't take it anymore.

So you whine that Franxx has girl outfits with "butt handles", but then you like Kill la Kill, an anime that is so unapologetically about fan service. Actually funny.

Sorry to intrude into this discussion but... Franxx is a different level than Kill la Kill.

Have you seen the two shows? I know if you've only seen Kill la Kill where the BDSM "Disciplinary Captain" gets power from whipping himself, it sounds like things can't get any more hypersexualized, but somehow Franxx made it more awkward than Kill la Kill ever made it.

A big problem is that the romance / dating aspects of Darling in the Franxx were front and center, so the characters are supposed to have sexual attraction / romantic feelings for each other. So somehow all these sex-jokes just landed differently / in a totally different context than Kill la Kill's more joke-heavy style.

Somehow its different when the characters involved are "seriously" romantically involved with one another. Because now we as the audience are seriously considering the implications of these positions or sex-jokes / whatever.

I think you've expressed it perfectly. Both KLK and Franxx are fanservice heavy, but Franxx made it awkward and uncomfortable to watch. To be fair, there are some parts of KLK that go beyond as well, but they don't appear until later in the series. Franxx put it front and center in the first episode.

I have to watch it, I didn't know the characters were so romantically involved.

I had not heard of it until a month or two ago and yeah parts of it were definitely a bit cringe in the classic anime fashion but I liked the story and art style overall.

Can't forget about stuff like the gridman series of series, BNA and even a movie, promare.

I watched the beginning of Delicious in Dungeon. Interesting weird and funny concept, but seemed too shallow and I do not like the overly dramatic anoying way of talking, or rather screaming all the time by the female character (I know it is characteristic to some Anime). But if there is an actual story to be found, I might have to give it another shot..

There is a story and decentish world building. It's just slow. Most of it happens from off handed comments the characters make. It's there! I can understand not wanting to watch 3 hours of anime to get background information though.

It’s quite slow - I would suggest giving it 8 or so episodes.

Are they actually still working on Delicious in Dungeon? The last episode in season 1 comes out this week, and I've been looking for confirmation that another season is coming but to no avail so far.

No clue! I guess I could have phrased that a bit differently - my point was that Trigger is still churning out quality anime.

I wasn't totally sold on it for the first ~4 episodes or so. I especially didn't like Marcille's role in it.

However, from around episode 5 onward, it started getting REALLY good.

I think the thing I appreciate the most of DiD is that it really feels grounded in its setting. Every character and detail feels like it connects and is a part of a cohesive setting. There's a lot of anime that isn't like that.

It also has a good sense of tone. It knows when to take things seriously and when to cut loose and joke and balances those two fairly well.

It's willing to have some slower and calmer sections which I like. (Though IMO I'd like even more)

It's unfortunate to say this, but it's basically one of the only good anime I've seen in maybe a decade. Most of the stuff out there is so terrible...

> It's unfortunate to say this, but it's basically one of the only good anime I've seen in maybe a decade. Most of the stuff out there is so terrible...

A lot of the shows that get meme'd to top status are pretty terrible at writing. The top shows are more about drawing style + music rather than contemplating the story.

The strongest "story" shows of the 2014 through 2024 decade are:

* Ranking of Kings

* The Promised Neverland S1 (S2 drops the ball but at least finishes the story).

* I actually have a softspot for Studio Trigger's "Little Witch Academia" (2017), an innocent school-setting / slice of life. Its probably my favorite Studio Trigger work actually (Gurren Lagaan is their best stuff ever IMO, but that was done when the team was still technically Gainax). I would argue the "techno-witch" Croix Meridies, who serves as the antagonist (with her "break tradition, embrace technology") has aged well as we moved from 2017 into 2024. The focus on tradition from the protagonists (and Shiny Chariot + her motif of the North Star) vs technology+progress (Led by Croix Meridies, obviously a riff on the Southern Cross / South Astronomy) is a simple, but relevant, debate. Nothing outright villainous but instead is a lower-stakes debate appropriate for the setting, and I bet it will be a timeless story moving forward.

Its Studio Trigger however, so expect things to get kicked up a notch as the ending arc comes about. But the bulk of the storytellilng / philosophical debate is well thought out and likely timeless.

* OddTaxi

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I'm slowly going through what many have considered were thoughtful anime of the past decade, but I haven't actually finished these yet.

* Sonny Boy

* Rascal does not dream of Bunny Girl sempai

* I'm surprised by "Toilet Bound Hanako-kun" and need to see where its going. Genre-aware ghost trying to help the main character is... actually fun. And the characters were deeper than they were letting on.

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I know everyone likes Frieren these days, which I do consider anime of the year. But I purposefully am leaving it off the list for "top of the last decade". I do think other shows have deeper stories / better thought out characters than Frieren (even if Frieren is above-average compared to typical popular shows). Frieren being the best of the popular shows is quite different from best thought-out overall.

I admit that I haven't seen any "Delicious in Dungeon" yet. Maybe its good, but that will have to wait and see until I get a chance to watch it.

Have you seen Shōwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjū?

No.

Apparently there's a lot of anime about Rakigo these days. I'm not so cultured to follow the details, but I get that it's a traditional comedy / storytelling style from Japan.

You might enjoy it if you're after thoughtful story-driven shows from the last decade. It's on my personal mental shortlist of those right alongside ODDTAXI and Ousama. Knowledge of rakugo is definitely not required.

Ranking of Kings is definitely up there, I like both frieren and bojji but I think ousama ranking lacks is "human touch" feeling frieren has in terms of intensity and waifu << this is important imo because bojji is child with superpower physical at the end of the show making it more disconnect from viewer compared to elf that study thousand years

The manga has a lot of side notes and chapters dedicated to just explaining the lore.

There's also a book by the author entitled Delicious in Dungeon World Guide: The Adventurer's Bible Complete Edition with even more content.

The author really did her homework regarding worldbuilding.

Oh we are going to have disagree on that last point: I can name multiple anime of the same caliber from just the last few seasons alone :)

On the contrary, I think we are getting more quality anime per season than ever before.

"Gainax Bounce" and "Gainaxing" just had a flow to them, though. The world just won't be the same if we have to rename them... "Trigger Bounce" and "Triggering" draw up very different images.

> Trigger Bounce

Mostly makes me think of some EE effect you'd see with a o-scope.

"Yeah, that's not real, it's just Trigger Bounce"

I have an EE degree. Trigger bounce is a real thing.

But it's not an EE thing, it has to do with a firearm malfunctioning in a way such that a normally semi-automatic firearm fires more than once per trigger press, due to some internals on the trigger that I'm forgetting about / don't know about.

Now that I put my EE hat on though, there is a significant parallel to "switch bounce", which is an EE thing.

Assuming it's the same thing as hammer follow, it's usually caused by a worn disconnector or hammer.

The disconnector prevents the hammer from moving forward until the trigger is pressed again (semi-auto) or the gun is in battery (full auto, closed bolt). I suspect open-bolt guns don't have one, but I've never looked at the trigger group of an open-bolt gun so can't be sure.

Sadly, tvtropes removed the link to the video [1] from the page on gainaxing[2]

[1] https://vimeo.com/512552697

[2] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Gainaxing

Edit: So, I wanted to check the discussion/history page to see when/why it was removed. Both need a login, and I can't create an account with a disposable address... Feels pretty suspicious.

And Gaina

Aoki Uru will never get made and even if Top o Nerae 3 gets made, one can consider TRIGGER's entire early catalogue and Gurren Lagann spiritual sequels of sorts already.

And that's it for any of GAINA's projects that have been announced 5 years ago now that might have given a hint of them carrying GAINAX's torch.

The Gainax of the 1990s was not the Gainax of the last decade. Gainax died in the Great Recession and became a hollowed out shell of a studio that only existed to collect royalties on their past work. So this is not a major loss.

"Its business conditions began to deteriorate around 2012, due to careless management by executives, and the company lost its anime production capabilities following an exodus of its creative staff."

no creative, no business

Except they were operating for a decade without creative and they made the most money during that time…

I remember watching the final episode of Evangelion several years ago. A few minutes into it, it's as if they simply ran out of animation budget and it went full slide show. And that was their greatest success.

just in case you don't know, there's an actual ending.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Evangelion

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I prefer the original ending

We probably are in the minority, but I do appreciate the uniqueness of that ending, it feels like the interior of a chaotic psyche.

I only liked the original ending after End of Evangelion helped explained WTF was going on. I watched the last two episodes like 6 times and couldn't figure it out.

Yes I've seen it. They ran out of budget for the original anime. Then when it became a huge success, they made a more comprehensive (and still baffling) ending in the form of a hit movie. Then they went ahead and dragged out THAT ending in the form of 4 reboot movies. Doesn't change the fact that the original ending ran out of money.

In a sense, the original ending is the purest one, where the audience realizes the show is not really about teenagers in mecha fighting kabbalistic space aliens, but rather about the clinical depression suffered by an anime studio runner as he deals with loneliness and a need to make connections to other humans!

clap clap clap

omedetou

> Its business conditions began to deteriorate around 2012, due to careless management by executives, and the company lost its anime production capabilities following an exodus of its creative staff.

I'm not an expert in anime but the article basically says it started to die in 2012-2014 or however long it took for the artists to leave, right?

Gainax's financial troubles are well documented in an interview with Hideaki Anno, where he detailed how the company was pretty dysfunctional from the start. The company's president was arrested for tax fraud in 1999, for example. This has been a long time coming.

Ask not why GAINAX bankrupted, ask how the hell it survived so long.

Memes about GAINAX running out of money to finish series go all the way back to Gunbuster, which was their fourth production, and second under the name GAINAX.

The second production, Daikon IV, survives thanks to piracy because they didn't license them music used :V

Gunbuster ran out of money to pay colorists by the end of the series, which was only 4 episodes. Evangelion also clearly ran out of budget by the end of the series, and that was after some blatant cost saving scenes repeatedly appearing in the show, like very very long elevator rides where nobody moves and the only action is a floor counter ticking down, or watching the counter on a Walkman slowly tick by. Almost taunting the audience with the counters on the obvious padding scenes.

The funny thing is, the studio claims last episode of Gunbuster was done black&white on purpose - in fact, that black&white was more expensive the way they did it than otherwise.

Unfortunately I suspect that outside of the people directly involved we won't ever hear properly. The rumours flew around since early 1990s, and there is the part that Gunbuster was originally supposed to be a TV series (AFAIK), and as result the plot was extremely compressed into those 6 episodes that we got ultimately.

And it's not like the studio was not known otherwise for wild swings even when they didn't run out of money... (anyone remembers how Mahoromatic ended?)

I think it's true (at least partially), you transfer the outline to a cel and then colour it, any issues are covered by the paint.

With B&W you need to transfer the shading and you can't just (literally) fill the gaps with a colour.

My favorite "no budget" moment was in Kare Kano, a lesser known Gainax adaptation of the shoujo manga of the same name.

The second half as a whole is clearly made on the cheap, but episode 19 is special, it is all paper cutouts on a stick, most likely from the storyboard, on top of recycled backgrounds.

My favorite was toward the end of the Evangelion series, where they generated flashback footage by shooting the backs of earlier cels.

It all comes tumbling down, tumbling down, tumbling down...

Seems like the franchise is safe just a bunch of executives at some subsidiary squandered everything.

That's my takeaway too.

"Gainax tried to rebuild itself with the support of Khara, which currently owns the rights to the Evangelion series and of which Anno serves as president."

So all the actual franchise stuff was with Anno in Khara, and Gainax was the creative staffing for the anime/movies?

Gainax was bought in 2019 by Studio Khara, Studio Trigger, Kadokawa Group and Studio Gaina (a former subsidiary) after the previous CEO got arrested for inappropriate behaviour around teenage VAs.

Khara and Trigger are the successor studios to Gainax as in that those are the studios made by their biggest creatives, and it's to my understanding that all relevant IPs from the creatives behind Khara and Trigger during their time at Gainax were transferred to them after the buyout. The only Gainax IP that's not owned by the creative behind it is FLCL, since Gainax sold the rights for it to Production I.G. in the late 2000s.

Another, more indirect, successor studio to Gainax is Studio Cloverworks at A1 Productions, although that one was mostly general staff.

That said, it's not like Gainax did much in the ~5 years between the formation of Studio Trigger and the buyout; they released exactly one anime and one OVA. There was pretty much nobody creative left at the company to make anything, specifically because the CEO got cold feet on approving creative projects.

Sounds like the bankruptcy system is working correctly then.

All the valuable assets are going to the people who matter: Cloverworks, Trigger and Khara. Its a bit sad for Gainax as an entity to be collapsing, but the individuals who bring us these stories (through producing, acting, animating, or other skills) still exist out there.

I'll definitely say that Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 from Studio Khara lost a lot of the mech-design that made Gainax great... but its clear that all the "mech designers" are alive and active over at Studio Trigger.

Its sad to see the team split up, because nothing like Evangelion (90s) will ever come out again. But on the other hand, these other studios are clearly active and seemingly successful. So the show goes on...

Yeah, it's sad in that they're a pretty massive name that's going away (and one of the few studios mostly known for doing original work rather than adaptations), but it's been a long time coming and the actual losses are minimal (it's really only FLCL but that happened years ago).

One small correction though: no IPs will be transferred to Cloverworks as far as I know. Cloverworks didn't really get any specific creatives from Gainax, moreso just that a lot of the intermediate staff that you usually don't hear about ended up at Cloverworks. (Which to my understanding was largely a coincidence: A1 had formed Cloverworks, put out hiring ads and in the next month, Gainax basically declared they weren't ever going to make any experimental anime again, causing a mass exodus from the company.)

Squandered, along with things like "commit massive tax fraud that caused several executives to go to jail and be forced to pay millions of dollars of fees"

> Its business conditions began to deteriorate around 2012, due to careless management by executives,

Is blunt writing like this typical of journalism within Japan, for Japanese audiences?

Japan Times is written by Americans for Americans.

That's helpful, but what about the question I asked?

I guess Gainax finally got its own Gainax Ending.

Darng I came late to make that joke.

For the curious: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GainaxEnding

I'm not an expert in this area, but a friend who is into anime said that the company that the rights to these series are being sold to is owned/operated by the same guy that made many of them. So he felt that in this case we were lucky that this is almost "Gainax went bankrupt and sold their properties to Gainax".

Again, I'm not an expert so I can't verify, but this seems like one case where maybe things are ending up alright.

one might say they achieved instrumentality

As for Evagelion series, most of the creatives and copyright itself have moved into khara.

GAINAX had been in the vegetative state for many years now.

Ouch, now that really stings to wake up to. Eva aside, Nadia, Gunbuster, FLCL all stand out among the great anime of the '90s-'00s. Even lesser known series, like KareKano, which Anno had a hand in, really have a vivaciousness to them to them that just isn't that common. RIP Gainax.

It stings a little, but most of the Good People have gotten around to other studios anyways. As I understand it gainax was really just an IP holding company for the most part in recent time

Honestly I'm super excited for this. An important detail of note is that Studio Khara will be responsible for selling off and distributing IP to interested parties. Realistically most of these properties will go to Khara themself, Trigger, and studios like SHAFT that worked closely with gainax in the early days.

So if anything this is how many of those beloved projects will get out from under Gainax's death grip and get something new other than a pachinko machine.

Well, their biggest success is pretty much done to death now. NGE has had a series, multiple OVAs, multiple movies, multiple revamp movies... there's really not much else to get out of it unless you want to tell the story of how they got into that mess to begin with, which might be the most interesting part of all of this to its core fanbase given their age. Maybe tell the story of the project up until Shinji's mom dies or something.

There's all kinds of fun things that could be done with the franchise. An isekai where an Otaku gets reborn as Shinji and tries to do it right would be great.

I mean the plan with Eva according to Anno is to do like what Gundam does.

i.e. you have you main timeline (Universal Century) with focuses on different groups on opposing sides of the conflict during different periods.

But then you have your many other offshoot series (00, IBO, GWitch, SEED, Turn A, etc) that are free of the main established canon while keeping the same core elements to the series.

They announced that, but all major IPs they had were already transferred to Khara and Trigger a couple years ago (that's why the TTGL movies reappeared in cinema a couple years ago). It's likely just some of the older/less popular stuff that's not easy to assign owners to that will need to be redistributed.

>Even lesser known series, like KareKano

Ahh the memories...I'll never forget their style of running out of funds mid series and then switching to the anime version of powerpoint style transitions to tell the remainder of the story! :D

And who can forget Mahoromantic with the quintessential other Anime quirk: The budget runs outs so the important people just die and the credits roll with sad music....the end. :D

I discovered in early high school after investing considerable time into a few series only to be burned by bad endings, that I should try something other than Anime. Its enjoyable but man I can't trust these guys. They suck you in and then leave you hanging too often.

At least Evangelion was good I guess. Guess thats what happens when you have more continual income coming in for a franchise?

Whats old is new again, Amazon and to a lesser extend Netflix are now mass producing content with this trap but at least we can make our voices heard. Back then in the late 90s early 00s we could not as easily complain to the company.

As a side note, the small worlds museum (from the article image) is pretty cool. I spent a couple of hours there on a rainy day in Tokyo. I assume they are going to keep the Tokyo-3 part of the exhibit after this.

End of Evangelion, indeed.

No more gainax bounce?

Evangelion this TTGL that. We are never getting another P&S G are we?

Studio Trigger is working on new P&S G project.

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2022-07-02/studio-trig...

Trigger has a new project in the works, it was announced last year:

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2023-07-01/trigger-unv...

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