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.
"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..."
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.
Thanks for the tips and thoughtful comments.
Hideaki Anno literally setup a brand new studio specifically to do the rebuild films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khara_(studio)
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.
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.
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!
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'.
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.
Gainax just kind of doesn’t have any of the IP anymore, for various reasons.
Including a partnership with ASUS ROG which led to the infamous "Evangenlion" motherboard.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.