Gainax
Gainax is an anime studio most famous for the television series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Gainax is known for its unusual stories, sometimes satires of cliche genres and its pechant for unusal endings to its series. In the past, it also became infamous in the American fandom for its production and budget problems for several notable series, and sometimes had to rely heavily on limited animation. Gainax also has a strong, lingering merchandise force behind many of its series, most famous of Evangelion despite that series having ended nearly a decade ago.
In American fandom, Gainax popularized the term and usage of fanservice, and unusually precise animation of a woman's chest bouncing became known as 'gainaxing.'
Gainax typically works on in-house stories, and unlike most anime, many of their stories are not derived from pre-existing manga from outside authors. (Notable exceptions were the animated adaptions of KareKano and continuity.
Gainax is also known for putting references of past series into new ones, and thus been typified as an 'otaku's company'.
- After a running gag where scenes were depicted in manga form on-screen, FLCL's characters make a tongue-in-cheek remark about the use of stills in animation (something Gainax became notorious for) being cheap and annoying budget saving device.
- Several KareKano animated sequences and clothing designs (the short of Miyazawa in Asuka Langley's yellow dress) are remakrably similar to Evangelion, as well as a handful of more overt references.
- Fans note the unusally strong similarity of character designs from Nadia and Evangelion, although this may simply be an effect of having the same designer.
- Abenobashi Magical Shopping District contains dozens references to anime, including Gainax. The second episode features a giant robot 'suit up' sequence using musical identical to the EVA unit launching sequence in Evangelion.
- FLCL features one of the leads dressing as the Daicon Bunny (see below).
History
The studio was formed in the early 1980s as Daicon Film by university students Hideaki Anno, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Akai Takami, and Higuchi Shinji. Their first project was to make an animated short for the 20th Annual Japan National SF Convention, also known as Daicon III, held in 1981 in Osaka, Japan. The short is about a little girl who fights all sorts of monsters, robots, and spaceships from earlier science fiction TV shows (including Ultraman, Space Battleship Yamato, Star Trek, Star Wars, Godzilla, Genesis Climber Mospeada, and many others) until she finally reaches a desert plain and pours a glass of water on a daikon radish, which immediately grows into a huge spaceship and beams her aboard. While this animated short was ambitious, its animation quality was rough and low-quality.
The group made a much bigger splash at the 22nd Annual Japan National SF Convention, Daicon IV, in 1983. The short they produced for this convention started with a recap of the original short, showing highlights of the little girl's adventures with much better animation quality; then it showed the girl all grown up: wearing a Playboy bunny suit, fighting an even wider selection of creatures from all sorts of science fiction and fantasy movies and novels (appearances include Darth Vader, an Alien, a Macross Veritech, a Pern dragon, Aslan, a Klingon battle cruiser, Power Rangers characters, Spider-Man, and a pan across a vast array of hundreds of other characters) as she surfs through the sky on the sword Excalibur. The action was set to the song Twilight from the group Electric Light Orchestra. This short firmly established Daicon Film as a talented new anime studio. The studio changed its name to Gainax in 1985.
Works
Gainax works include (year given is that of first broadcast, theatre showing, or publishing):
