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(pronounced "guy-nax") is a Japanese anime studio most famous for the television series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Gainax is known for its ambitious, experimental anime and controversial endings. Throughout its history, Gainax has been plagued by budgetary problems and poor management, and in the wake of Evangelion's success, Gainax evaded taxes and its President, Takeshi Sawamura, was sentenced to jail for accounting fraud•.
Although until Neon Genesis Evangelion, Gainax typically worked on stories created in-house, the studio has increasingly adapted existing manga like Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou and Mahoromatic into anime shows. Gainax could be said to produce two types of anime today: commercial works like Mahoromatic and He is My Master versus more experimental works that follow the company's traditions, such as FLCL and Gunbuster 2. In addition to anime production, Gainax relies heavily on merchandising its famous properties. Even though the show ended in 1996, Evangelion video games, t-shirts, and accessories are still being produced.
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History
The studio was formed in the early 1980s as Daicon Film by university students Hideaki Anno, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Takami Akai, and Shinji Higuchi. 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 film 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, and many others) until she finally reaches a desert plain and pours a glass of water on a dried-out daikon radish, which immediately resurrects itself and grows into a huge spaceship and beams her aboard. While this animated short was ambitious, its animation was rough and low-quality. An interpretation of the short that has floated around the Internet is that the water represents creativity and imagination, and the monsters and other adversaries confronting the girl represent those who try to quash the creative spirit for whatever reason.
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 Valkyrie, a Pern dragon, Aslan, a Klingon battle cruiser, Spider-Man, and a pan across a vast array of hundreds of other characters) as she surfs through the sky on the sword Stormbringer. The action was set to the song "Twilight" from the group Electric Light Orchestra. The use of this song, however, was unlicensed, preventing the short from being officially released on DVD, making the limited laserdisc release of the Daicon shorts very rare and highly sought after. The song was used again, legitimately licensed for the opening of the Japanese live-action TV series Densha Otoko, which had opening animation by GONZO. The Daicon IV short firmly established Daicon Film as a talented new anime studio. The studio changed its name to Gainax in 1985.
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Works
Gainax works include (year given is that of first broadcast, theatre showing, or publishing):
(1990) (Fushigi no Umi no Nadia)
FLCL (2000) (pronounced "Furi Kuri", or "Fooly Cooly" in English)
Diebuster (2004) (Top o Nerae! 2 or "Aim for the Top! 2")
Gainax has also produced a number of computer games, including a strip mahjong game featuring Evangelion characters, and its most famous games, the Princess Maker series, which was later adapted as Puchi Puri Yūshi.
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Daicon Tokusatsu fan films
As Daicon Films, Gainax was also notable for making a series of tokusatsu fan film shorts in the 1980s, usually parodies of monster movies and superhero shows, which have gotten lots of favorable media coverage. These productions included:
(1982)—A parody of the popular Super Sentai shows, which is also a satire of the Russo-Japanese War. The title team is based on Japanese culture (of course) and the villains, the evil Red Bear Empire led by "Death Kremlin", are Russians. In this "episode", Red Bear confronts our heroes with the giant shark monster, Minsk Mask, while attempting to brainwash the children of Japan by swapping out the pages of their textbooks with red paper. Shinji Higuchi worked on the special effects.
(1982)—A parody of Shotaro Ishinomori's Kaiketsu Zubat; the name of the hero's alter-ego (Ken Hayakawa) is the same, but the hero wears a sillier costume! Daicon/Gainax producer Yasuhiro Takeda played Ken Hayakawa. It spawned three sequels: "Kaiketsu Noutenki 2" in which he faces off against a mechanical clone of himself, Mecha Noutenki; "Noutenki in USA" where the hero walks around in San Francisco, California, seeing the sights whilest in costume; and a supposed role-playing video.
(1983)—A same-title parody of Return of Ultraman, with some impressive special effects, even for a low budget. The usual Ultraman derring-do ensues, only replace New Ultraman/Ultraman Jack with a giant Hideaki Anno in a vinyl Ultraman trick-or-treat outfit and glasses! Anno directed while Takami Akai directed the special effects.
(1985)—Daicon's epic 72-minute sendup of daikaiju (giant monster) movies, with special effects by Shinji Higuchi. This was the most heavily promoted of their short films.
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Trivia
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 for which Gainax had become notorious) being a cheap and annoying budget saving device. In fact, the manga scenes in FLCL were "hard work" (as a character laments) but necessary, in order to avoid getting "accused of being lazy".
Several Kare Kano animated sequences and clothing designs are remarkably similar to Neon Genesis Evangelion, as well as a handful of more overt references. (For example, the shot of Miyazawa in Asuka's yellow dress and her imitation of EVA-01's berserker mode in one episode.)
Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi contains dozens references to anime, including Gainax. The third episode features a giant robot "suit up" sequence using musical identical to the EVA unit launching sequence in Neon Genesis Evangelion.
FLCL features one of the leads dressing as the Daicon Bunny (see above).
In one episode of He is My Master, there was reference of all the anime worked on by Gainax, by showing them as action figure, plushies, or clothing.
In American fandom, Gainax popularized the term and usage of fan service, and unusually precise animation of a woman's chest bouncing became known as "the Gainax bounce" or "gainaxing"•, first seen in a scene of Gunbuster featuring Noriko Takaya.
Gainax have also worked on a 1987 promotional video for the song "Marionette" by Boøwy.
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