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Hideaki Anno (庵野秀明 An'no Hideaki, born 22 May 1960 in Ube, Japan) is a Japanese animation and video director. Having a distinctively vivid and precise visual style, Anno is best known for his work on the influential anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. He married mangaka Moyoco Anno in 2002.
Early work Anno began his career as an animator for the anime series The Super Dimension Fortress Macross (1982–1983), but wasn't a recognized talent until the release of his work on Hayao Miyazaki's 1984 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Running short on animators, the film's production studio posted an ad in the famous Japanese animation magazine Animage, announcing that they were in desperate need of more animators. Anno, in his early twenties at the time, read the ad and headed down to the film's studio, where he met with Miyazaki and showed him some of his drawings. Impressed with Anno's work, Miyazaki hired him to draw some of the most complicated scenes near the end of the movie. Miyazaki and his crew were very happy with Anno's final product, and he went on to become one of the co-founders of Gainax. He worked as an animation director for their first feature-length film, Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise (1987), and ultimately became Gainax's premiere anime director, helming the majority of the studio's projects such as Gunbuster (1988) and (1990–1991). However, Anno fell into a four-year depression following Nadia—the series was handed down to him from NHK as a partial remake of Hayao Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky, and he was given very little creative control. Neon Genesis Evangelion Anno's next project was the anime TV series Shin Seiki Evangelion (Japanese:新世紀エヴァンゲリオン known in the US as Neon Genesis Evangelion), (1995–1996), which has ultimately gone on to be one of the most influential anime works ever, championing a return to traditional anime drawing styles and themes and taking them to new heights of precision and depth. Many believe that Anno's four-year period of depression was the main source for many of the psychological elements of the series and its characters, as he wrote down on paper many of the trials and tribulations of his illness. During the show's production, Anno rejected the hermetic otaku lifestyle he had been living, considering it a form of forced autism. For this and other reasons, Evangelions plot became increasingly dark and psychological as the series progressed, despite being broadcast in children's television timeslot. Anno felt that people should be exposed to the realities of life at as young an age as possible, and by the end of the series all attempts at traditional narrative logic were abandoned, the final two episodes being a kind of bad trip taking place inside the main character's mind. The show did not garner high ratings at its initial time slot, though it was soon moved to a later, more adult-oriented venue and became exceptionally popular throughout Japan. After the ending of Shin Seiki Evangelion (Neon Genesis Evangelion), Anno received numerous letters and emails from fans, both congratulating him on the series and criticizing the last two episodes. Among these were death threats and letters of disappointment from fans who thought Anno had ruined the series for them. Partially in response to this outcry, a project was launched to create a movie with a "proper" ending for the series in 1997, eventually culminating in the controversial The End of Evangelion. Recent work After Evangelion, Anno directed a significant portion of the 1998 anime series Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou (known in English as His and Her Circumstances or Kare Kano for short) — the first Gainax work to be directly adapted from previously-written material — until disputes with both the show's sponsors and the original manga author ended in the director's departure, leaving the show in the hands of his protegé, Kazuya Tsurumaki (see also FLCL). Since that dispute, Anno has gone on to work with Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli on several short animated films which have been shown at the Ghibli Museum. The director has also made forays into live-action films, beginning with Love & Pop (1998), a cinéma vérité-style film about enjo kosai ("compensated dating", a form of teenage prostitution) in Japan, of which a major portion was shot on miniature digital cameras with constantly shifting aspect ratios. His second live-action film, Shiki-Jitsu (2000) (translated "Ritual Day" or "Ceremonial Day"), is the story of a burnt-out former anime director (played by popular indie director Shunji Iwai) who falls in love with a woman disconnected from reality. Though like Love and Pop it was an experimental work, the film was shot using a more traditional 2.35:1 aspect ratio and has a more polished presentation, eschewing the cinéma vérité grittiness of Anno's first live-action film. Anno's third live-action film, released in the summer of 2004, was a tokusatsu adaptation of the comic book Cutie Honey. A stark contrast to his earlier more realist live-action works, Cutie Honey is a lighthearted fantasy/superhero movie. Later in 2004, Anno supervised but did not direct the three-part OVA, Re: Cutie Honey. The directors are actually Hiroyuki Imaishi (part one), Takamichi Ito (part two), and Masayuki (part three). On August 1, 2006, Hideaki Anno's official website was updated with job listings for key animators and production staff at a studio called Khara.* In September 2006, it is reported by the October edition of the Japanese anime magazine Newtype that the new cinema series "REBUILD of Evangelion" will be released in the summer 2007. • On September 9, 2006, GAINAX's official website confirmed that four new Evangelion movies are in the works. The first three movies will be an alternate retelling of the TV series (including many new scenes, settings, backgrounds, characters), and the fourth movie will be a completely new conclusion to the story. Hideaki Anno will write the scenario for the first movie and will be the general director and manager for the entire project. Kazuya Tsurumaki will direct the movies while Yoshiyuki Sadamoto will provide character designs and Ikuto Yamashita will provide mechanical designs. Shinji Higuchi will provide storyboards for the first movie. The first one will launch in Summer 2007, the second in January 2008, and the third and final movies will be shown together in Summer 2008. • Filmography | ||||||||
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