Gainax, KGI

Gainax, KGI
Founded	April 18, 1981
President	Shinji Higuchi
Notable Works	Neon Genesis Evangelion FLCL

Gainax (ガイナックス) is a Japanese anime studio most famous for the television series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Gainax is known for its commitment to experimental anime and twisting the conventions of typical anime genres. At the same time, Gainax has become infamous for some significant 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 famously Evangelion, though the series ended nearly a decade ago.

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".

Although until Neon Genesis Evangelion, Gainax typically worked on in-house stories, the company has increasingly been adapting existing manga, like Kare Kano and Mahoromatic, into anime shows. Gainax is also known for putting references of past series into new ones, and thus been typified as an "otaku's company".

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 is about a little girl who fights all sorts of monsters, robots, and spaceships from earlier science fiction TV shows and movies (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 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. 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):

• Wings of Honneamise (1987)
• Gunbuster (1988) ("Top o Nerae!" or "Aim for the Top!")
• Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990) ("Fushigi no Umi no Nadia")
• Otaku no Video (1992)
• Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) ("Shin Seiki Evangelion")
• Love & Pop (live action) (1998)
• His and Her Circumstances (1998) ("Kareshi Kanojo no Jijo" or "Kare Kano")
• Modern Love's Silliness (1999)
• FLCL (2000) (pronounced "Furi Kuri," or "Fooly Cooly" in English)
• Mahoromatic (2001)
• Shiki-jitsu (2001)
• Puchi Puri Yuushi (2002)
• Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi (2002)
• Melody of Oblivion (2004) ("Boukyaku no Senritsu")
• This Ugly and Beautiful World (2004) ("Kono Minikuku mo Utsukushii Sekai" or "Konomini")
• Re: Cutie Honey (2004)
• Diebuster (2004) ("Top o Nerae! 2" or "Aim for the Top! 2")
• He is My Master (2005)

External links

• GAINAX NET - Gainax's official Web site