[EVA] Evangelion Kaibunsho

[Carl Gustav Horn]

On Sep 19, 2006, at 10:33 AM, M wrote:

>> Anno had already been at Gainax (then called Daicon Film) for  
>> three years prior to NAUSICAA;
>
> I thought that was Okada's General Production, and even after  
> "joining" Gainax, Anno actually drifted in and out of the company,  
> doing piece work here and there for a number of years before  
> finally getting serious with Nadia (read: Hidaka Noriko) and then Eva.


General Products was the merchandising division, whereas Daicon Film  
represented their filmmaking arm, and in the early 1980s Anno was  
closely involved with both their anime and live-action productions.  
To say that he drifted in and out of the company makes it sound like  
Gainax had regular board meetings in suits and ties of the sort they  
lampooned in OTAKU NO VIDEO. Again, Gainax has rarely been what you  
would call a organized company, but more a group of friends  
collaborating on projects.

(It strikes me that many of these "revelations"--"Hey! Gainax is a  
bunch of fuck-ups!"--didn't have to wait for an anonymous  
posting...anyone could have learned them in the six years before the  
"Kaibunsho" by renting OTAKU NO VIDEO, which was made not by a  
disgruntled staffer, or by an investigative reporter, but by Gainax  
themselves. It isn't as if they've been going around all these years  
hiding their true natures, and the courageous "Hiiro Yui" is now  
going to blow the lid off).

It isn't necessary to dig up obscure information to rebut many of the  
points in this article, but it does strike me as written for people  
who knew about Gainax primarily because of EVANGELION--otherwise they  
would have never been taken in by statements like:

Even Bandai snubbed them based on the past results of the huge  
failure of "Wings of Honneamise (Royal Space Force)". (laugh)

It's a laugh, all right. First of all, Bandai is proud, and was  
proud, of Honneamise. We've seen they've named their recent DVD label  
after it, but even two years before this "Kaibunsho," Shigeru  
Watanabe, president of Bandai Visual, spoke proudly at a press  
conference in San Francisco (to promote MEMORIES) of how Honneamise  
had in fact eventually turned a profit for Bandai, and of his long- 
standing belief in the film.

Secondly, even if the statement about Honneamise were true, you will  
nowhere find in the translated portion of this "Kaibunsho" the name  
GUNBUSTER or AIM FOR THE TOP!, the Gainax OAV series Bandai financed  
immediately after the "huge failure" of HONNEAMISE, and which was an  
unqualified success in rentals and sales. GUNBUSTER, of course, not  
NADIA, was Anno's directorial debut.

It therefore seems highly unlikely to me that Bandai would simply  
snub Gainax either for artistic or commercial reasons. It is Gainax  
who was reluctant to work with Bandai, not because they don't respect  
them, but because they wanted to keep a greater ownership of their work.

—C.