Its only film, "The Wings of Honneamise," has been voted the favorite anime of all time for three straight years on the Internet's rec.arts.anime poll. It's the anime studio of unparalleled coolness that many American fans relate to the most. And its first work since 1991, the TV show "Neon Genesis Evangelion", is now the most popular anime in America and was the most popular TV show in Japan, which had made it one of the hottest bidding wars of the last few years among American anime companies who had been eager to bring it over. AD Vision eventually won with a bid possibly as high as 1 million dollars. The company's name is Gainax-the empire of the otaku.
Otaku-our closest translation would be "fanboy", and some Americans are starting to use this Japanese word, pushing it towards the dangerous cliff edge of pop-culture hipness at whose bottom lies a big, soft pile of flannel shirts. But it's something you don't call yourself in Japan, especially if you're in the industry, where anime studios try to "work the fan out" of their new hires. Only, the folks at Gainax have managed to make names for themselves as professionals, yet they never apologize for remaining obsessed fans to this day-something made possible by their unique history.
Gainax never went to Tokyo to do grunt work in the industry; instead the company started as a group of kids at a technical college in the gritty, gangster-ridden city of Osaka. In 1981, the kids made their first four-minute anime film out of industrial plastic sheets they cut into the size of anime cels and shot frame by frame on a home 8mm camera-studio equipment not being part of their $100 budget.
Although they enjoyed success selling their homemade anime and associated merchandise through cons, mail order and even their own store, Gainax's breakthrough was with 1983's "Daicon IV Opening Anime," an MTV-inspired music video that marked them as the biggest "unsigned" anime talent in Japan. Bandai, Japan's largest toy company (and the bankroll behind "Sailor Moon") approached them. The kids had dreamed of making a 30-minute video based on retelling the story of the first man in space on an alternate world, but Bandai's deep pockets meant that they could actually put out a real two-hour film, and jump directly from 8mm to 35mm.
At 800 million, the film, "The Wings of Honneamise," was the most expensive anime ever made, but writer/director Hiroyuki Yamaga's introspective realist approach proved a disaster with audiences who were looking for romantic adventure.
"Honneamise" had to be satisfied with sweeping the critics' awards and gaining gradual fan respect (it finally made back its money for Bandai in September 1994), especially in the United States, where it was praised by The Washington Post and Roger Ebert during its belated 1994-1995 American film release. "Honneamise" is available on video from Manga Entertainment in both a dubbed and a somewhat easier-to-figure subtitled version.
Deciding that they needed to try a different approach after "Honneamise," Gainax rebounded in 1988 with "Aim for the Top! Gunbuster," an idea writer Toshio Okada sold as "cute girls in bathing suits bouncing around fighting space monsters." In fact, "Gunbuster," available on video here (subtitled from Manga Entertainment), was a three-hour epic in six parts that tore the giant-robot genre apart and put it back together, beginning as a parody and developing into a serious man vs. alien conflict reminiscent of both Joe Haldeman and Robert Heinlein.
It was Gainax's first success, and it set the stage for its smash hit TV show "Nadia" in 1990, a Jules Verne inspired adventure (with cute girls) set in an alternate 1889 (available dubbed in the U.S. through Streamline Pictures under the title "The Secret of Blue Water"). For the first time, Gainax was getting both the critical acclaim and the big money. In 1991, though, at the company's high tide, Gainax again did the unexpected (and the unpopular) with the 100-minute long "Otaku no Video" (available here subtitled through AnimEigo), a scathingly honest self-parody of fan obsessions combining anime with character designs by Gun Smith Cats' Kenichi Sonada (an old Gainax crony who worked on "Honneamise") with live-action interviews purporting to be "Hard Copy"-like exposes of otaku. Some call it anime's "Spinal Tap," but it proved to be too much perspective for the Japanese public, which wasn't prepared to hear it like it really was.
After that, the members of Gainax couldn't find the spirit to do another anime for four years, and turned their offbeat creativity to making PC games, which-unlike their anime-they own the rights to. In 1992, they released their most famous game, Princess Maker, which could be described as a sort of SimDaughter. Several corporations, including the electronics giant Pioneer, approached Gainax during this period to finance new anime. But, according to Okada, unlike most professional studios which churn out anime according to schedule whether good or not, Gainax will not create, unless everybody's heart is in it-everything they do is a group effort that Okada calls "controlled chaos."
It wasn't until October of 1995 that Gainax broke its anime silence with the TV show "Neon Genesis Evangelion," (available here both subtitled and dubbed through ADV Films) where writer/director Hideaki Anno swore to do something new with the giant robot genre (with cute girls). Inspired in part by Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, aliens claiming to be messengers of God-yeah, that God-give us a little taste of apocalypse in the year 2000 by smacking a "meteor" into Antarctica, melting the ice cap and changing the earth's climate. Fifteen years later, the survivors find themselves tested by the Angels in the newly built Tokyo-3. The plot combines elements of biotechnology with Kabbalistic mysticism, which does prove a winner in an America that is into both anime and X-Files-type weirdness. Due to an ending that was disappointing to the Japanese public Gainax has created an "alternate" ending available in "Rebirth", the second part of "Evanglion:Death and Evangelion:Rebirth". "Death" is a digest of the first 24 episodes. The ending also includes "The End of Evangelion",which picks up where "Rebirth" left off, making it the series finale. Both are in movie format.
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