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Gainax, known for 'Evangelion' anime production, goes bankrupt
- wwilim 2y agoIt all comes tumbling down, tumbling down, tumbling down...
- Something1234 2y agoSeems like the franchise is safe just a bunch of executives at some subsidiary squandered everything.
- atomicnumber3 2y agoThat's my takeaway too. "Gainax tried to rebuild itself with the support of Khara, which currently owns the rights to the Evangelion series and of which Anno serves as president." So all the actual franchise stuff was with Anno in Khara, and Gainax was the creative staffing for the anime/movies?
- noirscape 2y agoGainax was bought in 2019 by Studio Khara, Studio Trigger, Kadokawa Group and Studio Gaina (a former subsidiary) after the previous CEO got arrested for inappropriate behaviour around teenage VAs. Khara and Trigger are the successor studios to Gainax as in that those are the studios made by their biggest creatives, and it's to my understanding that all relevant IPs from the creatives behind Khara and Trigger during their time at Gainax were transferred to them after the buyout. The only Gainax IP that's not owned by the creative behind it is FLCL, since Gainax sold the rights for it to Production I.G. in the late 2000s. Another, more indirect, successor studio to Gainax is Studio Cloverworks at A1 Productions, although that one was mostly general staff. That said, it's not like Gainax did much in the ~5 years between the formation of Studio Trigger and the buyout; they released exactly one anime and one OVA. There was pretty much nobody creative left at the company to make anything, specifically because the CEO got cold feet on approving creative projects.
- dragontamer 2y agoSounds like the bankruptcy system is working correctly then. All the valuable assets are going to the people who matter: Cloverworks, Trigger and Khara. Its a bit sad for Gainax as an entity to be collapsing, but the individuals who bring us these stories (through producing, acting, animating, or other skills) still exist out there. I'll definitely say that Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 from Studio Khara lost a lot of the mech-design that made Gainax great... but its clear that all the "mech designers" are alive and active over at Studio Trigger. Its sad to see the team split up, because nothing like Evangelion (90s) will ever come out again. But on the other hand, these other studios are clearly active and seemingly successful. So the show goes on...
- noirscape 2y agoYeah, it's sad in that they're a pretty massive name that's going away (and one of the few studios mostly known for doing original work rather than adaptations), but it's been a long time coming and the actual losses are minimal (it's really only FLCL but that happened years ago). One small correction though: no IPs will be transferred to Cloverworks as far as I know. Cloverworks didn't really get any specific creatives from Gainax, moreso just that a lot of the intermediate staff that you usually don't hear about ended up at Cloverworks. (Which to my understanding was largely a coincidence: A1 had formed Cloverworks, put out hiring ads and in the next month, Gainax basically declared they weren't ever going to make any experimental anime again, causing a mass exodus from the company.)
- chc4 2y agoSquandered, along with things like "commit massive tax fraud that caused several executives to go to jail and be forced to pay millions of dollars of fees"
- ordinaryradical 2y agoThe real talent left to form Studio Khara, I think it part because of this kind of mismanagement. Gainax has a long history of financial follies despite having created one of the most successful anime in history.
- isk517 2y agoAlso Studio Trigger.
- Cyph0n 2y agoMostly Trigger. They are currently working on Delicious in Dungeon, which starts off slow but evolves into an amazing story.
- quink 2y agoAnd, thanks in no small part to the final collapse of GAINAX, they've announced a second season of Panty and Stocking after getting the rights.
- dragontamer 2y agoDelicious in Dungeon, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Little Witch Academia, and Kill la Kill. Trigger is knocking it out of the park. Clearly a top-tier animation studio of the last decade.
- dimmke 2y agoCyberpunk: Edgerunners is such a killer anime, it's honestly one of my top all time favorites even though you can tell it had a small budget. Even their less popular stuff I dig. I just watched Darling in the Franxx and I'm about to start Kiznaiver.
- dragontamer 2y agoI dunno if you can call Darling in the Franxx "less popular". At least in my circles it seems like a hugely popular work. A lot of people like it but I do consider it a bit of a waifu-trash anime, lol. So I didn't think it was as critically good writing as the other stuff I listed. Kinznaiver is on the less popular side. As is BNA (Brand New Animal). The Tokusatsu community seems to like the SSSS.(Gridman/Dynazenon) anime, but arguably taking the Gridman name makes them more into Tokusatsu than the anime community anyway.
- GrumpyYoungMan 2y agoOuch, now that really stings to wake up to. Eva aside, Nadia, Gunbuster, FLCL all stand out among the great anime of the '90s-'00s. Even lesser known series, like KareKano, which Anno had a hand in, really have a vivaciousness to them to them that just isn't that common. RIP Gainax.
- pachouli-please 2y agoIt stings a little, but most of the Good People have gotten around to other studios anyways. As I understand it gainax was really just an IP holding company for the most part in recent time
- CuriousCosmic 2y agoHonestly I'm super excited for this. An important detail of note is that Studio Khara will be responsible for selling off and distributing IP to interested parties. Realistically most of these properties will go to Khara themself, Trigger, and studios like SHAFT that worked closely with gainax in the early days. So if anything this is how many of those beloved projects will get out from under Gainax's death grip and get something new other than a pachinko machine.
- MisterBastahrd 2y agoWell, their biggest success is pretty much done to death now. NGE has had a series, multiple OVAs, multiple movies, multiple revamp movies... there's really not much else to get out of it unless you want to tell the story of how they got into that mess to begin with, which might be the most interesting part of all of this to its core fanbase given their age. Maybe tell the story of the project up until Shinji's mom dies or something.
- paul_funyun 2y agoThere's all kinds of fun things that could be done with the franchise. An isekai where an Otaku gets reborn as Shinji and tries to do it right would be great.
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- zdw 2y agoThe entire anime industry is built on labor that is not compensated well, from many sources: This whole substack, but in particular: https://news.animenomics.com/p/nafca-anime-worker-survey-long-hours-low-pay https://news.animenomics.com/p/nafca-anime-worker-survey-lon... NHK video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5AR2X6R4TM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5AR2X6R4TM From what I can tell, the production does a lot of Hollywood-style accounting where the production companies take most of the profits and most of the actual work is contracted out.
- CuriousCosmic 2y agoAn good video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDEIPa9b3OU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDEIPa9b3OU However in this case with Gainax, the failure isn't due to anime production committee style accounting or anything like that. It's entirely because gainax hemorrhaged all their talent to offshoot studios and then gainax has done effectively nothing other than contract work out and milk IP in the ~15-20 years since then.
- Levitz 2y agoI think this happens when people have a dream of doing a specific job. As you mentioned, Hollywood does the same thing, as does the videogame industry in general. One could also look at a certain company which name starts with "T" and ends with "esla". In a way, the work itself turns into part of the compensation so people are willing to have a worse everything else as long as they do the thing.
- kvemkon 2y agoPrevious discussion on HN: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074062
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoWhat is the distribution bottleneck that keeps artists from self organising?
- segasaturn 2y agoThe Gainax of the 1990s was not the Gainax of the last decade. Gainax died in the Great Recession and became a hollowed out shell of a studio that only existed to collect royalties on their past work. So this is not a major loss.
- nottorp 2y ago> Its business conditions began to deteriorate around 2012, due to careless management by executives, and the company lost its anime production capabilities following an exodus of its creative staff. I'm not an expert in anime but the article basically says it started to die in 2012-2014 or however long it took for the artists to leave, right?
- kipukun 2y agoGainax's financial troubles are well documented in an interview with Hideaki Anno, where he detailed how the company was pretty dysfunctional from the start. The company's president was arrested for tax fraud in 1999, for example. This has been a long time coming.
- p_l 2y agoAsk not why GAINAX bankrupted, ask how the hell it survived so long. Memes about GAINAX running out of money to finish series go all the way back to Gunbuster, which was their fourth production, and second under the name GAINAX. The second production, Daikon IV, survives thanks to piracy because they didn't license them music used :V
- jandrese 2y agoGunbuster ran out of money to pay colorists by the end of the series, which was only 4 episodes. Evangelion also clearly ran out of budget by the end of the series, and that was after some blatant cost saving scenes repeatedly appearing in the show, like very very long elevator rides where nobody moves and the only action is a floor counter ticking down, or watching the counter on a Walkman slowly tick by. Almost taunting the audience with the counters on the obvious padding scenes.
- p_l 2y agoThe funny thing is, the studio claims last episode of Gunbuster was done black&white on purpose - in fact, that black&white was more expensive the way they did it than otherwise. Unfortunately I suspect that outside of the people directly involved we won't ever hear properly. The rumours flew around since early 1990s, and there is the part that Gunbuster was originally supposed to be a TV series (AFAIK), and as result the plot was extremely compressed into those 6 episodes that we got ultimately. And it's not like the studio was not known otherwise for wild swings even when they didn't run out of money... (anyone remembers how Mahoromatic ended?)
- looperhacks 2y agoLet's face it, Gainax was only an empty shell of its former glory. Most of the "important" people left for Khara and Trigger and Gainax has done nothing of importance for more than ten years or so? Also, financial troubles is probably the most Gainax thing possible
- PaulHoule 2y agoEvangelion is almost 30 years old. The fact that they can't name a newer hit anime for them is the problem. I don't know about the economics but from a creative standpoint the anime industry seems quite healthy having recently produced a lot of great shows like Sousou no Frieren, Oshi no Ko, and Konosuba Season 3 in the last year or so.
- PurpleRamen 2y agoIf a massive hit like evangelion is your benchmark, then everything will fail in comparison. Gainix had many good productions even after NGE, but if management sucks, then success will not help. And they haven't released anything new for nearly a decade now. > I don't know about the economics but from a creative standpoint the anime industry seems quite healthy having recently produced a lot of great shows like Sousou no Frieren, Oshi no Ko, and Konosuba Season 3 in the last year or so. Anime is dying, permanently, since decades. It's a very unhealthy exploitive industry, similar to the infamous Hollywood-accounting. And I guess with AI this will only become worse. But most productions are not anime-originals anyway, they usually originate from books or manga, and the creative animation work is rather small and generic at the end.
- omoikane 2y ago> The fact that they can't name a newer hit anime I thought FLCL was quite good. The original one, at least. I heard they made a new FLCL series in recent years but haven't seen it. But maybe most of FLCL's success was due to The Pillows as opposed to Gainax.
- dragontamer 2y agoRanking of Kings is the underrated gem people need to go and watch. And is my pick for best anime of the last 5ish years. Its a bit of a shonen, but hitting shonen tropes isn't necessarily a bad thing. And Ranking of Kings does it in a relatively fresh way, and absolutely nails the "Brothers Grimm" style to fairy-tale magic and lore. (Yes, kid-friendly on the surface, but then deep blood-magic involving the grinding of bones and drinking of blood to infuse deep magicks into the story and lore). Bonus points that the battle scenes are done by the venerated Studio Wit. ------- With regards to Gainax: their last big hit was Gurren Lagaan in 2007 IMO. But even Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 was Studio Khara, not Gainax. You're not wrong, but Gurren Lagaan is a great work, even if all those particular animators left Gainax shortly afterwards and started Studio Trigger. Most people consider Gurren Lagaan to be Studio Trigger for some reason but remember that group was still technically employed by Gainax when Gurren Lagaan came out.
- xg15 2y agoI guess Gainax finally got its own Gainax Ending.
- timetraveller26 2y agoDarng I came late to make that joke. For the curious: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GainaxEnding https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GainaxEnding
- dvncan 2y ago"Its business conditions began to deteriorate around 2012, due to careless management by executives, and the company lost its anime production capabilities following an exodus of its creative staff." no creative, no business
- fareesh 2y agoone might say they achieved instrumentality
- harimau777 2y agoI'm not an expert in this area, but a friend who is into anime said that the company that the rights to these series are being sold to is owned/operated by the same guy that made many of them. So he felt that in this case we were lucky that this is almost "Gainax went bankrupt and sold their properties to Gainax". Again, I'm not an expert so I can't verify, but this seems like one case where maybe things are ending up alright.
- slillibri 2y agoAs a side note, the small worlds museum (from the article image) is pretty cool. I spent a couple of hours there on a rainy day in Tokyo. I assume they are going to keep the Tokyo-3 part of the exhibit after this.
- barfbagginus 2y ago[flagged]
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- morkalork 2y agoNo more gainax bounce?
- karmasimida 2y agoAs for Evagelion series, most of the creatives and copyright itself have moved into khara. GAINAX had been in the vegetative state for many years now.
- schaefer 2y agoEnd of Evangelion, indeed.
- LarsDu88 2y agoI remember watching the final episode of Evangelion several years ago. A few minutes into it, it's as if they simply ran out of animation budget and it went full slide show. And that was their greatest success.
- snvzz 2y agoclap clap clap omedetou
- 123yawaworht456 2y agojust in case you don't know, there's an actual ending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Evangelion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Evangelion
- LarsDu88 2y agoYes I've seen it. They ran out of budget for the original anime. Then when it became a huge success, they made a more comprehensive (and still baffling) ending in the form of a hit movie. Then they went ahead and dragged out THAT ending in the form of 4 reboot movies. Doesn't change the fact that the original ending ran out of money. In a sense, the original ending is the purest one, where the audience realizes the show is not really about teenagers in mecha fighting kabbalistic space aliens, but rather about the clinical depression suffered by an anime studio runner as he deals with loneliness and a need to make connections to other humans!
- 79a6ed87 2y agoMaybe an unpopular opinion, but I prefer the original ending
- timetraveller26 2y agoWe probably are in the minority, but I do appreciate the uniqueness of that ending, it feels like the interior of a chaotic psyche.
- aidenn0 2y ago
- neilv 2y ago> Its business conditions began to deteriorate around 2012, due to careless management by executives, Is blunt writing like this typical of journalism within Japan, for Japanese audiences?
- irusensei 2y agoEvangelion this TTGL that. We are never getting another P&S G are we?
- Trellmor 2y agoStudio Trigger is working on new P&S G project. https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2022-07-02/studio-trigger-reveals-new-panty-and-stocking-with-garterbelt-project/.187308 https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2022-07-02/studio-trig...
- albl 2y agoTrigger has a new project in the works, it was announced last year: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2023-07-01/trigger-unveils-announcement-video-for-new-panty-and-stocking-with-garterbelt-anime-project/.199878 https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2023-07-01/trigger-unv...