Despite the overwhelming evidence collected on this blog that anime, like all forms of pop culture entertainment, suffered a fatal blow in the late 1990s, some still cling to that dead art form, hoping for a miracle.
Well, if a miracle were to resurrect the Japanese animation industry, the logical place to start would be Gainax, the legendary studio behind cultural touchstones like Neon Genesis Evangelion. Instead, Niche Gamer has brought news of the end of Gainax.
Gainax, the studio behind anime hits such as Neon Genesis Evangelion, FLCL, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, and Nadia the Secret of Blue Water, has filed for bankruptcy.
Gainax noted that their financial situation worsened in 2012 due to mismanagement by executives, failed projects, and incurring massive debts.
Related: Anime Ground Zero
In addition, many regional branches of Gainax later separated such as Studio Gaina, bringing their talents with them, along with Studio Khara, which was opened by Evangelion director and Gainax veteran Hideaki Anno. These companies stopped affiliating with the main Gainax studio.
Studio Khara later sued Gainax in 2017 for 100 million yen due to the latter failing to pay alleged debts. Khara won the ruling in the Tokyo District Court.
Gainax head Tomohiro Maki transferred shares to a person who has no knowledge of filmmaking production in 2018 and later arrested in 2019 for sexual harassment, causing Gainax to “completely lose its ability to operate while still being saddled with a large amount of debt.”
Hideaki Anno later requested the help of Kadokawa, Studio Trigger (also founded by Gainax veterans), and King Records to resolve Gainax’s problems. However, they were confronted with the worsening financial situation and thus were not able to solve it.
Related: Anime Has Fallen
During a revamp of management in February 2020, along with creditor Studio Khara, it was discovered a massive amount of debt and many intellectual properties were transferred to other studios without the permission of the original creators.
While Gainax tried to solve their debt problems, it was no longer able to solve it when a debt collection company sued Gainax in May of this year. Studio Khara later took over the Gainax trademark.
Everywhere you look, it seems like animation studios are dropping like flies.
Rooster Teeth folded mere months ago, and now we have the end of Gainax.
Neither development should be surprising to anyone who’s read this blog for a while. Con Inc. media has normies convinced that woke infiltration is what kills beloved companies and IPs. But as we’ve established, the woke rot sets in after a studio or publisher is already dead but not yet broke.
The writing was on the wall if you kept track of anime’s stagnation in its home country.
Nobody wants to face the facts, but it’s undeniable that anime peaked as an art form in 1998. Then came anime ground zero, and it’s been on a downhill slide ever since.
It’s been a wild ride, but now the ride is coming to an end. Gainax defined the pinnacle of Japanese animation, and the end of Gainax marks the end of an era.
Don’t mourn for Gainax or the anime industry. Everything since the turn of the millennium has been an Eva or Gundam ripoff, a slice-of-life snorefest, or diabetes-inducing cute girls doing cute things. And all of it looks flat and pastel.
We’ll always have the classics. The end of Gainax is a signal to move on and make something new.
That’s what I’ve been doing, and I don’t intend to stop anytime soon. Join me on the new frontier.
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1998 as the peak of anime?
The year is close to 1997. Hmm…
The Western animation industry fell off around this time, too. The shift to digital and flash animation caused an ease of access factory beltline-like quality problem that has never been properly dealt with.
You know how animating with Gmod is different than animating with SFM? I suspect that Flash cartoons looked worse than they needed to, because neither the American directors nor the Canadians/Koreans that their studios outsourced to studied the weaknesses and strengths of animating with Flash puppets.
It’s an old story by now, but unlike other media, we can trace Anime Ground Zero to one watershed historical event. Throughout the 80s and 90s, almost every Japanese animation studio got their paints from one supplier. That company employed one guy who mixed all of their paints. You can see it by going back an scoping out anime cels from works of the era. The aptly named “80s red” is unmistakable.
That one paint mixer had a massive heart attack and retired in 1998.
Sometimes the universe is small place.
Anime in the ’90s was being squeezed out during Japan’s economic bubble popping, but it was still being produced in the highest quality possible. Despite the downturn, anime was still growing domestically and abroad. And it was still aiming high.
Where the damage was done was the ’00s. It wasn’t just the switch over to digipaint, but also the misused budgets, the increasing inward turn of projects, the abandonment of the worldwide market (people forget that the first industry crash happened in the ’00s) and the deliberate aim towards otaku to try and combat the explosion of online piracy. By the end of the ’00s, there was little left of what made the industry what it was from the ’70s to the turn of the millennium.
I will put in that I think there was a bump in quality in the ’10s by a combination of studios seeing the writing on the wall amidst the flood of low budget junk flooding the industry through the insanely high number of studios that just pump out seasonal product. Studios like Bones, MAPPA (before their recent employee scandals), Madhouse, Sunrise, the above Khara and Trigger, and some others like UFOtable and David Productions, were able to bust through the noise and deliver top notch shows. They had even managed to work around the digital format to bring back a lot of color and liveliness to the proceedings.
The biggest problem I have with the industry in the ’20s is that is too big for no discernable reason. They pump out way too much trash and disposable generic fluff that no one either watches or buys and is a waste of everyone’s time. Yes, there is more being made than ever before, but if you cut out the filler than you are still left with about the same level of quality a random season would have had back in the day. There are plenty of good and great manga like Green Blood or Heart Gear that would have made for perfect anime, perhaps even in the recent ONA format that would allow for more creativity in expression, but they simply aren’t being adapted. Instead, every season is flooded with the same generic product, which has been a problem since the mid-’00s.
I feel like there is a lot of talent in the industry that isn’t given enough time to shine because of how a lot of it is setup for a climate in the industry that no longer exists. They need to change their model and focus to adjust with the fact that it’s not the ’00s anymore, and realize a lot of those changes were ill-advised even at the time.
When I look back and watch even mediocre OVAs from the late ’80s and ’90s, I see a level of ambition in most of them that is not being as fostered today as it should be. Instead, it feels like a bunch of studios scrambling to stay afloat so they can put out more generic product. What is the point of that?
Of course, at least the Japanese HAVE an animation industry at all. Most of the West threw theirs out ages ago for low IQ fart humor and generic feminized adventure product stained with Current Year tropes.
The only real solution I see for animation as a whole is to dial it back and allow creators room to breathe. The anime industry getting rid of yearly series that run 52 weeks out of the year is uniformly a good thing. Patience and allowing studios time to focus on making the best animated creation they can will lead to both better animation and better end results. Of course that means the audience needs to also adjust their expectations of no longer getting constant product pumped out to meet insatiable demand, but it has to happen.
Animation as a whole is not in the best of states, and it hasn’t really been since the 20th century ended, but we can make steps to finally improve it. We just have to finally change our own unrealistic expectations of said industry.
I don’t think there is any mystery why Japan was pumping out anime regardless if it was good or trash. It’s common phenomenon in the business world that when something blows up in popularity, the market gets flooded with that thing. In this case, Japan realized the world liked the cocaine it was selling so they made more of it even if the quality wasn’t good – people were going to buy it for the hit. Better that Japan have their product on the market than someone else.
When the demand is high, there’s no time to focus on quality because you have to follow a formula to get stuff cranked out with ease. It becomes less of an art and more of a commodity.
I’d mark the 2010’s as the decade of market saturation which set the stage for entertainment burnout of the late ’10s early 20’s.
It’s the same paradoxical pattern we’re seeing in Hollywood, deadpub, and the record industry: More and more product is getting pumped out to claims of ever-higher revenues, yet no one cares, and companies are merging and folding left and right.
This is the phenomenon we’d expect to see when the propaganda arm of the government has lost the people, so TPTB make printer go brrrr in a vain attempt to recapture their audience.
It makes sense that the over the top level of comically bad propaganda happens after normies start getting a clue that it is propaganda. If a guy like WDWPro sounds edgy and anti-journalist, the problem is bad.
My adult son was listening to some okay YouTube channels that obviously get their clicks from political hot takes. YouTube only allows certain views, so it’s not exactly bad think regardless of the channel chosen. Anyway, the channels were stressing him out. My advise was to take them out of his feed and then *poof* all the supposed “tension” about the election (and world events) would disappear.
It certainly works for me. Somebody will alert me if I really need to know.
The OVA is really the key to the creative pulse of the 80’s and 90’s in anime. Bubblegum Crisis, Project A-ko, Riding Bean, Please Save My Earth, Key the Metal Idol, the original (and best) Tenchi Muyo, etc. probably would not have existed if not for the OVA format. Sometimes they went nowhere, sometimes they fizzled midway and sometimes you got a complete story, and occasionally you got a huge franchise out of them, but they allowed smaller animation studios to take on more unusual topics without needing the budget for a full TV season. And even when the idea behind the OVA is relatively straightforward, you still see them taking risks in terms of animation techniques, episode structure, etc.
Now I very well could be overlooking something, but I can’t find much of any OVAs that aren’t tie ins (or porn) after FLCL (2000.) This tracks with the death of VHS. In theory OVA on DVD should work just as well, and I know that there were OVA released that way, but it never seems to have taken off. I don’t know if this is due to the changes in the animation industry as a whole or due to Japan’s tendency to charge prices for DVDs, and later blurays, far above their actual value.
In theory ONA is the successor to OVA. In practice it really isn’t. While I’m not the most versed in the format, the only example of something that was a complete story and not just a tie-in was Kemurikusa, and that only happened due to the fan outcry at Kadokawa screwing over Kemono Friends’s director Tatsuki, even though he turned the franchise from a joke to one of their most merchandisable products. I think that I am missing some underground series, but I get the impression that these are largely outside of any influence on mainstream anime, unlike the OVAs of the 80’s and 90’s.
The big problem is that ONA doesn’t really offer a great way for a small production team to get a show out. If you want mass distribution you’re going to have to work with streaming services like Netflix, which just puts you in the same boat as normal shows (especially for the lucrative overseas market.) You can put your show at some independent place online, but then there’s no way to make money off it, and furthermore due to the poor state of search engines there’s a good chance that no one’s going to see it anyways. If you’ve just got a creative idea that you want to get out self-publishing manga or doing a webcomic is a much better option, though obviously if you do that you can’t experiment with actual animation.
OVAs had the backing of sponsors and production companies to cash in on the then-new home video market to offer original product. Unfortunately, it’s mostly turned into trading card style “exclusive” episodes licensed out to different markets which sometimes even makes them hard to license out over here (the My Hero Academia OVAs, for example, have still not released over here and MHA is the biggest anime property going right now), they’re never really exclusive or original ideas anymore, which is a shame.
The ONA could theoretically be a venue for experimentation, or at least a way to allow less obviously pandering material the light of day, but even the best examples, like Spriggan, Pluto, or Cyberpunk Edgerunners, were only allowed to exist because they are already part of big IPs. Right now it’s just being used as another market to tap when the TV airwaves are full, which, again, is a shame.
Recently I’ve been looking into older animation and seeing how all over the world there were inventive projects like Heroic Times, Felidae, Son of Stars, or the Japanese OVA/movie boom, all the time back when hand painted cells were common, makes you really appreciate how much could be done that has been seemingly forgotten thanks to the format change since they were abandoned.
The best competition for Disney was once an ex-employee making a mythologically-tinged adaption of a children’s book out of a garage, and now it’s another corporation copy-pasting outdated Shrek humor on the next CG winking “comedy” mascot.
Animation has so much potential, and now it’s just this. It’s disheartening.
Hopefully we get more independent projects like Lackadaisy going, because it’s going to be up to indies to bring that spirit back.
I don’t know much about anime, but I did quite enjoy Noragami, which was recommended to me by a friend. I thought it had a pretty good depiction of sin for a bunch of Shinto. 🙂
Hmm, it sounds like Gainax had turned into a zombie company after all their best minds went elsewhere. But at least some of them are still making interesting stuff, on occasion, so perhaps it’s not quite as bleak as it seems?
I was never much of an otaku but there was plenty of anime I liked in the early 00s heyday of Toonami and Adult Swim. I think 08th MS Team was one of the best shows I’ve ever watched, period, just to give one example. Over time, I just lost interest as the focus shifted to boring subjects and trash pandering to the lowest tier coomer fans.
Oh, on the subject of mecha, I’m finally plowing through Combat Frame XSeed after reading the first book and part of CY 40 a year ago. I finally picked up the second book again and I’ve been hooked ever since, just started on SS. It’s nice reading a series where each book is better than the last.
And (spoiler alert for books 3-4, I guess?) I never cease to be amused that Red married an alien, producing a dozen (half-alien?!) children together and nobody seems to think this is especially odd or anything of the sort. Maybe everybody in the SOC grew up watching Tenchi? What a boss. Looking forward to seeing how everything turns out!
Yeah, the brain drain got to Gainax big time.
Thanks for reading. Most folks think Red is weird. But since he controls the XSeed Metatron, not to mention being the UCP’s biggest combat frame supplier, most keep that opinion to themselves.
This whole discussion is interesting to me, since I was born in Texas in 1990 (thus being far too young and removed from anything culturally Japanese) and basically had no clue about anything anime until Halo: Legends came out in 2010.
Not too long after that, I had several acquaintances that tried to get me into anime, and I decided to give it a try. The end result will probably surprise no one here. I immediately loved Cowboy Bebop (who doesn’t?) and Ghost in the Shell…which are from the 90s. Also Studio Ghibli. I also liked GitS: Stand Alone Complex and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. But the more I looked at recent anime, the more I complained that most of it appeared to be pervert garbage, lazy generic fantasy aesthetic, or both. After that point, I just stopped paying attention and trying any of it because I was tired of sifting through garbage. Though now I’m dating a woman that really likes Fairy Tail, which I’ve barely heard of and never seen, so here’s hoping it’s somewhat decent?
All of that to say, it’s revealing that even when I was a newbie to anime in the 2010’s, I STILL ended up gravitating to stuff from the 90s and early 00’s as overall superior. Does that qualify me as a “man of culture”?
If any of you more knowledgeable people want to comment some suggestions of more that’s actually worthy of a try, I’d appreciate it.
Also, can anyone explain to me why Neon Genesis Evangelion is liked so much? I watched the first movie of the remake, which I’m told is similar to the original series, and decided I was rooting for the “angels” to win seeing how utterly pathetic, whiny, and stupid the main character was. In fact, the only part I liked and thought was actually cool was the attack of the geometry “angel”, which I still refer to jokingly as “attack of the angry math”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u26WYI9oxoA
Seriously, am I missing some context? NGE just seems massively overrated.
Man of Culture status confirmed.
My off-the-cuff reactions:
>GitS: SAC is not only my favorite anime series, it’s my favorite police procedural, period
>MS Gundam gets a high recommend from me; the 1st 3 movies, the Stardust Memory OAVs, and the entirety of Zeta Gundam, in particular
>Haven’t seen any of the new Eva stuff, just the original series and OS-concluding films. But its inability to resonate with you makes sense because Eva is a deconstruction of the mecha genre. It’s also the tragedy of the ultimate Gen Y incel whose inability to get over his past makes him blow his chance to save the world.
Speaking of Studio Ghibli, I made an interesting observation the other night. My wife and I had a movie date to go see “When Marnie Was There” in the theater, since we had never seen it before. Before the movie, they played a commercial for the Studio Ghibli theme park. Their sales pitch for the “Whisper of the Heart” section of the park included a direct invocation of nostalgia for the 1990s. I infer from this that the Gen Y nostalgia issue isn’t limited to Westerners. Otherwise, they would not be trying to hook Japanese folks our age with “Hey, it’s your childhood!” It is not as if Western audiences would remember what nice Japanese suburbs looked like in the last decade of the last century.
There’s a famous Japanese Dragon Ball video game commercial that advertises specifically to adult business men remember what it was like to be a kid giving their power to help Goku throw the Spirit Bomb. Not to mention, they’ve also had a recent onslaught of IP revivals (much better than ours, of course) meant to resurrect that time again. I think one of the conceits of a recent Yakuza game was that the protagonist was put in jail during the ’90s and came out after Japan was hit hard by the economic downturn its still never recovered from, and his story is how to adjust to the change.
I honestly think the nostalgia issue isn’t just a specifically Western thing–it seems to be global. No one can really seem to break its grip because they don’t seem to have any vision of a future.
My knowledge of anime is very limited – it’s merely an art style to me – but… Death Note was put out after the turn of the millennium, it falls into none of the categories you listed, it’s still talked about as a universal reference point, and it’s far and away my favorite, including Monster, and Monster essentially stars Jean Valjean as a brain surgeon/amateur investigator. Death Note is not chopped liver.
There was indeed a small Anime renaissance in the early to mid 2000s, prior to the Moe Apocalypse of the late 2000s.
FLCL, Death Note, Haruhi Suzumiya, Code Geass…
One of the first anime that really hooked me in was Inuyasha.
I rewatched the first episode the other day: it still looks and sounds incredible, with its saturated colors, line variation and orchestral soundtrack.
Even early Naruto would have looked great if the pacing hadn’t been so terrible.
It looks like several decades of bad, shady, and criminal business decisions finally caught up with Gainax more than anything else.