I recently wrote about Hideaki Anno and his passion for Japanese popular culture and I mentioned the possibility of discussing his filmography someday. Considering how positively that article has been received, I’ve decided to take a look at the legendary Hideaki Anno, his fascinating career and his impact on the anime industry.
While I’m going to be focusing predominantly on series and films that Hideaki Anno directed, I’d be remiss if I didn’t discuss his career prior to directing. Ever since Hideaki Anno was a child, he’d always been interested in art and film, to the point of being considered a “problem child“. He later attended the Osaka University of Arts and ended up working as an animator on Super Dimension Fortress Macross. He was eventually kicked out of the Osaka University of Arts for not paying his tuition but not before he teamed up with a number of other students to create “Daicon III and IV Opening Animations”, short anime films that were made on a shoestring budget in a friend’s house. He eventually went to work on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind under Hayao Miyazaki where he was assigned the task of working on the God Warrior, a very complicated scene that ended up becoming an impressive set piece in the movie. He, along with the other students who had worked on Daicon III and IV, founded Daicon Film in 1984 which was later renamed as Gainax.
Hideaki Anno’s professional directorial debut was the 1988-89 OVA series Gunbuster which follows Noriko Takaya as she joins the Okinawa Girls Space Pilot High School to fight the Space Monsters and defend Earth. The series has since become a classic noted for the high quality animation, numerous references to otaku culture and a surprisingly emotional story. When it was announced that Discotek Media was releasing Gunbuster on Blu-Ray with a brand new English dub, I remember seeing my Twitter feed explode in celebration as both industry professionals and regular anime fans were overjoyed to see this series released properly in America.
In 1990, one year after the end of Gunbuster, Hideaki Anno got his debut on television when he directed the anime television series Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water. Following 14 year old French inventor Jean and Nadia, a mysterious girl with an unknown origin and history, they are pursued by numerous villains who are after Nadia’s blue pendant. The series is one of the greatest examples of wonder in storytelling that I’ve ever seen and would be my favourite thing Hideaki Anno ever did if it wasn’t for the dreadful island arc in the middle of the series.
However, it was Hideaki Anno’s next project that would undoubtedly become his most popular and famous. In 1995, the first episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion began airing, a series that sees Shinji Ikari, a young teenage boy, forced into an organisation called NERV by his estranged father and given a mech called an Evangelion to fight Angels, a mysterious alien race that periodically invade Earth. The series was an instant hit and is estimated to have grossed billions of dollars in revenue since then. However, that is not to say that the series has been without controversy with budget issues leading to the final two episodes having very little animation and acting more of a psychoanalysis of the characters rather than a conclusion to the story. Hideaki Anno later directed Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth and The End of Evangelion, two films that were released in 1997 to act as a conclusion to the series.
After Evangelion, Hideaki Anno ended up working on several different projects. In 1998, he directed Love & Pop, an experimental live-action film which deals with four teenage girls who provide enjo-kōsai, also known as compensated dating. Hideaki Anno also directed his last TV series to date in 1998 with an anime adaptation of the manga Kare Kano, also known as His and Her Circumstances. In 2000, he directed his second professional live-action film, Shiki-Jitsu, another experimental live-action film that sees a director returning to his hometown and meeting an eccentric woman with the story taking place over the course of 33 days. In 2004, he directed a live-action adaptation of Cutie Honey as well as an OVA series called Re: Cutie Honey that expands on the live-action film. His final directorial job at Gainax was to work on Gunbuster vs. Diebuster, two compilation films that combined Gunbuster with its later sequel Diebuster.
In 2006, Hideaki Anno announced that he was establishing a new anime studio called “Khara” and, in 2007, he announced that he was resigning from Gainax. At Khara, Hideaki Anno has been directing the Rebuild of Evangelion tetralogy, a new retelling of the story of Evangelion that begins similarly but diverges as time goes on. These films were originally intended to be released relatively quickly but we steadily saw the films produced more slowly than expected with the first film released in 2007, the second film in 2009, the third film in 2012 and the fourth film released in 2021. Between the release of the third and fourth Rebuild of Evangelion film, Hideaki Anno ended up codirecting another live-action film, Shin Godzilla, a new entry in the Godzilla franchise that ended up becoming a critical and box office darling. Now that he has finished the Rebuild of Evangelion tetralogy, his upcoming projects are Shin Ultraman, a new Ultraman film that Hideaki Anno is writing and Shin Kamen Rider, a new film in the Kamen Rider franchise that Hideaki Anno will be both directing and writing.
It’s so easy to simply point to Hideaki Anno as the Evangelion guy but I think this is as dismissive and condescending as referring to Osamu Tezuka as the Astro Boy guy. The career of Hideaki Anno is both legendary and fascinating and I hope that anime fans look beyond Evangelion and begin to explore the rest of his catalogue. Let me know your thoughts on the fascinating career of the legendary Hideaki Anno, your thoughts on his works, which ones are your favourites, whether you’ve seen any of his live-action offerings and any additional information you might have on the topic.
Hopefully you have found this article interesting and informative and, if you wish to seek any of the works I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs!