After nearly 42 years, Gainax, the Japanese anime studio behind works like Neon Genesis Evangelion, FLCL, Gunbuster, and Gurren Lagann, has finally gone defunct. Its closure comes a year after the studio filed for bankruptcy. Granted, the Gainax that old-head anime fans once knew has spent years as a shell of its former self, but its co-founder, acclaimed director Hideaki Anno, still shared some words for its wake as a last goodbye.
As noted above, Gainax formally filed for bankruptcy last May, according to a report from Anime News Network. Over the years, the studio spawned other production houses like Studio Trigger and Anno’s own Studio Khara, which brought many talented creatives with them when they formed. Gainax has been embroiled in legal issues with its progeny, most notably Khara suing the studio for unpaid debts.
“As someone who has been with the company for over 20 years since its founding and has been involved as a shareholder until today, this is a truly disappointing end, but I am accepting it with a sense of urgency,” Anno said in a press release.
According to ANN, Gainax had a storied history of financial mismanagement. The laundry list of financial woes included both a failed restaurant and a CG studio launch, which established smaller affiliates that later cut ties with the studio, thereby compromising its ability to create new works.
Arguably, the most significant controversy of late-stage Gainax was its then-CEO, Tomohiro Maki, being arrested in 2019 for indecent acts of allegedly taking lewd photos of and inappropriately touching a voice actress, which resulted in him being sentenced to two and a half years in prison. All of this occurred a year before Maki transferred a large number of company shares to an unknown entity—a black mark on the company’s sunsetting history.
“First of all, we would like to express our gratitude and respect to all the related companies who worked with us for nearly six years, free of charge, to rebuild and subsequently reorganize Gainax following the arrest of then-CEO Maki Tomohiro in 2019,” Anno said. “Thanks to your cooperation, we were able to properly process the rights for each work, transfer the rights, and transfer all production results and other materials, and safely return them to the respective rights holders and creators.”
All of this, in turn, led Khara to take over Gainax’s trademarking process and distribute the remaining intellectual property rights Gainax once held to other companies and creatives to “ensure that creators, original authors, and writers can continue to manage and produce their works.”
Case in point: Khara as a creditor on the Evangelion rebuild movie series and Trigger taking over Panty & Stocking with Prime Video’s recently released streaming series, New Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt. While Anno characterized his earlier statements as what he could make public, he noted one aspect of the situation he found disappointing: the dishonesty under which Gainax’s former management had operated while carrying out repayments and the transfer of rights and materials.
“Specifically, upon learning about the various false statements made by former Fukushima Gainax representative Yoshinobu Asao, Hiroyuki Yamaga, and Yasuhiro Takeda, whom I considered friends since college, toward my company and myself, including instructions from then-President Yamaga to Gainax employees to pretend he was hospitalized, statements that viewed our company as hostile, and schemes to unfairly avoid repayment, I have gone beyond anger to sadness,” Anno said. He also noted an instance in which he witnessed the dishonesty firsthand, citing an instance in which Khara provided emergency financing to address the defunct financial issues despite the management team’s “lack of respect for Gainax’s works and staff.”
He continued: “I have come to realize once again that our relationship with them will likely never return to what it was before, and I am truly sorry. The reason we agreed to the previous settlement as a company is because we did not want to waste any more of our time dealing with them.”
Still, despite the occasion being more of a cleaning of house in a business sense, Anno closed out with a sentimental farewell to Gainax and all the great work it was responsible for, despite its disastrous ending.
“Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to President Yasuhiro Kamimura, a friend from my university days and the last representative director of Gainax, who, despite the fact that the previous management team had abandoned the historic anime studio Gainax without taking responsibility for its many responsibilities and creditors, managed to prevent the rights and materials from being lost and inherit them with the understanding of all parties involved, faced creditors sincerely, and did his best to the end, witnessing the studio’s demise.”
So long, Gainax.
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