Director of Collapse and Rebuild
Mecha animator who burned his own breakdown into Evangelion, survived the backlash, shot Shibuya on camcorders and turned Godzilla into a cabinet meeting.
Director, Animator & Screenwriter
Hideaki Anno is a mecha animator from Ube who put his own breakdown on television. Before Neon Genesis Evangelion aired he described himself as “a broken man who could do nothing for four years”; its unfinished ending, the online calls for his death and the film he made in answer set a pattern he has repeated ever since: collapse, retreat, rebuild. In between the giant machines he shot Shibuya schoolgirls on consumer camcorders, made a Godzilla film mostly out of government meetings, and spent fourteen years remaking Evangelion until he could end it in his home town.
Hideaki Anno was born on 22 May 1960 in Ube, Yamaguchi Prefecture. The official biography his own company publishes is unusually unflattering: a boy soaked in manga, anime, tokusatsu and war stories; at Ube High School a “problem student” whose grades swung wildly, who failed English and graduated only after a make-up exam that came with the answers. In his second year he bought an 8mm camera and, with friends in an amateur group called SHADO, shot superhero, monster and animated films for school festivals.
After failing his entrance exams he chose Osaka University of Arts because it admitted students on demonstrated skill and original continuity sheets rather than test scores. There, from 1980, he met Hiroyuki Yamaga and Takami Akai. He was later expelled for not paying his tuition; the money was going into films he financed himself.
In 1981 convention organisers Toshio Okada and Yasuhiro Takeda asked the three students for an opening film for DAICON III, the 20th Japan SF Convention in Osaka. Yamaga directed, Akai animated the characters and Anno drew the machines and effects: a schoolgirl carrying a glass of water through a pile-up of borrowed spaceships and monsters. None of them had used cels. By Takeda’s account in The Notenki Memoirs, they bought cheap industrial vinyl whose painted sheets stuck together and peeled, punched their own paper, and in the absence of timing sheets Anno called out frame counts while the animation was shot on a tripod. The 1983 DAICON IV film, on which Anno supervised the mecha animation and drew storyboards, put the same girl in an unlicensed Playboy bunny suit and cut her to Electric Light Orchestra without permission. The same group, as DAICON FILM, made an amateur Return of Ultraman in 1983 in which Anno played the giant hero himself, glasses on.
DAICON III brought Anno and Yamaga to the notice of Studio Nue, and Anno went to Tokyo as a key animator on Super Dimension Fortress Macross (1982–1983). There he met the character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto and the designer Mahiro Maeda, and the animator Ichirō Itano, whom he has called his first master.
His second master was Hayao Miyazaki. Short of hands on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Miyazaki hired Anno as a key animator and, as eiga.com’s account of the production puts it, gave a near-amateur with no in-betweening experience an important scene at the climax: the God Warrior, an ancient biological weapon dug up before it is fully formed, rising over the burning field, firing, and rotting apart as it does so. Anno moved from Osaka and lived at the studio. In the interview book Parano Evangelion he remembered Miyazaki at that time as “burning with enjoyment” and called him a genius as an animator, “in speed, ideas and technique” (our translation of eiga.com’s quotation).
In 1984 he was a founding member of Gainax, formed to make Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise (1987), on which he recruited staff and supervised the animation and special effects. For Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988) he animated the heavy cruiser Maya.
Moved, Khara says, by Yamaga’s script, he made his directing debut with the six-episode video series Gunbuster (Top o Nerae!, 1988–1989), credited to Okada with Yamaga writing the later episodes uncredited. It starts as a parody of sports-school melodrama with a giant robot in it and turns into a tragedy of relativity: every mission at near-light speed leaves Noriko barely older while the people she left on Earth age and die. The last episode is in black and white. The ending is a single message spelled in lights across a darkened Earth: オカエリナサイ, “welcome home”, with its final character reversed. The time dilation is the method. A machine big enough to fight space monsters is used to measure loneliness in years.
Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990–1991) made Anno a television chief director and, by Khara’s own account, taught him how punishing television production could be. Then came the lost years. Blue Uru, a feature meant to follow Honnêamise, began production and was shut down. When the producer Toshimichi Ōtsuki told him, in Khara’s English, “Bring me something, anything, and I’ll make sure it gets green-lit”, Anno came back with a television series.
In a statement dated 17 July 1995 and printed in the first volume of Sadamoto’s Evangelion manga, Anno described himself as “a broken man who could do nothing for four years”, “a man who ran away for four years, one who was simply not dead”. The phrase “You can’t run away” came to him, he wrote, and he restarted. “I tried to include everything of myself in Neon Genesis Evangelion”; it was “a production where my only thought was to burn my feelings into film.”
Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–1996) was made by Gainax with Tatsunoko Production. Sadamoto designed the characters, Shirō Sagisu wrote the score, Kazuya Tsurumaki was assistant director and directed the first episode, and Shinji Higuchi wrote and storyboarded for the series. A fourteen-year-old boy is ordered by the father who abandoned him into a biomechanical giant to fight creatures called Angels. Anno told Newtype in 1996 that he chose fourteen because the boy “is no longer a child but not yet an adult”, and said of the boy’s guardian Misato that “she resembles me in many ways” (both from a fan translation via French).
The production outran its time and money. Okada later told American fans that Anno and his staff were fighting with the producers at Tatsunoko, did not have enough time and could not find a way to end the series well. The last two episodes abandon the plot for the inside of Shinji’s head: storyboard frames, line drawings, held stills and text on screen, characters questioning him on a bare stage, and finally a circle of applause and “Congratulations”. Anno said he had to abandon the planned episode 26 at a very early stage, and also that the broadcast episodes “accurately reflect my mood at the time. I am very satisfied. I regret nothing.” At Anime Expo in California that summer he told fans who disliked the ending, in English, “Too bad.”
The anger was real and some of it was murderous. In NHK’s 2021 documentary, as reported by Anime News Network, Anno said he had come across internet threads debating “the best way to kill Anno”, lost his will to make anime, and twice tried to kill himself around that time, stopping both times because he “wanted to die in a way that didn’t hurt”. In 1996 he travelled alone to Hokkaido for what his biography calls a time of “no purpose and no meaning”. Gainax promised a new theatrical ending; Death and Rebirth (March 1997) delivered a recap and only the opening of the new ending, and The End of Evangelion followed on 19 July 1997, with Tsurumaki directing its first half (Episode 25′) and Anno its second (Episode 26′).
Near its end the animated film cuts to live action: an audience filmed in a Shinjuku cinema during a screening of Death and Rebirth, then letters, emails and graffiti flashed at roughly one per frame. Among them are “Anno, I’ll kill you!!!” and graffiti on a Gainax shop front reading 死, “die”. Most of the letters are in fact appreciative, and they are not the real mail. At a later Tokyo International Film Festival appearance, as summarised by the fan reference EvaWiki, Anno said legal reasons ruled out using real fan letters, so staff wrote them, the abusive ones by “a really old friend”. The threats were real; what is on screen is a re-enactment of them, cut into the film that answered them.
The live-action fragments of The End of Evangelion were shot on a consumer video camera. At a 2014 Tokyo International Film Festival talk Anno said the footage looked good enough for a feature and that Evangelion had taken him as far as he could go in animation. Love & Pop (released 9 January 1998), adapted from Ryū Murakami’s novel Topaz II, follows four Shibuya high-school girls into enjo kōsai, paid dates with older men, through Hiromi (Asumi Miwa). It was shot almost entirely on consumer-grade handheld digital cameras, wedged into places a film camera could not easily go, including a model train running on its track. Anno said the film changed the way he makes films. Its subject is commercial sex at the edge of childhood; the handheld cameras stay with the girls rather than at a moralist’s distance.
Ritual (Shiki-Jitsu, 2000) was the first production of Studio Kajino, the live-action label set up by Studio Ghibli, with Toshio Suzuki producing. Anno wanted a lead who had directed films, Suzuki suggested Shunji Iwai, and Iwai plays a director who has lost his subject and drifts around Ube, Anno’s home town, into the private rituals of a young woman played by Ayako Fujitani, from her own novella Tōhimu. Anno shot it on 35mm because, he said, “I made Shiki-Jitsu because I wanted to do beautiful live-action shooting”, and filled it with scenery he liked: a factory, a railway.
He directed the television anime His and Her Circumstances (1998–1999) and was chief director of Gamera 1999, a companion piece to Gamera 3, the kaiju film whose effects Higuchi directed. In March 2002 he married the manga artist Moyoco Anno. Cutie Honey (2004), a live-action tokusatsu with Eriko Satō, was his first professional try at the genre he grew up on; he later described delays caused by the production company and a sharp budget cut, and said “A democracy that uses a parliamentary system doesn’t match with film production.”
Anno founded Khara (from the Greek for joy, the company says) on 17 May 2006, opened Studio Khara that September to make a new four-film Evangelion, and left Gainax in October 2007. Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone (1 September 2007) stays close to the series. Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance (27 June 2009) swerves, and the official record of how is unusually specific. In interviews for Ryūsuke Hikawa’s Evangelion 2.0 Complete Records Collection (in a fan translation), Anno credits Tsurumaki with pushing for Asuka, rather than a boy from Shinji’s class, to pilot the doomed Unit-03, a change adopted in the sixth script draft in January 2007; Tsurumaki’s memo argued, “We have to provide Shinji, as well as the audience, with the same degree of shock and sense of loss.” Higuchi storyboarded the image of Asuka contaminated in the plug, saying, “I thought about a cruelty worse than death, and this was the result.” The producer Ōtsuki wanted a hopeful ending in which Shinji saves Rei; Tsurumaki resisted and gave way. Tsurumaki also insisted that the new pilot Mari arrive falling from the sky; Anno wanted her to be “an outsider within myself as well as an alien presence in the world of Eva.”
Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo (November 2012) jumped fourteen years and withheld the explanation. Then Anno broke again. In a statement published on 1 April 2015 he wrote that after its release “I was broken. I fell into what’s called a depressive state”, the result of six years spent grinding himself down remaking Eva. Through 2013 he could not go near his own studio and returned only early in 2014. Voicing Jirō Horikoshi, the lead of Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013), kept him connected to animation. Toho approached him at the end of January 2013 to make a Godzilla film; he first said no — “No way. I have Evangelion, I can’t do it” — and agreed in March, persuaded by the studio and by Higuchi.
The last film, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, arrived on 8 March 2021 after Covid postponed it twice. NHK cameras followed its making from 2016 to late 2020 and showed Anno repeatedly judging his own script insufficient and throwing it out; the script’s last part was finished only in early 2019. He shared direction with Tsurumaki, Katsuichi Nakayama and Maeda, leaned heavily on motion capture and CG, had a physical model of the film’s village built so staff could see it, and Sagisu again wrote the score. Anime News Network’s report of the documentary credits Moyoco Anno with carrying him through the burnout. The film ends with an adult Shinji and Mari on a station platform that the city of Ube says was modelled on its own Ube Shinkawa Station, then running out into the town. It took ¥10.28 billion by December 2021. Ending a story he had remade for fourteen years by walking his hero into Ube reads as a deliberate exit from it.
Shin Godzilla (29 July 2016) was written and chief-directed by Anno, with Higuchi as director and special-effects director and Anno editing with Atsuki Satō. Its defining decision was made on paper. Anno’s planning memos, reproduced in The Art of Shin Godzilla and analysed by Real Sound in 2017, show early plots with a hero in conflict with his father, an ex-girlfriend, a scientist and his daughter, police against terrorists. On 27 March 2014 Anno proposed throwing all that out for a fake documentary assembled from civilians’ phone video, news broadcasts and re-enactments: “not so-called human drama, but events alone, depicted pointillistically.” The proposal met strong opposition and was dropped, but the method stayed. The finished film opens on shaky footage from a coastguard boat and moves through meetings, minutes and on-screen captions naming officials, rooms and weapons while the monster keeps mutating.
Hiroki Hasegawa, who plays the deputy chief cabinet secretary, recalled that Anno told the cast that bureaucrats and politicians talk faster than ordinary people because their jobs demand instant decisions, so this speed was normal. He also remembered Anno and Higuchi splitting the set, one at the monitor and one on the floor, sometimes giving opposite notes, and Anno directing largely by silence. Satō said Anno “keeps iterating until he is satisfied”, asked for new footage to be made in the middle of the edit, and that work ran across linked suites at Toho, Khara and the effects house Shirogumi; Anno himself shot inserts inside tanks and helicopters on an iPhone and a small action camera.
Anno then wrote and planned Shin Ultraman (13 May 2022), directed by Higuchi, and wrote and directed Shin Kamen Rider (17 March 2023), returning the hero to the 1971 suit. NHK’s documentary on Shin Kamen Rider (31 March 2023) showed the action director Keiya Tabuchi, after clashes with Anno over the fights, thinking of throwing out his plan and quitting, and Anno apologising in tears for having gone too far; viewers argued over whether his conduct amounted to power harassment. Tabuchi’s own explanation, in the film’s programme, is that the early Kamen Rider cannot control his fighting instinct, so the violence explodes, and Anno wanted the killing intent shown in the actors’ performances.
