Author: NewType USA
Source: Originally published in the July 2003 issue of NewType USA
Dated: July 2003
In Otaku no Video, protagonist Kubo is drawn into the world of anime, cosplay and fanzines by school buddy Tanaka. Participating in activities generally shunned by the mainstream, the anime convert abandons job-hunting pursuits and defiantly states that he will instead become the king of the otaku. The pair establishes a company with their sights set on conquering the world via the manufacture and direct sales of custom 'garage kit' models of popular characters. A store opening ensues; the scheme later evolves into producing garage animation (which scores big with the fans) and culminates with the construction of Otaku Land, the anime and manga fan's ultimate fun park paradise. The parody is fittingly described as a fictionalized history of GAINAX, a company renowned among anime fans as the ultimate maverick studio, responsible for classics including Ouritsu Uchugun Honneamise no Tsubasa ("The Wings of Honneamise"). Top O Nerae! ("Gunbuster") and Neon Genesis Evangelion.
With a laugh, president Hiroyuki Yamaga says it would take 20 years to describe the real-life GAINAX experience blow by blow. "The very first thing that got my friends and I together was this convention every year," he recalls. Held across Japan, the sci-fi event that focuses on authors is currently in its 42nd year. It's slated for Tochigi prefecture in July under the name of T-con. The founding members of GAINAX (which include Hideaki Anno and Toshio Okada, who's no longer with the company) produced the opening animation for DaiCon III and IV, the event held in their hometown of Osaka in 1981 and 1983, respectively.
"At those conventions of course there were tons of sci-fi novel fans, but I wasn't anything like that at all," Yamaga notes about his personal background. "So it's funny that what actually drew us together was when we worked on the staff. It's certainly not always the case that people [get into this industry] because they've watched sci-fi works and say 'I'm going to do that!'"
The entire group were amateurs to begin with, most of them college students doing things just for the fun of it. "We did everything we're doing now, including running a shop," he explains. "At the time, toy stores didn't really carry things like spaceships and stuff from anime, sci-fi films or whatnot. There were some cheap things for kids, but absolutely nothing for hardcore fans. What we did was build them ourselves from the prototypes on up and sell them."
Then school ended, and they were faced with the prospect of finding jobs; the possibility of a less than creatively stimulating career weighed on their minds. "We all thought that was such a huge waste, you know. I certainly didn't want to get a job, so we thought if that's the case, then why don't we just make our own company? That way there'd be no need to look for work anymore. So we formed GAINAX."
Thematically sophisticated, technically accomplished and beautifully realized, 1987's Wings of Honneamise is lauded among fans and critics alike. Funded by Bandai, who was impressed with the group's amateur works, the theatrical feature boasted a score by Ryuichi Sakamoto and a generous production budget for its time. As GAINAX's professional debut, it's nothing short of extraordinary. "It was what it was, and I do think the end result was good," reflects Yamaga, who directed the feature, but he's quick to downplay the work's public perception. "I certainly don't think we made it under the best possible conditions, not by a long shot," he states. "The budget was insufficient, and of course it was great being able to get Ryuichi Sakamoto to do that for us, but it wasn't like that was the be-all and end-all of our existence. For us at that time, it was something we made using the bare minimum required. I wanted to make it so much better than we did, to tell you the truth."
According to Yamaga, the film almost marked the beginning and the end of the fledgling studio. "Everyone had been saying we should stop [running the company]. I mean, it was a pain to keep it going, and the basic idea was if you could just land that first job and make that first movie, then your career would be pretty much in the bag, so after that, who needs a company, right?" Yet someone eventually stepped in to direct a follow-up project: Hideaki Anno with Gunbuster in 1988, and then Takeshi Mori with Fushigi no Umi no Nadia ("Nadia, Secret of Blue Water"), released three years later. "In the beginning, it was like that: doing it one project at a time. It lasted as far as Evangelion. So it wasn't like we had this great plan for where we were going to take the company and then got to Evangelion on the strength of that. We just somehow kept going, you know."
"I couldn't do anything unless I was always on the offensive; that's the one and only secret," says Yamaga of the most important aspect of running an animation studio. "If you're starting up a company when you're 20 years old, no one takes you seriously. Everyone tells you 'That's just how it is'—if all you do is smile at that point, it's like you've accepted it, right? There has to be [someone who says] 'No, it's NOT like that. Just hold on there.' I was constantly fighting in that sense." So did things progress smoothly after the confrontations? Yamaga smiles. "You have to do the work, even if you are fighting; that's what a job is; there certainly wasn't much reconciliation though, that's for sure."
Needless to say, everything changed with the powers that be once GAINAX became famous. Just a mention of the name, and people listened; as he puts it, "Even if you bring the project plans to their door in person, all you have to say is 'I'm from GAINAX, and I brought some plans with me,' and they'll meet with you, whereas usually you wouldn't even be able to make it past the front entrance." It wasn't until reaching his late 30's that Yamaga truly acknowledged the benefits of having a company.
The main difference in the GAINAX of today compared to the past is stability in animation production. "For a dozen years or so, we just kept going without much planning," says Yamaga—it's the 'without much planning' part he wants to drop. "I guess we didn't really start thinking about how to run the company more effectively, like a company should be run, until maybe two or three years ago. Seriously." It's a matter of taking on work, defining the goals and checking to see if they're being fulfilled. "I mean, none of this is anything new," he remarks. "I guess normal people do it that way from the start."
Not that he's going to suddenly set up a multitude of departments to handle things more systematically. "If we get too uptight about things, we'll end up losing what's made us so great up to now. I think we're much more flexible than other companies."
Of his thoughts regarding Evangelion, Yamaga replies, "Before then, we were aware that this thing called 'anime' was making waves, but it wasn't the kind of thing where famous personalities would get up on TV and say, 'I watch anime'—I doubt KimuTaku [Takuya Kimura of the group SMAP] would just suddenly go 'Evangelion!' you know." Yet he found the series was continually being mentioned and incorporated into TV drama material at the time. "From that point on, the distinction between 'someone who likes anime' and 'a normal person' began rapidly disappearing. That's the thing that impressed me the most."
The series was not only a landmark in the industry and for GAINX; financially speaking, it was the first anime production to actually make money for the company. "Not making money is one thing, but that doesn't mean they weren't hits," stresses Yamaga of their pre-Eva works. "The others were certainly hits, but the contracts were at fault."
"We never had very good contracts," he admits. "In fact, we didn't have a very good contract for Evangelion, either, but it was just so popular. So basically we made money on the products we put out ourselves. They said on the news how Evangelion had passed the 30 billion yen mark, so even if the contract only gave us 1% of that, it's still be 300 million yen!"
Until then, the games division kept GAINAX running. Yamaga recalls that Takami Akai, who'd been with the group since their college days, suddenly bought a computer and announced, "Let's do games! If we do games, we can make money."
"According to him, at that time with Japanese computer games, the art was done by the programmers, so it totally sucked," Yamaga explains. Since Akai was a painter, he'd be able to create decent images, even with the limit of 16 displayable colors at the time. "He was like, 'If we do this, there's no way we can go wrong!"
Akai's concept was literally on the money. "Princess Maker (1991) was a big hit, and that paid our salaries for quite a while," Yamaga says on the princess raising simulation. "Unlike the anime and films, we make the games all in-house and sell some of them ourselves, so it's not just that we have the rights; we get to keep the take in those cases, so hit or no hit, the amount of money coming in is totally different."
Princess Maker's art caused quite a stir in the industry; other developers took its graphic cue and incorporated lush art into the presentation. The long-running series, originally for PCs, later spread onto consoles including the Super Famicon and is the basis of the studio's latest anime work Puchi Puri Yucie. "We're still making games, but compared to then, we're taking it a little easier," Yamaga says. "What we decided instead was to take the animation we have the rights to and put them out ourselves; if the people making it are close by, then you're able to make something that's much closer to your heart, so to speak."
"We did make several games for the PlayStation," but he exclaims that it was almost prohibitively costly. Considering the economic downturn in the Japanese game industry, Yamaga opines that unless you're a large company, you can't create a decent game on platforms like the PlayStation 2 anymore. "That's why we're thinking of a somewhat smallish market. Making anime is our number one priority, but we are still considering putting out games as a kind of service to our customers.
Alongside original anime works of late including Abenobashi Maho Shotengai ("Magical Shopping Street Abenobashi") and the spectacularly nonsensical action-mecha-comedy mélange of Furi Kuri ("FLCL"), the studio has also adapted Oruchuban Ebichu, Kareshi Kanojo no Jijo ("His and Her Circumstances") and Mahoromatic from manga to animation. "Basically, we take whatever, as far as projects coming in from the outside," says Yamaga. "It doesn't matter whether it was based on a manga or not—if we can do it, we'll do it; we're an anime company." Whether or not the right staff can be assembled, production timeline and budgets are all aspects that are scrutinized. "Sometimes we line it all up and we're like, 'Nah, maybe not,' and other times we actually start doing it and then realize we can't really do it after all."
He offers an example of the former, when a company brandishing a famous manga approached GAINAX (names and title have been left out for obvious reasons). "Even though we thought we could do it and it was interesting and everything, I read it and said, 'OK, it'll definitely cost 100 million yen; it'll be 100 million for 40 minutes,'" he explains. "They told me, 'Do it for 20 million yen.' I said there's no way we can do it for 20 million, but if we had 100 million, we'd do it. They were all, 'What do [sic]you[sic] think, we're made of money? We can't pay that!' And then they left, taking their manga with them." He pauses. "OK, so they did it somewhere else, and sure enough, it cost 100 million yen."
Asked how his writing and directorial skills have developed from Honneamise to Mahoromatic, Yamaga replies that he doesn't know whether they've evolved at all. However, he observes a change in trends. "We've gotten to the point where we're always conscious of the distance between [the anime] and reality. Before, it was like anime was making fairy tales. That's what used to be popular, and that's what everyone thought anime was. But gradually, everyone has started thinking about how close the fictitious worlds we've created will be to the real world."
Highly anticipated by GAINAX fans is Yamaga's grand project, Aoki Uru, which some say is a sequel to Honneamise. Yamaga says there's nothing he can impart on its development just yet, though he assures us that the project is maturing and moving forward. It's tied in with how GAINAX will evolve, their position with respect to the industry and the position animation occupies within Japan.
"Now that someone like Miyazaki has won an Oscar, where does that leave us?" he asks. "The point I'm thinking of here is somewhat different from the usual idea of doing business. To put it in more concrete terms, my thinking for that project is to produce an anime on a massive scale, something on the order of two billion yen. But in Japan, there are only about three people in the position (to do something like that)—Miyazaki, Otomo, and Oshii. So I have to pay close attention to what the situation looks like for those three. It takes time to get a project like this in."
Also blipping wildly on the GAINAX fan radar in Japan and abroad is a sequel to Gunbuster. "There's a lot happening, but I can't reveal anything," Yamaga apologizes, also hinting at other projects in the works. A friendly tease, he smiles and points at the table. "See these eraser bits right here?" We look at the shavings. "They're the remnants of yesterday's meeting. We were discussing things at length right here."
A regular US convention guest, he observes that compared to Japanese fans, overseas fans—especially the ones also studying Japanese—tend to approach anime intellectually, akin to how Japanese study European film or foreign literature. As an example, Yamaga mentions the dictionaries and reference books created by fans. "It's such an academic atmosphere."
Yamaga opines that one of the benefits that may result from anime's increasing globalization is big budgeted theatrical works. "I mentioned a film that would cost two billion yen. That's more money than you can possibly recover if you only consider the people who watch Japanese movies inside Japan." To make the production viable, he estimates one would have to recoup around four billion yen when factoring in the marketing costs. It's not impossible, he says, considering the popularity of titles like Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi ("Spirited Away").
"But it's damn tough. And there's no way you can have something on the level of Sen to Chihiro every year, no matter how hard you try. If you stop to think about that, finally you see investors in Japan start to wake up to the fact that there's a huge market overseas, so money starts to flow a little easier." He doesn't however believe that the shift will have any impact on the stories that will be given the green light.
"That debate's been going on for a long time, but we've gone along ignoring it, making things that target Japan, and they're still very popular overseas. Sen to Chihiro was an extremely 'Japanese' film, wasn't it? There were parts that even Japanese viewers couldn't understand without some research." He stresses the point with an analogy: "I really like French wine from Bordeaux, so do I want something that the businessmen over there have whipped up especially for Japanese? No—give me the stuff the French people like."
On the other end of the budgetary spectrum, he doesn't believe that advances in technology resulting in works such as Makoto Shinkai's Hoshi no Koe ("Voices of a Distant Star") will revolutionize the anime industry. "First off, I personally really like that title," he says enthusiastically. "I like what it's about. I remember how beautiful the sky looked, and I like small stories like that, but I definitely disagree with the way the mass media in the Japanese anime industry is making such a huge stir about it."
"It isn't the case that you have someone who's made an anime all by himself," he elaborates. "What you have is a manga that someone created that's now moving like an anime and has music stuck onto it. In fact, it's because he made it all by himself that he was able to create a world of such substance. You can't create a world like that if you have a hundred people working on it. Whether it's novels or paintings or manga, there've always been works that a single person creates. And of course there've always been works done by a hundred people, too."
"So while I do believe we can look forward to seeing many more things like that in the future, in the final analysis, if you haven't got the talent, it's meaningless. Shinkai had the talent, but I certainly don't believe that just because you can use a computer, you're suddenly able to make anime. When you're doing it with a hundred people, there's a certain kind of 'talent' that you get from having a hundred people working on it. And there's something interesting about that, too."
Regarding GAINAX's future developments, Yamaga is thinking live-action works. "We want to become a movie company. We can take on a theatrical project, and make it an anime if it seems suited to anime. But if it's more suited to live action, then we can make it live-action. In that sense, we're striving to become a movie company with a lot of freedom."
He dismisses the traditional image of a huge studio hiring outside directors to helm live-action films. "I think if you want to have a movie company right now in Japan, then it has to be based on animated works." Thus he believes GAINAX is in a pretty good position, considering that the increased use of CG in films has blurred the line separating live-action and animation. "I think that probably even the sense of wondering which you should work in as a company will fade away as time passes."